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.
—
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.
The one time that a woman hit me, I caught her arm as she went to hit me again, held it firmly and said, “I’m not hitting you. I’m not going to hit you. If you touch me like that again, you’ll never see me again.” Oddly enough, she didn’t hit me again… it’s almost as if communicating works or something. Go figure.
Not that communicating always works, and not that it would’ve necessarily worked if she was significantly stronger than me or if I had nowhere to go, but… at least in that situation with that power dynamic, it worked.
Cloudiah, are you following me on Tumblr? Just curious because I see that someone named “metacloudiah” is following me.
Also, here’s a link to that study whose abstract you quoted: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2779018/
Good, you’re speaking to someone who’s taking a biological science for a major.
Your misunderstanding of evolution and your misapplication in a place where the theory of evolution does not apply (i.e. culture) is so painful, it doesn’t burn with the fury of a septillion suns, but of a septillion supernovas. That’s how bad it is.
Even hard-core young earth creationists aren’t as bad as you.
Congratulations. You win a negative Internet.
No, not one. You win negative ten septillion Internets.
FYI: You are all amazing, have all the kitties!!! (except bad, they can go step on cat litter)
Guys, y’all are overthinking Good’s fail. He started this with “Let me ask this. If men dominate the world, why is that the case when men and women are equal in numbers?”
And once the social constructs that put women and minorities in oppressed roles was oh so explained, he went “And when this happens over a 3 million year period, it’s called evolution.”
Well Good, looks like you got your answer, it’s evolution (you’re fractally wrong, an mild bogglingly thick, but even within your framework you’ve answered your question and can now kindly fuck off)
Goodfornothing:
Want to tell me why the number one cause of premature death for women in Victoria is male violence, then? “Men have never desired to kill women” is the dumbest piece of lying shit you’ve come out with yet. Tell the women slaughtered by male soldiers over millennia, the women murdered by their fathers, brothers, husbands around the world, the women and little girls being gang raped and murdered in India (hardly an isolated instance, but prominent in the news right now, with India noted as the worst place in the world to be a female-bodied person). It’s not for nothing that Gavin de Becker (you know, a DUDE) saw fit to quote this line in The Gift of Fear: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
You think you don’t use personal insults? You do. You insult everyone here. You insult us with your blind stupidity, your complete refusal to look outside your own privilege, your insistence that the real things women have suffered for millennia and still suffer now are not real; you insult us with your claiming of victim status for men; you insult us by ignoring our life experience and brushing it all aside. You’re a fucking insult to anyone with an ounce of human decency, because you’re a mealy-mouthed, pathetic little misogynist.
Go sit on a cactus, you carbon thief.
Oh I know, but he is full of fail and that was the closest he came to an actual question. One which he has now answered to his own satisfaction. Who cares if he’s right so long as he goes away?
Argenti is correct – we’ve had some dumb trolls before, but this one is special. He’s kind of stupidity squared.
Goodfornothing also doesn’t know the difference between “mad” and “contemptuous”.
Hmm, evidently haven’t fed the blockquote monster lately.
Bonelady, hi! Have a Complimentary Welcome Package!
Are you an osteoarchaeologist, by any chance?
/Time Team fangirl (I love Jackie McKinley’s skull and crossbone gloves)
Short time lurker and someone probably posted about her but what about Ada Lovelace.
It’s only the sense of politeness which makes me feel like spamming the thread with TMI about my sexual preferences that’s preventing me from providing examples that counteract this lulzy comment from Good.
Dominance does not appeal to me, at all, because I am not sexually or socially submissive by nature. In fact, as I was reading the thread I was watching YouTube videos on another tab and one of the ones that came up I favorited because it has one of my favorite celebrity hotties doing the pretend-gay fanservice thing with another guy. Guess which guy I wouldn’t kick out of bed? Hint – it’s not the one who’s taking the dominant role in that interaction.
Good: why can’t you be INTENTIONALLY hilarious?
Maybe TMI will scare witlesstroll away, like bras and makeup do! 😀
For me, the idea of some man getting dominant in any context is a huge turnoff (hypothetically, obviously) because it screams UNTRUSTWORTHY. It’s inseparable from domineering in my mind, and that sets off all the alarms.
Plus, going back to what LBT (I think) mentioned yesterday, and which we’ve all said before: why does a relationship have to have any “dominance” in it? I’m not talking about people whose kink that is, or like it that way, but the idea as a norm. A relationship with someone who has to be boss is a putrid idea to me.
Sometimes he is funny funny. Unfortunately it’s when he’s trying to be serious serious.
Maybe Dumb is scared that if he uses a comma, he’ll turn into Stripper Stalin.
Which, I have to say, would be an improvement.
David Futrelle,
Man, these are stupid.
About the MGTOW Lemmings one, does “Millenia89” have any idea what kind of message he’s sending about a group of men people like him think we should be proud of?
You know, I really don’t like having a boss. I tolerate it in a working context because it’s just one of those realities you have to deal with, but I don’t like it. I don’t really relish being the boss either, though I’m pretty good at it when I need to be. I prefer relationships that are balanced, where one person may dominate in one context and the other person in a different context but it all tends to balance out in the end, and nobody feels like they’re superior to the other person. Even in a kink context if I felt like I was genuinely superior to someone I wouldn’t want them for a play partner. Why would I want to introduce a dynamic that I dislike into my personal life?
@ Kittehs
OK, small TMI (tell me if this is getting annoying, I’m still in “yay he’s finally out of the army and can be hilarious and sexy and awesome on TV again!” mode), since this just came up on my playlist and it’s kind of relevant since it’s all about playing with ideas about gender. Members of 2 boy bands cover song/dance from girl band that’s with the same entertainment company they are, guy in the red pants is the one I wouldn’t kick out of bed. What appeals to me is that he’s clearly having way more fun than everyone else, he’s playing the part of the girl band member who at the time was rumored to be his girlfriend, and then at the end he forgets that he’s supposed to be playing femmey and uses his real (not at all feminine) voice.
General Message which I’m putting here ‘cos it’s the busiest thread:
Any Midwestern manboobzers (Illinois in particular) looking for cats or kittens to adopt? My gf there has had a couple of strays-plus-litters move into her yard, and much as she loves having them, that’s too many kitties for her to look after. The no-kill shelters in her area have been at capacity. If anyone is interested, let me know!
QFT, and I really hated having to be a boss-like creature today at work. Workplace bullies can eat a bowl of bees.
Wow, I really shouldn’t have read that today. I would, however, just like to leave this for ModSquard…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother's_Day
Ugh, I hate having to be all boss-like as a means to prevent assholes from bullying their coworkers. Why can’t people just play nice at work?
*Modsquad. Ooops….I like mine better.