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.
Bonelady,
“If they hunted the mammoth for us (and there were a lot of places where they didn’t – no mammoths), we gathered plant materials for them. And going by modern hunting and gathering groups, that was the more reliable form of subsistence. I lurk by the way, but I occasionally do come out. I guess I never said anything before that was all that noticeable. (Waves and relurks.)”
Just hilarious! This whole time the mammoth “gotcha!” crap was weaker than I thought!
We need you! Stay out of lurkdom! Funny how just the teensiest bit of evolution/anthropology reading so simply debunks their crap, yet they willfully ignore it.
Aaaah! Why are they so bigoted against neurotypical people!? AAAAAAAAH!!!!1!!1! /sarcasm
Well, hey, be fair! If they’re not allowed to just ignore everything we say and rant against strawpeople, how will they ever have a good argument against feminism? I mean, it’s not like there’s a specific definition of drunk that applies in legal issues or anything.
@Hatchetmaniac – you’re talking to the wrong people.
1. MRAs, despite the name of their movement, aren’t standing up for men’s rights, they’re trying to deny women’s rights as is easily shown by the messages they choose to put out to the public: This kind of shit, for example, rather than this.
2. While feminists do reference historical injustices on a fairly regular basis, they do so to point out the things that need to stop, not to promote further injustices. When MRAs point out injustices, it is done to demonise feminists – look up MRA comments on white feathers.
3. The MRA term for MRAs is MRA. The feminist term for MRAs is MRA.
The feminist term for feminists is feminist. The MRA term for feminists is feminazi.
Just sayin’.
BOOM.
Tristan, More internet hugs and a box o’ cats.
Jezebel often makes me kind of stabby. Not stabby as in “stab all the men” stabby, just angry at them for the crap they publish just to be “controversial.”
Yeah, Jezebel, because when I’m not beating my husband (who was my boyfriend a while back) I’m busy throwing a tantrum at the grocery store or shitting my nappies.
But someday I hope to be all grown up, use my words, and learn how to appropriately channel my emotions.
That Jezebel article… yeah, if they never had the decency to retract/repudiate it, then I’m done with ’em.
This is the same Jezebel that published some guy blathering about how he loves French women because they don’t fetishize consent like American women, which makes them more liberated, or something. It was awful, and pretty blatantly done for the pageviews.
@auggz, it depends on what you’re into. The only “”fashion” blog I follow is Things Miss Frizzle Would Wear. I used to follow some hijab fashion blogs and some fatshion ones, I’ll see if I can find them. I bet if you searched you could find a bunch of “fuck yeah models of color” or “fuck yeah fatshion” or whatever you’re into.
Or unless, for that person, standing up for the rights and respect of one group means opposing the rights and respect of another group. None of us here are against the rights and respect of men.
Yep. Good thing no one here disagrees with that.
We mock MRAs. Engaging in reasoned debate with MRAs isn’t that important to most of us because the MRM is a terrible “movement” that doesn’t deserve to be called a movement due to its sheer bigotry, terrorist tactics, victim-blaming, and so on.
Well, I did find this one on Jezebel but this guy is a doozy. Sleepless in Austin, on his list of requirements for potential girlfriends. Unfortunately his website crashed, but in the comments they said an additional rule listed there is no history of sex with black men because that’s “just about bestiality.”
http://jezebel.com/delusional-man-child-has-most-incredible-list-of-dating-1382052948?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+jezebel%2Ffull+%28Jezebel%29
“no history of sex with black men because that’s “just about bestiality.”
A neural connection in my brain just snapped like a twig from the obscenity overload mentally aimed at Sleepless in Austin. Racist pos.
RE: dress code
What does “distracting” even mean? Walking around school wearing only your birthday suit? A really low cut dress that swoops across your boob line? A tube top and shorts? A tank top and jeans? Midriffs, miniskirts, hoop earrings, what?
Inquiring minds want to know!!1!
(My high school had a dress code which banned clothes deemed to be a “distraction”. This included gang clothes, certain styles of tank top, and things that “showed too much skin”. I’ve seen this violated numerous times, so…)
Did you guys see the response of one town in India after that horrific honor killing? They banned girls from wearing jeans and using cell phones.
That’s right — to avoid future incidents of parents torturing and murdering their own children, they are policing the behavior of the girls….who clearly are to blame by being so “tempting.”
This is the perfect illustration of why focusing on the behavior of the victim does absolutely nothing to stop the violence.
“3. It is irrational to make up a term, “MRA” and to use the term to dismiss a person without addressing his or her argument.”
Misogyny, I rationally engage in discussion about it.
Nope, that’s still not the header!
So, you want to take the manboobz challenge? Find one widely known moderate MRA. Just one. Shouldn’t be too hard in a human rights movement right?
auggziliary – Huzzah, it’s my choice of clothes that causes distractions such as sexual harassment! *rolls eyes*
I’m trying to recall if the school ever did an event regarding harassment of people because of their gender. We definitely did do events encouraging people to accept one another at my high school starting about two years ago, although from what I recall, it focused on LGBT and differing cultures.
I do recall people going around wearing shirts where they implied that if you got married, it was game over or whatever. These were mostly dudes. At the time, I didn’t call myself a feminist, although I knew what feminism was and what their goal was.
Lovely.
School dress codes…I could see if they followed the ones the teens may get from employers, that’d make sense. (Fucking iOS 7 no not that’ drake!)
But they don’t.
No gang colors or symbols is logical where that’s a problem. No shirt, no shoes, no service = utterly understandable. But some of them! And they always address the female bodied. Like, no shorts shorter than…the only things you can find in stores. (Note, I am not actually proposing teens be stuck with no jeans, no sweats, etc business dress, just noting that if the goal was to dress for practice for a good job it’d look more like that)
Argenti – I’ll be fair, the dress code did address what men couldn’t do (it was “you can’t wear pants so baggy that they fall down to your knees” and “you can’t wear pants so baggy that if you pulled a legging from one side the excess cloth exceeds two inches”), and there was a ban on baseball hats, but honestly I think that’s understandable. You don’t want to trip over your clothes.
However, the “you can’t wear this kind of tank top” (the racerback tank top? I don’t know the styles) and “straps must be at least one inch wide” rules sucked. I think a lot of girls got around that by wearing a top that’s really see-through over their tank tops, but still.
At the time though, I didn’t know better. Then again, I didn’t know that my 9th grade biology teacher was teaching us bullshit until about five years later, so…
C’mon, isn’t anyone going to ask why there won’t be any three-ways in space?
Why won’t there be any three ways in space?
katz – Okay. Why can’t we have three-ways in space?
Because no one wants to solve the three-body problem!
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Yeah… you’re going to hell for that one, Katz. 😛
Thank you all for humoring me.
Coudiah, how are your kitties today? I’ve had a couple of pairs of litter mates, and the only time one was aggressive to the other was when one was ill. We already knew Storm was sick, but if Nutmeg and Nilla suddenly became aggressive to one another, I’d watch them for 2 or 3 days for other changes in behavior and then take them to the vet. Even if nothing is physically wrong with either of yours, I don’t think it would be a frivolous visit under the circumstances. Hugs to your kitties!