Pity the poor Men’s Rights activists. The real civil rights movements that MRAs like to compare their, er, “struggle” to may have faced many obstacles that MRAs haven’t — from legal prohibitions on voting to fire bombings and assassinations — but at least they haven’t had a hard time explaining just what it was, and is, that they’re seeking redress for.
When Martin Luther King so famously dreamt of a world in which “my four little children will … not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” he was not only speaking eloquently; he was expressing an idea that was, well, pretty easy to understand.
And that’s where the trouble comes for the MRAs. It’s a bit harder to explain your alleged anti-oppression movement to the general public when the people on whose behalf you’re fighting aren’t actually, you know, oppressed. So is it any wonder that MRAs have such a hard time explaining themselves to the public?
I mean, all the Suffragettes had to put on their posters was “Votes for Women.” MRAs are stuck. Men already have votes. They already have civil rights. Heck, men already run most companies and hold most political offices and control most of the world’s wealth.
And so MRA propaganda tends to be muddled, a weird mixture of misogyny and special pleading and stuff that just doesn’t make any sort of sense no matter how you slice it. In earlier posts we’ve looked at baffling and/or offensive posters from A Voice for Men and associated sites, as well as at some of the awful graphics that sometimes make their appearance on Reddit.
Today, a quick stroll through the MRA underground on deviantART.
The graphic at the top of the post is from someone calling himself awesomeninja; for his propaganda work, he specializes in somewhat baffling text-based graphics in basic colors. Apparently he has convinced himself that “feminazis use child-bearing all the time to defend their sexist views,” and feels it is necessary to respond to this in giant letters in several colors with a black background.
He is also responsible for this similarly befuddling contribution to political art:
Wait, is this a trick question?
Dude, have you actually met any Men’s Rights Activists?
Oh, wait, you are one. Oops.
But wait, there’s more:
Of course, awesomeninja isn’t the only one spreading the MRA message of love on deviantART. Here are a few other graphics I found by searching for “men’s rights” and related tags on the site.
This lovely “stamp” from loqutor, who has convinced himself he is “debunking an ages-old feminist myth” with it.
A meme from Userbruiser, who apparently thinks that if a woman has alcohol in her system, it’s ok to rape her:
This bizarre castration fantasy from the same lovely fellow:
This rant posted by themodsquad, who also enjoys jokes about pedophilia and bestiality.
There’s some question about whether or not themodsquad came up with that all by himself, but this uglier and worse-written sequel seems pretty authentic to me:
Is he a “real” MRA or just a troll? I don’t know, but he does seem to be an authentic misogynistic asshole attention-seeker, and I’ve seen virtually every “argument” in the first graphic rehashed many times on assorted MRA sites; it’s pretty much standard-issue “we hunted the mammoth to feed you.”
Let’s close with several graphics from an aspiring Man Going His Own Way. millenia89 is proud of his own reproductive organs:
But he doesn’t seem to think too highly of most of his fellow male-identified penis-havers. Indeed, he believes most of his fellow men are like lemmings marching off a cliff — except for a tiny percentage of MGTOW like the two tiny fellows at the bottom right of the graphic below.
I know it seems confusing, but trust me, the MGTOW in this picture aren’t the ones going over the cliff, really. They’re the ones facing the other direction, underneath that little MGTOW sign. No, not under the big MGTOW sign, under the little one. Just trust me on this one.
millenia89 is especially unimpressed with men who step in to “save a hoe,” like this fellow, whom he sees as a handy “personification” of the sort of “manipulated tool” who, I guess, apparently likes women enough to help them out. I’m not quite sure I get it. Apparently this picture is inherently hilarious because it’s a picture of a black guy with an odd smile in a weirdly inaccurate superman costume. Heck, even the font is wacky.
Millenia89 may not think much of most of his fellow men, but at least he doesn’t want to render them obsolete. Women, well, that’s another issue entirely, as this utopian paean to the glories of artificial wombs suggests:
So awesomeninja thinks that “pregnancy is no excuse for misandry.” Millenia89 evidently hopes that in the future there will be no excuse for pregnancy itself.
This is how the Men’s Rights movement tries to explain itself to the world.
And MRAs wonder why their little movement has the reputation it does.
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I was inspired to check out deviantART’s MRA community by some of the commenters here. Check out the comments in the “Feminist anti-obedience school” thread starting here to see some homegrown parodies of awesomeninja’s graphic works.
