On Monday, Martin Luther King Day here in the United States, this was posted in the Men’s Rights subreddit, where, as you can see, it was quite popular with the assembled Men’s Rightsers:
How wrong is this? Let me count the ways.
1) It’s wrong because Men’s Rights “Activists” aren’t “warriors for peace,” or justice, or even for their own backwards notions of men’s rights. MRAs, like a lot of men insecure about their own worth, love to claim credit for the accomplishments of great men in the past (without accepting any responsibility for the terrible deeds of the terrible men who lived before them).
But even in terms of claiming credit where no credit is due this is especially ridiculous. Aside from a tiny handful of “fathers rights activists,” who’ve bizarrely chosen to try to advance their cause by vandalizing paintings and/or dressing up in superhero costumes and climbing up buildings, and one troubled man who killed himself in hopes that his death would spur other MRAs to acts of terrorism directed at courthouses and police stations, MRAs don’t risk anything with their “activism,” insofar as they engage in anything that can be called activism at all.
There’s nothing heroic, or risky, about posting anonymous rants online about how women are all a bunch of hypergamous bitches, or sending some vague threat to the feminist villain of the day.
Indeed, MRAs face so little risk that some are forced to invent stories of persecution — like John Hembling’s tall tale of being confronted by a mob of boxcutter-wielding feminists, thoroughly discredited by The Daily Beast — in order to cast themselves in the role of the persecuted victim-turned-hero.
2) It’s wrong because the person posting this message, and attempting to suggest some sort of link between the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King and the Men’s Rights movement today, is someone who also posts in the White Rights subreddit, a haven for the same sort of hateful white supremacists who hurled racial epithets — not to mention actual rocks and bottles — at King when he was alive.
When one Redditor pointed this out, and noted (correctly) that numerous white nationalists post in the Men’s Rights subreddit, they were quickly downvoted for their troubles.
The original poster explained that he only posted in White Rights about “real cases of white discrimination.”
Another poster offered an example of what he saw as one such case of “real” anti-white discrimination:
Yeah, that was totally a real thing.
3) It’s wrong because it’s wrong. As in, factually incorrect. Warren Farrell is talking out of his ass, again. Here’s a slightly longer version of his quote, which you can find on his web page. (It’s originally from The Myth of Male Power.)
Men are likely to be not only the warriors of war but also the warriors of peace. Almost all those who risk their lives, are put in jail, or are killed for peace are men. While some of the peace warriors—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold—are remembered, most are forgotten. Remember Norm Morrison?
Well, no, Warren, I don’t remember Norm Morrison. But I think you’re forgetting a few people too. Like half of the human race.
Women have been involved in peace and social justice movements as long as women have been active in the public sphere. Ever hear of Women Strike for Peace? Code Pink? At every large demonstration I’ve been at that has involved civil disobedience, I’ve seen both men and women arrested, with some of the women old enough to be grandmothers or great-grandmothers. The idea that women don’t put themselves on the line for peace or social justice is patently false.
This is really kind of basic stuff. But with MRAs, alas, you always need to go back to the basics.
But the post in the Men’s Rights subreddit was all about co-opting the civil rights movement, so today I thought I would remind anyone who might have forgotten — or who never knew — that it wasn’t just men who put themselves at risk in the struggle for civil rights.
You can click on the pictures for more information.
Might want to add that my dad went to help with voter registration drives in Mississippi in college, the mid to late sixties. He also drank form the colored fountains during trips to visit his mother’s Georgia and Tennessee relatives, and covertly listened to what my grandma still sometimes calls ‘race music’ (when her brain to mouth filter is working) and ‘n-word music’ when it isn’t. She also called a bag of nuts ‘n-word toes’ one Christmas. In front of my brother’s then-fiancee, a truly lovely and amazing Gambian woman. sigh. I love my grandma a lot, but sometimes she makes it really hard to like her.
Example time! Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, a.k.a. Nellie Bly. Investigated an asylum by faking mental illness to expose the cruel and inhumane treatment of its patients. Among other things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly
I was born in 1968 in Birmingham Al. I was sheltered from all this stuff .Its always amazed me knowing now what was going on then . I remember subtle things later in Florida I didn’t undrerstand (subtle to me) going on when I was 6 /8 etc. They were integrating our schools.
I remember the comments section of…I think it was a Doctor Nerdlove article…where someone lamented the terrible hardships men had to face approaching women due to the threat of misandry, and he used Emmett Till as his example. I just…was so angry and offended I was speechless.
@kittehserf Sorry. My typing sucks. I mean Charlie Pierce calls right-wing people nuts or crazy. I understand if this makes his writing unapproachable.
Most murders and assaults are committed by men too. Funny how the MRAs don’t want to claim credit for that.
That’s because women do it too .
I think kitt33 has a secret feminine side to him by calling us all cupcakes. Hmmm. Interesting.
What I find really interesting is that Elam uses the phrase “warriors of peace”. It’s like he can’t disassociate his mind from violence even while talking about peace.
It is really… sad.
…and as usual, MRA’s will try and twist the data in one of their weird attempt to prove that women are the ultimate evil and say that most murders and assaults are committed by women.
Logic and reason and reality does not apply to the MRA fantasy world they live in.
Maybe we should use nits instead – irritating, itchy, nasty crawly feeling from lice … yup, that works for trolls, right-wingers, MRAs …
I am grateful to my parents for neglecting certain parts of my social education. Don’t know quite how it happened, but thanks, Mom and Dad. I remember telling my eldest brother how surprised I was by how welcoming my father was to my first husband, who was Chinese-Panamanian. He laughed. “Don’t you realize that you gave him his only Catholic son-in-law? And Manuel is a college-educated professional! That he’s not white, and gay? Minor details.”
