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.
Good needs to learn the difference between social/ cultural constructs and biology/evolution.
Did the troll just go for sciency-ness (like “truthiness”, but with 100% more sparkles!)
c’mon, Good, what do you actually know about punk eek?
I misread that, and worried that you might be exposing us to toxoplasmosa… but your pictures aren’t publicly available anyway, so I guess we’re safe.
<blockquote so many women have no inhibitions about aggressively confronting and striking men as well as how women are the bosses in most married or cohabitating households
Citation needed.
Bummocks, the blockquote monster got me.
or men THINK it says that. It does not appeal to me, nor many other women.
Where is this alternate universe where women go around striking men randomly? (tw: domestic violence). Though female on male domestic abuse isn’t taken seriously often, and it’s not because women on average aren’t scared of men, it’s because women are seen as ‘not a threat’ to men, but I don’t think that’s what you were getting at.
Where are my previous points?
It hasn’t been 3 million years. This is totally unrelated to evolution. No DNA, no biology, no natural selection, just social interactions. Since when have misery, shortsighted failure, and convenient excuses been part of evolution? Since when has evolution needed 3 million years to be considered evolution?
I simply didn’t cut anything out of the sentence. But a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is evolution.
The beginnings of humankind go back around 3 million years when our ancestors first began walking upright. But if you want to just reference homo sapiens, 275,000 years of happenstance chain events is more than enough time to promote evolution.
Fibinachi didn’t say anything about species development.
Fallacies: Naturalistic. Is/Ought. Probably some others that I don’t have the patience to look for.
It’s an inaccurate point anyway – traditions aren’t coded for in the genome. It is no more an evolutionary fact that women are subservient to men than it is that we believe in Jesus Christ. Take all traces of Christianity out of the world and it will be dead, unless it turns out to be true, in which case god will come down and spank us. Likewise, take all traces of patriarchy out of the world and it will be dead. Something else may regrow in its place if it let it, but it will not be the same thing, any more than a new religion would be the same as Christianity. This is easily demonstrated by the large variety of traditional gender roles among different peoples around the world.
Any evidence of this?
Or this?
1) Or this?
2) As if that would be a bad thing!?
“I simply didn’t cut anything out of the sentence. But a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is evolution.”
Oh dear, another twerp who thinks there is no such thing as nurture. How embarrassing for him.
Why don’t you just pull out that biological determinism card you’ve been hiding up your sleeve? You know, the argument that we have NEVER heard before.
First: citation?
Second: does not follow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-sacks/researcher-says-womens-in_b_222746.html
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/09/25/women-call-the-shots-at-home-public-mixed-on-gender-roles-in-jobs/
I don’t exactly have a professional level understanding of biology and evolution… but a chain of happenstances over a large period and the effects on species development is history. The parts that count as evolution are the parts that have to do with the genetic code. Wearing funny hats over several thousand years, then making it illegal not to wear the hats is not evolution. Killing people who do not wear hats might contribute to evolution, but only if there’s a gene that determines whether someone will refuse to wear a hat.
You’re so predictable, Good.
Athywren,
“Take all traces of Christianity out of the world and it will be dead, unless it turns out to be true, in which case god will come down and spank us.”
Ok, I just scared the crap out of my kids laughing SO hard at this. Your delivery – wasn’t expecting it. Everything preceding spanking was so serious. Oh, I hope the rapture consists of spanking. Wait, that sounded dirty…
takshak, I’ll take it, thanks!
It looks like there are two ways – log in, click your name click settings, then click the “public” option in public or private, or create a public album and put the ones you want us to see in there. Or share the direct link for each one of them, but that’s probably a lot of copying and pasting.
Oh dear, another twerp who thinks there is no such thing as nurture. How embarrassing for him.
Stop being stupid stupid. Nurture is important. But you don’t think that nature is involved with something that is universal and has been for hundreds of thousands of years at the least?
Terrifying, horned demons, spanking us rhythmically to the tune of ““O Fortuna” and chanting, “I’m do-ing-this…. for-your-own-good…”
It doesn’t matter if it’s innate or not, Lessgood. That doesn’t make it correct.
@good
I’m going to need a citation on ‘hundreds of thousands of years at least’.
I really, really do.
Do you think that people who were slaves at one time in history are evolutionarily inferior to their masters, too, Good? Because that’s what follows from your statement.
True. If you’re talking genetics and biologically transferable things, instead of oral histories and sociological organisation or religion or traditions.
And even then, so… what? What? what
Are you suggesting misery is evolutionary selected for, or that fitness pressure would entail men to become more controlling and women to become more casually exploited? Or that evolutionary pressure has gradually shaped it so that humans come together in organisations wherein men are on top and women are not, because That’s Just The Way It Goes?
Are you mad? In what world? By what mechanism? For possible fitness increasing purpose? By what wayward mutation?
Set aside all of that, and consider for an instant that it’s a horrible *ineffecient* way to go about things. IT wastes truly massive amounts of ressource on subduing half the population and it limits the growth potential of your entire species. There is no way that system would endure for a split second the moment a better, more effectively producing generallized system came out OH WAIT that’s feminism, isn’t it? ANd the fact that in general, higher co-participation of everyone and more open, less strict terms of tradition frees up talent to go where its best.
Ouch, my brain.
And… O…. but…
OKay. Okay. New question. New question.
GOOD. assuming that’s true. Assuming that is actually the case. Assuming this is all evolution, and the way it works today is how it all evolved, and that men and women and the human species in general has been shaped by those forces to that which we are today, biological all, and it’s hard-coded into our dna…
You’d still want that to continue?. In this hypothetical example, we’ve all just figured that out, and people know, so you can just… make it not so by mutual decision, and set things up so everyone benefits better, reduce all the casual cruelty, domestic violence, rape, threats and pain because so far it’s just been blind evolution and we’re smart humans and we can fix that. It’s just a matter of changing a few laws and making a few snips and snaps at society to fix the “Blind errors of evolutionary chance”, and you seem to be saying we shouldn’t?
… I don’t often have the chance to converse with true evil, but I do relish the oppertunities I get.
Step on all the legos.
Forever.
Okay, easy run-by here: Good claims women are the bosses in ‘most’ homes. To justify this, he cites a study that shows that women are in charge of specific decisions… 43% of the time, with it being a mixed-bag or male-dominant household the other 57% of the time.
Ergo, Good is a moron who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “most”. Proceed accordingly.
“Stop being stupid stupid. Nurture is important. But you don’t think that nature is involved with something that is universal and has been for hundreds of thousands of years at the least?”
I think it’s funny to read YOU calling anyone stupid.
Funny how you like to strawman, too. I said, you’re ignoring nurture.
Unsure if Bad’s just trying to go for repetition as emphasis, or if Bad is, well, bad at grammar and attempting to make… dun dun duuuuun… A PERSONAL ATTACK! Gasp!
Somehow I suspect the latter, but let’s see: Bad, please elucidate!