See artificial wombs sound great to me but I don’t think for the reasons that MRA’s do.
I mean for me I would love kids of my own but pregnancy freaks me out so I’d love artificial wombs.
They’d make life for infertile couples much easier as well, no more expensive IVF!
And for GSM couples who want to have kids but can’t naturally
And for people for whom pregnancy would have severe health consequences or be life threatening.
I mean that all sounds pretty great, but I’m fairly certain that MRA’s like the idea of artificial wombs because they seem to think that they would render women obsolete.
Like they could program them to only produce male babies and create some kind of male-only utopia. Or just use the threat of doing that to hold over women’s heads.
Ok, so I get that this guy fancies nibbles afterwards & has a whole rage thing going on if he doesn’t get them but the “men on the phone” bit? WTF?
One of the tells I can pretty reliably count on to show me a misogynist is the use of “a women”.
“artificial wombs” — Why are all those babies white? Is it a creepy glimpse into their racially pure fantasy.
BREVITY
Demotivators need it.
“You’ve never been forced to die in war.” Oh yes we have, bub, in nearly every war since the beginning of time. The only difference is that we weren’t given access to weapons or any training in how best to use them, most of the time. Do they not realize that wars take place in actual COUNTRIES with PEOPLE living in them and everything? (That is a rhetorical question; I know they think wars are things that take place in mythical lands filled with brown … bipeds that they don’t consider to be human.)
@Feminist Bees:
Nah, everybody knows the foetus painters are never there when they say they will be.
@cloudiah: And that one time that war actually happened to people like them, it was a TERRIBLE TRAGEDY and the
losersvictims have to be FOREVER ROMANTICIZED.oh, i saw the so you think you’re superior poster on tumblr!
It was horrible
I saw someone refuting it in a reblog, then I re-reblogged it and added pointless commentary. here if anyone wants to read it.
“women are r*tarded when it comes to empathy”
THROUGH IN SOME ABLEISM WITH YOUR SEXISM BIGOTRY IS ALWAYS BETTER WHEN IT COMES IN TWOS
then you like him whining about women not getting him a bowl of cereal after sex because it’s not that hard.
dude, you can get your own damn bowl of cereal. You said yourself it’s not that hard.
Is that why I can write complete, coherent sentences, and am a licensed attorney?
And you, sir, clearly are the paragon of all that is intelligent and erudite in the world.
I’m thinking our friend is not a student of history. Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria, anyone?
“Your entire ladybrain function is tied to your second X Chromosome” is possibly my favorite line of MRM “reasoning”.
Tell that to the Queen!
Damn, ninja’d by Carswell.
Or you could keep a box of cheerios under the bed! It’s like, there are so many solutions to this problem yet he chose moaning on the internet.
If physical strength matter in military leadership, how is it that the UK’s greatest admiral had lost an eye and an arm?
I tell you now, if eyebrow tweezing involved a general anaesthetic & the surgeon’s knife, I’d be going mono-brow.
Only a truly shitty person could take the statistic that 72% of rape victims were intoxicated, add scare quotes and a picture of cleavage, and act like it’s evidence of oppression of men.
This. Civilians die in war. A lot.
The difference between a misogynist fuckwad who sincerely believes all this shit, and a troll who uses misogynistic language, is pretty much nil on the misogyny scale. If anything, the troll is worse–it’s possible, with the right circumstances, to get through to a ‘true believer’, but the troll is just a waste of time and energy.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I love it when MRAs get their inventing history wrong. MRAs wouldn’t have Wi-fi, Blu-tooth, or other wireless technologies without Ms. Heydy Lamarr. The dishwasher? Invented by a lady named Josephine Cocharane. I mentioned that the person who built the first compiler was Grace Hopper. Etc.
Stupid MRAs. *shakes head*.
“You have never ruled the world”
Have they sent a memo to Catherine the Great about this? (You know, absolute ruler of the largest country in human history which became that large during her reign*)
* Okay, so she was a size queen.
Feminists have an even more difficult time defending their views. That is why you guys resort to personal attacks and insults.
Good, that is the most random thing. It wasn’t even vaguely related to the rest of the thread. If you’re going to troll, please do it in a relatively coherent manner so it’s easier to call your bullshit out.
@Good
Nobody expects the Feminist Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Our four…no… amongst our weapons…. amongst our weaponry…are such elements as fear, surprise…. I’ll come in again