One of the strangest things about doing this blog is all the things I ‘ve learned about myself in the process. I don’t mean all the insights into my inner being I’ve gained, though there’s been a bit of that. I mean all the completely untrue things I’ve learned from people who hate me.
For some reason, many of the people who most hate this blog– many of whom have never read it — aren’t satistfied with criticizing me for what I do and who I am; they find it necessary to make up many new and horrible and not-actually-true things to criticize me for: That I plant the things I quote on this blog to make Men’s Rightsers look bad, that I write all the comments myself (all the hundreds of thousands of them) to make Man Boobz look more popular.
Oh, and that I want all men cuckolded.
To those who hate me and this site, I and the Man Boobz commentariat have become what sociologist Stanley Cohen called “folk devils,” convenient scapegoats around which various urban legends — or in this case internet legends — have grown like mushrooms.
The ShitRedditSays empire on Reddit has developed a similar mythos of its own. ShitRedditSays started out as a subreddit to collect together and skewer the worst, most bigoted nonsense that regularly posted and upvoted on Reddit; it grew into a robust Reddit counterculture that’s really one of the only good things about the site.
But to most Redditors, it seems, the SRS folk devils really are akin to the devil, and they are accused of all sorts of preposterous things on a daily basis — many of which suggest that SRS wields vast and nefarious powers behind the scenes on Reddit and possibly even in the real world. There’s so much of this nonsense that the SRSers have started a whole subreddit devoted to the SRS Mythos.
Basically, all the preceding was sort of a long-winded preface to me saying that I just discovered SRSMythos and have been really enjoying reading it.
Here are some of the not-so-true facts about SRS catalogued there:
A claim that
my friend used to mod there [on SRS], he and his buddies from Stormfront.org started it as a joke to get people to hate politically correct liberals and black people.
The notion that SRS was secretly started as a joke by Nazis or other bigots is one of Reddit’s favorite conspiracy theories.
A claim from a Men’s Rights Redditor that one of the Men’s Rights subreddit mods is a secret SRS agent.
Another Redditor, familiar to anyone who reads the anti-SRS and/or Men’s Rights subreddits, offers a convoluted theory about how SRS is all part of a weird eugenics experiment.
Someone called againstSRS complains that “THEY’RE the ones who try to make fun of US for so-called “ridiculous” conspiracy theories? Our theories about SRS and women destroying society are more grounded in concrete facts than their entire sense of reality.”
Someone else asserts that SRS is a
horrible horrible subreddit full of Nazi Feminists that aren’t actually for equality. They hate all men, and think that every man is a rapist. I’ve seen people banned from it just for mentioning that they were a guy while commenting.
Actually, SRS did its own demographic surveys and found that most SRSers — -somewhere in the range of 57% to 59% — were dudes. Granted, that’s a low percentage of men for Reddit — which is overall 80% male — but not exactly evidence that SRSers are a bunch of man-hating feeeeemale separatists.
Check it out. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff there, whether you’re studying the sociology of scapegoating, or if you just like seeing Redditors post idiotic crap.
RE: DefJam
the commentariat here would do well to spend more time considering their words instead of just posting whatever inchoate thought pops into their heads.
You’re one to talk.
RE: Argenti
That sucks, Argenti. I’m really sorry this shit is happening; the disability system is fucking ASS. I think I vaguely remember something like that; even when I’m ‘indisposed’ (Sneak’s way of avoiding saying that the subconscious swallowed me for a few days) I usually get memory from when I was gone. (Thanks god.)
“In a general sense, the commentariat here would do well to spend more time considering their words instead of just posting whatever inchoate thought pops into their heads.”
I don’t know where you are, but this is a place called the “In-ter-net.” Inchoate thoughts and unctuous comments are the very building blocks of the internet, If people stopped spending their evenings in their pajamas writing mindless crap, the internet itself would cease to be.
Woo! First post~!
well actually I may or may not have made a post before this, but It may or may not have been gobbled up, so If I seem to be repeating myself, That would be why.
Anyway I have spent awhile back-reading and lurking On this blog, because MRA and the crap they believe has been big on my mind lately. My typical website, youtube, Had been getting an oddly high amount of anti-femminism and White nationalism before I lost my ability to post comments. (mostly because of my refusal to make a google+ account.)
Anyway, Im just glad to find Places that call this crap out. I know there are ‘Legitimate’ MRA who do actually try to worry about The actual ill’s the male gender suffers, but I would Urge those individuals to avoid the far more extremist viewpoints pushed my most of the websites That would rather hate woman then try and make things better for men.
@Ally
I’m not sure I see the problem with oppressed people hating their oppressors. I mean, if they refused to hire men or went out beating random men or felt hatred for every individual man, that’d be horrible, but wariness and anger and, yes, even hate seem like perfectly understandable reactions to me. Of course, I’m also assuming that people who say this mean “men in general” or “the oppressive things men do” rather than literally every single man, so I may be reacting incorrectly.
