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.
Chie Satonaka has said it right.
The institution of slavery has existed in some form in every human society on the planet. Therefore, slavery is the natural state of humanity and “good.”
This is the kind of shit that comes from the type of “logic” that people like Good employ.
Good :no one is mad at you, you’re not interesting or smart enough to be mad at. You’re just fucking tedious.
I’m still waiting for good to tell me that I’m really mad at him, I’m just pretending I’m not or w/e. But hellkell hit it. Good’s just boring.
And yet I am bored, so I still keep poking him. Oh well. ::sighs::
Good makes me go /).<
@argenti aertheri
I wish I knew what those punctuations signified 🙁
…what do they signify?
Damn it, now I’m writing a post on misogyny in STEM, with a planned post on misogyny on the Internet, and I should be preparing for an interview in four hours. EEP!
For the record though, we’re working on fixing the gender parity, at least in STEM.
I asked all the kitties what they think of all of Good’s reasoned arguments and citations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiias7R444s
@alice
Good luck on your interview! 😀
Good luck, Alice!
This. So much.
Going back to before we got invaded by Not Good At All — “rather than ‘men have higher suicide rates because they’re less likely to seek help…'”
Auggz, ya might want to be careful there, last time I mentioned that suicide prevention programs targeting men would be a good idea, Joe accused me of victim blaming (and I proceeded to completely loose my shit at him because my ex-FWB’s brother killed himself and you do not go after my friends)
Marie — it’s a face palm, like >.< but with a palm /)
So /) = palm and .< = nose and squinty cranky eye
@argenti
ah. That makes sense.
/).<
“You haven’t addressed my points” and “Why aren’t you giving my argument the respect it deserves” both translate to “You aren’t agreeing with me like I think you should be.”
Best wishes for your interview Alice!
Don’t pay any attention to Good. He is just trying to garner the attention his classmates don’t give him at school.
Unrelated to anything and with apologies to vegetarians.
Chupaqueso
You will need a good teflon skillet, a fairly sharp teflon spatula, some sharp cheddar, some fresh parmesan, and some Monterey Jack cheese.
1. Grate about a half-cup of cheddar and a half-cup of jack.
2. Heat the skillet, and spread the cheddar evenly in the pan. You should have an eight-inch diameter circle of grated cheese, with a little bit of pan showing through here and there.
3. As the pan gets hotter the cheese will obviously melt. Then it will toast, and you’ll get cheese-grease floating on top of melted cheddar, itself on top of a layer of crusty toasted cheddar.
4. Start lifting around the edges with the spatula. You’ll soon reach a point (you’ll know, trust me) when the structural integrity of the crusty-toasty cheese allows you to flip the whole thing over.(Speaking of “over,” this is often the point where you’ll get frustrated and decide to start over.)
5) After toasting side two for a moment, flip it again so the “smooth” side is down, and the recently toasted side is up.
6) You now have a cheese shell sizzling in a puddle of cheese grease. It’s still flexible, but much longer and it won’t be, so you’ll have to work fast. Add the Jack cheese and a sprinkle of parmesan, and then tri-fold the cheddar-shell around it.
7) Slide it out of the pan onto your plate. It’s called a “chupaqueso” either because you can suck (chupa) the cheese (queso) out of the middle as you crunch away, or because this cheese (queso) thing you made sucks (chupa).
For added flavor you might try adding cooked-and-crumbled bacon with the jack and parmesan. In this case you’ll end up with a chupaqueso con tocino, or, as it’s often pronounced in my house, “chupaqueso con THERE’S BACON IN THIS THING chomp chomp AAARGH I BURNED MY MOUTH slurp gulp chomp.”
On the subject of inventions and discoveries…not only are the contributions of known women often downplayed/ignored, but unknown inventors are usually assumed to be men. Anyone else remember the “Men invented rope” troll?
@karalora
not me, but they sound like a very strange troll
Hyena Girl: that sounds effing delicious. No such thing as a sucky cheese dish.
I just commented on the stamp from deviantart. I’m going to be trolled like crazy now.
What is it with trolls like Good? For the 38474738th time: it’s not that we can’t refute your “arguments”, it’s just that we don’t feel like it, because this isn’t a debate site. We’re here to mock, and you’re as good a target as any other MRA.
Thanks! $12 an hour, I hope I get the job!
Also: men do not see women as equals. For most of human history, women were seen as inferiors, as property, as vessels to fuck, as a dependent, as like a child. Women are objectified, their bodies and the promise of sex being used to sell things from cars to body wash for men (Axe commercials anyone?). The Bible is highly misogynistic, with passages punishing women for losing their virginity, passages declaring her unclean during her period and after pregnancy, passages requiring her to marry her rapist if he refuses to pay her virgin price (but it’s only rape if she cried out while she was being raped of course!).
Laws were in place for much of the century denying married women the right to her own property, the right to vote, the right to keep her wages. She was expected to get married, and expected to take care of the home and care for babies. She was in the care of her father, and then her husband, and finally her sons; she never really got a chance to do things herself. Only if there were no men around (and if she was single) was she able to achieve some semblance of independence.
Women were denied entry to numerous institutions, denied access to many careers, especially science-related fields such as medicine. Elizabeth Blackwell was only accepted into medical school by a fluke of chance — the dean took her acceptance up for a vote, and if one male student (the male being superfluous at the time) objected, she would have been denied entry. The male students there thought it a joke and unanimously voted to accept her. If a woman achieved, she was not given credit, hidden by all of the male faces that accepted the awards and the acclaim for her work (see: Rosalind Franklin). Recognition for her work might take decades to surface; Franklin’s work was acknowledged as hers 25 years later.
Women were thought to be too stupid, too irrational, too emotional, too fragile, and hence all of the sexism and misogyny and restrictions regarding her agency made sense. And unfortunately, this attitude STILL exists today. And why? Because they were (and still are by many misogynists) seen as inferior.
[This is probably going to show up in my blog post later, because I’m lazy.]
Good: In the era when the roots of patriarchy were planted (see: ancient Rome/Greece, original Hebrew tribes, etc), upper body strength actually mattered, since whoever could swing a club harder was usually victorious. Even a small differential in that metric meant that men could dominate women physically (superior intellects need not apply). The stress of childbirth would also have factored into it; again, in pre-sanitary societies, childbirth was a much more dangerous prospect, and so women who achieved old age (often seen as a sign of divine providence in primitive societies) were few and far between.
Once a group has disproportionate power, the tools of power allow them to enhance that hold. So if you’re in charge, and you’re the guy telling the stories around the campfires, well, your stories will explain to everyone how it’s good and right that you’re in charge.
Thing is, the conditions in which ‘rule by force and age’ was a reasonable concept pretty much started fading with the invention of gunpowder, and are utterly inapplicable in modern society. As a result, women have been slowly, but steadily, trying to undo the effects of thousands of years of socialized patriarchy.
Good, men did it (dominate) by using violence and the threat of it.
“I have never insinuated anything of the kind”
You lying fuck.