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.
I’d go for album title.
… which shows I should have read the second page before commenting! 😛
Tristan – don’t feel bad about avoiding the news. I’m doing exactly the same thing without even being in a bad place to begin with, because the reactionaries just got elected here in Australia and it’s depressing/frightening hearing what they’re doing. Avoiding news is a very good idea when you’re already feeling vulnerable.
Ugh… The first coder was Ada Lovelace, a woman. It’s also theorized that prehistoric women were the ones to figure out agriculture and weaving since they often got relegated to the gathering part of being a hunter-gatherer. Women’s accomplishments don’t get lauded like men’s but if you actually LOOK through history those accomplishments are still there.
For example, Watson and Crick got credit for discovering the double helix, but it was actually Franklin (a woman!) who not only theorized a double helix structure *but actually proved it too*; she published her findings in the same issue of Nature as Watson and Crick, practically on the very next page. Watson and Crick even later confessed to breaking into her lab to steal her x-rays of DNA structure, before that they were still adhering to the three strand theory. History is riddled with instances of men stealing women’s ideas and taking credit.
It grinds my gears something chronic whenever misogynists trot out the “men built and invented everything cool ever” line because it’s not only ridiculous to say “oh look, the people we have been deliberately suppressing for our own ends haven’t been able do all the cool stuff we have, ergo they are inferior and our suppression of them is justified”, but it’s factually *wrong*, as in YOU CAN GOOGLE THIS SHIT!
Except hunter-gatherer societies even now are not monolithic, and we know zip about prehistoric ones and how they divided labour, so supposing women got relegated that way seems a bit of a leap. I’m wary of “men figured this out/women figured that out” when it implies a whole group plus a gender divide. What about the differences within genders, and the similarities between them, that are so well documented now?
Off topic (slightly) but is *this* a reason for misandry?
http://www.mensrightsedmonton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/PatriarchyParty3.pdf
Trigger Warning.
http://www.mensrightsedmonton.com/
Now I know he *thinks* he’s being all satirical, but he is legit a member of MR-E.
Shaun, I think I posted that on the other thread, but the r/mr discussion of that Patriarchy Party thing is hilarious:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1n40po/meet_the_patriarchy_party_candidatemre_submits/
typhonblue gets so angry; there are a bunch of slap-fights that break out. Have popcorn on hand.
Cloudiah knows everything.
*shifty eyes*
And I know everything cloudiah knows.
::adjusts camera in cloudiah’s living room::
kittehs, Can you tell me what Buster is doing? I’m not home, and I’ve always been curious what she gets up to during the day.
She is doing this.
Why? What do you think “fetishizing consent” means, and if it was actually a thing why would it be bad?
WUT.
That’s certainly an alternate definition of fetish.
@auggziliary, when MRA people talk about fetishizing consent, they mean expecting consent to be considered important. Not like… demonstrating consent through scarification or anything like that.
OK, what I THINK this MIGHT be is a reference to pregnant people who use their pregnancy to excuse their poor treatment of others, which I think we can all agree sucks but isn’t misogyny. If a woman with a male partner is pregnant and treating him poorly and using the pregnancy as justification it’s not because he’s a man. It’s because he’s there and a convenient person to take her anger out on. Gender is irrelevant. It’s not OK. It’s not misogyny either. It’s just bad behaviour. It’s also not an entrenched aspect of society.
That’s still not really fetishizing consent, and if it were, so what?
Isn’t “consent is sexy” just a way to communicate the idea that rape is not?
Judging by this:
I’m not real sure Brute Reason understands the message either.
Okay, I’m gonna go dictionary pedant here:
Fetish: Noun
An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
A course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment.
Synonyms
idol – charm
It’s totally separate from sexual fetishism, and the idea that French women don’t/US women do “fetishise consent” is pretty obviously saying this dude thinks US women make too much fuss, or say no too often, or aren’t as blase about unwanted sex as French women. I’d be really surprised if he was taking the “consent is sexy” saying to mean it’s a sexual fetish (if he’s even aware of it).
tl:dr – “Stop
insisting I only get to fuck you when you want tofetishising consent!”Why would anyone want to refuse in a sexy way? That sounds bizarre.
Kittehs: Right?
Is it your point or someone else’s? That’s great and all but it still kind of misses the point. It’s not a fetishization, it’s meant to grab people’s attention.
Auggz – that pretty much sums up where I think any gobshite talking about women “fetishising consent” is coming from. He doesn’t actually give a shit about getting it and resents the idea he should have to. Which, again, isn’t about whether consent is seen as a turn-on at all.