I do remember, at a very young age, using a certain word. My mother looked at me and said, very seriously, “If you use words like that, people will think you’re stupid.” I still don’t use those words.
You know what is actually peaceful? This video of my kittens!
(Warning: kittens not actually peaceful. By watching this video, you are contributing to their master plan to take over the world. Don’t worry–they will be benevolent furry dictators.)
Malala Yousafzai makes me cry. She is a power in her own right.
Furrinati power … must … resist … kitten … cuteness … must …
ASSIMILATION COMPLETE
Couple of things with uterus transplants (besides my having just fallen down a rabbit hole cuz THAT IS AWESOME!!)
Nine more women have had the surgery, and are scheduled to attempt pregnancy this year, so we should know more soon.
Pregnancy loss before/at eight weeks isn’t that uncommon. (Somewhere around 15% risk it looks like, that’s including high risk pregnancies, which, of course, this is)
Pregnancy after any organ transplant is extra risky, and it looks like you should be waiting a year+ to ensure the organ isn’t rejected (this was about kidney transplants — something relatively normal among transplants). Depending on the anti-rejection drugs, half of those women miscarried.
So all in all I’m entirely unwilling to draw any solid conclusions from one transplanted uterus rejecting pregnancy at a stage where a low risk pregnancy is just starting to be a fairly sure thing (that is, even among the textbook perfect pregnancies, before 8 weeks is the riskiest until birth)
We’ll see, I do find it promising that the pregnancy implanted and grew — the uterine wall had to be suitably thick and healthy for that to occur at all. What I want to know is if a heartbeat was found and then lost, or never found, the latter is more common (by a good bit) in general, and, with a sample, size of one, would sway me to thinking the issue wasn’t with the uterus.
Really, with just one pregnancy to base this all on, the only way to be sure it the miscarriage was because of the transplanted uterus would be…impossible, more or less, but you could exclude it if, say, obvious fetal abnormalities were present, particularly the sort that are genetic or develop before implantation.
Can you tell that my interest is piqued?
But but but none of these women activists are HB10s and therefore they do not count.
/channelingmras
This wonderful piece of writing by David illustrations for the umpty-umpthy bazillionth time something I keep noticing about the MRAs: they dunno much about history. Whenever they go forth blathering about history, society, or the meaning of something, misinformation, mistakes, and outright fiction will quickly dominate whatever message they set out to convey.
I meant illustrates. Damn, no ability to edit.
Reading these comments reminds me again of the simple truth that change happens when people do things, they don’t just write on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, Manboobz is a hugely valuable site and David does great work in monitoring the worst of the MR movement.
But in the same way that the misters achieve nothing because they spend all their time complaining online, there are also too many well-intentioned social justice / progressive types who confine themselves to reading/writing on Tumblr etc. Please, as someone who has been an activist of one kind or another for (pause for mental counting) nearly 30 years, try to spend a minimum of one hour actually fighting injustice for every five you spend talking, writing or reading about it.
Charlie- that’s a huge assumption you’re making. You really don’t know what all of the commenters here do in their free time, and they’re also probably not as forward about it because some facts could be hugely identifying and we I personally don’t need the misters blowing up my identity.
Hi Catgirl!
Thanks for the feedback, but I suspect you are reading something specific about commenters here into a very general comment I made. I said ‘there are too many well-intentioned social justice / progressive types who confine themselves to reading/writing on Tumblr etc.’ I didn’t refer to the commenters here specifically, for the same reason you give – that I don’t know what specific groups of people are doing offline. In fact, since David often highlights the fact that MRA consists almost entirely of online rants, the readership here at Manboobz is less likely to be armchair warriors than a lot of other places. And look at how many commenters here have women and men of action as their heroes.
I agree I am making an assumption, which is that far more time is spent on online discussion of Social Justice / Progressive issues than is spent on working to improve these issues. That assumption is based on the amount of online vs offline action I see and the amount of talking (even in very general terms) about offline action that I see online. Don’t get me wrong, I agree discussion and debate is vital – I probably spent hundreds of hours of my life with my arm raised in a seated circle of like-minded souls, trying to reach consensus on aims and tactics – and I’m not suggesting that we walk away from the internet and leave the misters unchallenged. My suggestion is simply that, as a minimum, every 5 hours of online action be matched with 1 hour of rolling up sleeves and volunteering, campaigning or otherwise taking direct action.
I’m not saying this to chide or sneer, I’m genuinely thrilled at the commitment to righteous causes I find online. I’m just very aware of what sort of action has made a difference down the years, as evidenced by the people discussed in this thread.
auggziliary, well I’m not sure if my every day work is a form of activism…I do lots of human service work with the underprivileged of my community. It could be from housing, healthcare, education, domestic violence or drug abuse. We also advocate for family and individual of special needs, we give them the tool to be able to navigate the educational and health system (find the help and service they need). I don’t speak to often about the work I do because this type of work is not easy (and I not in it for the money), I mean is fulfilling but it could be hard on you mentally and physically. So I might not be marching and giving public speeches but I feel like I’m elevating and easing some of the burden of the individuals and families I work with, and that how I contribute.
Now I got to go, AAA is here to start my car…it die over night due to the freeze weather. Bye!
scarlettpipstrelle – the inability to edit can be inconvenient, but it’s well worth it to deny trolls the ability to gaslight. No changing posts so it looks like they’re not lying when they say “I never said that”. The record is indelible.
This is our hangout, not our base of operations.