@Alice, I do understand the distinction between racial bigotry, horizontal racism, and structural racism, but I wince a little when people start yelling about how the word only applies to white-on-POC, if only because the argument inevitably gets derailed into an argument about definitions. The “prejudice + power” definition is useful at a 201 level, but when you’re talking to people who aren’t versed in academic anti-oppression theory, I’ve found it much more productive to call attention to the difference between individual versus structural racism than to claim that only one of those is really racism. /white opinions
I think there’s some truth to the argument that white people have privilege even when they’re in majority-nonwhite countries, but I have no idea if that’s universally true. And then there are cases where there are no white people involved at all, like when Han Chinese people discriminate against ethnic minorities there.
@LBT
I think the term you’re looking for is “horizontal oppression” (in this case, “horizontal racism”).
Nope. I still do it.
Oh, and speaking of both Tumblr and DID, did multiples come up last time we were kvetching about Tumblr?
@Def Jam
“Just”? Are you new here?
LBT — thanks and *non contact hugs* because the best part about hugs is you can’t give one without getting one 🙂
And I’m glad your subconscious spat you back out, being swallowed sounds gross (bad joke is bad?)
@Def Jam,
Anti-intellectualism? Yeah, you’re definitely new here.
Why?
@pillowinhell
Or Harry Potter. That’s where I learned it from, anyway.
I’m not sure I see the problem with oppressed people hating their oppressors.
See, there you go. Agree or disagree, this is a fairly standard line throughout the feminist community, not just on tumblr. So Ally, your beef is not with tumblr.
I thought EarWax meant we’re all men-haters here like the trans lesbians Ally mentioned, not that we’re transphobic.
Either way, citation needed!
I’m not sure how I feel about cultural appropriation. I mean, I can see how it could be taken as disrespectful and inappropriate, but as an ethnologist/anthropologist I know that taking elements of other cultures and adapting them for ones own is one of the primary ways that a culture avoids stagnation.
That’s not exactly right… believing that it’s okay for women to hate men doesn’t mean you actually do hate men. It’s a rarefied distinction, but an important one.
I really like tumblr. True, I stay mostly among the fandom nerds and the rugby blogs, but I met four really nice people irl from tumblr and made very close friends with a girl who lives in Scotland. True it can be full of SHE’s telling you you’re doing it wrong, but there’s enough other stuff that you can ignore it. (my tumblr is angelsonthetouchline.tumblr.com just FYI)
“See, there you go. Agree or disagree, this is a fairly standard line throughout the feminist community, not just on tumblr”
As someone who has been a feminist (surprisingly there is no single heterogeneous “feminist community”) for a handful of decades and spends quite a bit of time lurking on various site, I’m going to go ahead and disagree big guy. It is not a “fairly standard” line. It IS a fairly common complaint by people who don’t — for a variety of reasons — like feminists.
RE: emilygoddess
Oh, and speaking of both Tumblr and DID, did multiples come up last time we were kvetching about Tumblr?
No! And I admit to having a terrible weakness for multi wank, so if you have stories, do share! I’ve never heard the term ‘horizontal oppression’ before, so that’s a handy new vocabulary term for me.
RE: Argenti
Yeah, our brain will do that sometimes when it decides someone’s had enough. It’s pretty frightening though, so we don’t like it happening. (Mac is used to having me in his head and at most twenty feet away at all times; suddenly having me VANISH for almost a week is pretty upsetting for him.)
Also, Sneak and Gigs have grown so fond of your compass that we’ve taken to wearing it around our neck all the time.
Erm, no. It’s not. Rareified means esoteric, scholarly, remote from ordinary people. All you’re saying (or trying to say) here is that it’s a fine distinction.
Of course rareified also means thin and lacking oxygen, which is more appropriate for the claims of anyone supporting the misogynists of the MRM.
Gah, SJWs autocorrected to SHEs
I never said my beef was just with Tumblr – I just said that that online space is where I see the bulk of the justification for hatred against all individual men.
You could help lower the inchoate thinking quotient around here by fucking off.
But then we’d be deprived of his scintillating presence, hellkell!
I like Tumblr, myself. But I stay away from people who use the label SJW.
“See, there you go. Agree or disagree, this is a fairly standard line throughout the feminist community, not just on tumblr”
So, by my count we have one commenter possibly not having a problem with “opressed hating their oppressers” (also please note the caveats in her comment) & and that makes it standard here and “throughout the feminist community.”
I bet you’re awesome at statistics
LBT — glad y’all enjoy it! And I hadn’t even thought what that was like for Mac, that sucks. I got stuck on hoping Sneak wasn’t in charge, seeing how ze is a kid and all, glad to hear it was Miranda.
Oh, is it okay if I include your comics in the disability 101 page? I plan to do a subsection for mental health and thought your comics might be a good counter to wtf people see in media.
LBT: I’d be OK without it.
So DefJam has come to accuse us all of being the dreaded manhaters and I’m just… not very interested. I have men in my life that I love very much, but I’m sick of being required to talk about how much I care about them before it’s okay for me to want things like bodily autonomy or basic human respect.
And it’s not like it’s a game we can win, anyway; people will go ahead and insist we hate men no matter what we say. I’ve been told that I hate men because I do things like allow some of the skin on my legs to be visibly exposed when I am in public.
The trolls who pretend to be making valid contributions to the conversation are among the least interesting.
Huh, I just had a thought. If exposing one’s skin without offering to fuck every man who sees it is misandry, are women less misandrous in the winter?
Because there’s no way I’m leaving the house with anything other than my face showing until it warms up.