Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are getting worked up about imaginary feminists again. Well, I suppose that’s pretty much all they ever do. But these two have managed to get even more worked up about even more imaginary feminists than they usually do:
![flying_downwardss 12 points 22 hours ago (18|6) I'M SORRY FOR BEING BORN MALE, I'M SORRY! Is that what the feminists and manginas want to hear? permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]Maschalismos 7 points 18 hours ago (7|0) You know full well it is. And the only way for you to atone for your sin -making a woman feel bad by existing- is to kill yourself. Thats why they chuckle at male suicide figures: they think its justice for the vast, infinite, undefined bulk of crimes against women since the dawn of time.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sorry.png?ssl=1)
Upvotes for everyone!
Piers Morgan was an astounding asshole about the Janet Mock thing; he just kept doubling down and doubling down again and posting these awful infantile tweets about the people who were calling him out on his transphobia.
That said, I don’t think that’s going to be a big part, or maybe even a part, of the media spin on the story. Looking at the NYT story about it, the angle seems to be that he was a prickly Brit who didn’t connect with Americans and he talked too much about gun control. His ratings were terrible. The quotes from him in the NYT story seem to sugggest that he fully expected his show would be cancelled.
Wow. You wonder how these guys manage to actually deal with the real world (outside of the forums), imagining all of these evil feminists/women hiding around every corner. Do they really suspect that every other feminist they meet wishes death upon them? I can’t imagine what it must be like thinking like that. It must be miserable.
And is it just me, or is their various, er, theories about women totally inconsistent?
Victoria: they’re totally inconsistent. If us women have hamsters running our brains, how are we ruling the world?
It’s not you. Sometimes, they manage to contradict themselves within the same sentence
@aleprechaunist
That is indeed a reprehensible statement; I’m rather stunned by it.
But then again so was everyone else in that thread. You’ll notice that everyone else there told the person who posted it that it was utterly reprehensible, and that the person ultimately withdrew that part of the comment.
aleprechaunist: not quite the “gotcha!” you think it is. Sorry.
But but but one person on a discussion said a bad thing, so that person must: 1. be a feminist; 2. speak for all feminists everywhere.
Even though that person apologized, retracted and clarified zir statement. So that person wasn’t really wasn’t gloating over men commuting suicide. And which was stated in the same post a-leprechaunist quoted and linked to.
I guess it’d be misandry to point out the many times MRAs say women should be beaten, raped, killed en masse …
I was reading the Guardian the other day, the stats on male suicide in the UK are WAY up, disturbingly so, whereas suicide rates for women have declined almost by half over something like a ten year period? It was shocking to me, and I read through the article, much talk about how men need to be reached more effectively without much mention of how, or what the cause of this might be, and THEN:
I got to the comments. And lo, the very very few self identifying feminists who posted in the comments were are horrified as I was, and the self identifying numbers of men who posted seemed to hit on the following three themes:
1) if women would just go back home and take care of us, we wouldn’t kill ourselves, because in order for suicide to go down we need to go back to the fifties, where everyone knew Their Place;
2) MAN UP YOU BUNCH OF WHINERS, or the British equivalent of that statement, and;
3) um, maybe this is happening because people are always telling us Being A Man means you suck it up and take it and never complain or discuss mental illness/depression (the leading cause of suicide, obvs.), and perhaps what we need is maybe, um, some feminist strategy and theory to help us get past this notion that to be a man you can’t express your…
And then an uproar of angry commentators, yelling at whichever poor guy popped up to point out reality. Because yeah, as feminists often point out, patriarchy victimizes men too, and I think in no arena more often than in getting help for mental illness. The track record isn’t stellar with women either, but it’s a bit better.
(Apologies for using such extremely binary language to make my point.)
Lili, There was a study that radio host Thom Hartmann cites often that showed a correlation between higher suicide rates and conservative government in the UK and Australia. Rates were lower in liberal governments. Perhaps the people in group have it colossally wrong when they blame liberalism. Of course correlation =/= causation so who knows? It’s an interesting find though.
And, of course, since (white) men are more equal than everybody else, they deserve to have more equality! As if that even makes sense.
@lili
This is an interesting topic. What astounds me is that the Manosphere hates women and feminism and then co-opts feminist theory and lexicon without knowing that they use it properly sometimes. There was an article on AVFM written in a social constructivist feminist lens regarding sports culture.
They’re pretty desperate to do that and we all know why they’re desperate: they don’t have a case for any of their rage.
It’s just another part of being part of the Manosphere. One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. It’s one contradictory statement after another.
Urgh, I’ve noticed the whole “sorry for existing.” Frankly, I don’t CARE about your damn feelings, I care about your actions — for instance, treating my existence like it’s there to inspire guilt.
Because irony is women’s work otherwise it’s MISANDRY.
IME, the “do you just want me to apologize for being male/white/straight” people have usually just been pretty thick and insulated and honestly can’t wrap their minds around “you have privilege” having any implications other than “you should feel bad.” When I’ve heard it it wasn’t really meant maliciously or anything other than stupidly.
I find the whole ‘privilege guilt’ thing is usually tied in with the ‘I got mine, so screw you’ mentality. They’re desperately trying to hold on to something they think gives them value (specifically, more value than ‘those people’, whoever that may actually be) because they don’t intrinsically value themselves as people. It’d be really sad if they weren’t mostly asshats.
You owe me a keyboard!
🙂 I couldn’t resist the pun.
I wrote something on male suicide figures, and r/mensrights decided it was an anti-male attack – despite, last I checked, what I wrote beginning with what a massively serious issue it was and how important it was to tackle and perhaps reasons why the disparity exists. Their reading comprehension isn’t spectacular, it seems.
Meh, MRAs don’t really care. They just insult the guys who suicide as not manly anyway…
I think it’s more like they think every woman that wishes them death is because she’s a feminist.
I guess that’s the only way they never have to deal with wondering whether they *ever* did something wrong to a woman.
This kind of reminds me of that thing, though. That thing that happened when those MRAs tried to speak at a college somewhere and people protested? And there’s that video that was featured in a post on here a while ago? …I don’t really know much about it, obviously, but didn’t it have something to do with the protestors mocking male suicide?
(Absolutely not arguing for anything these MRAs are saying, by the way. I’m just wondering if that’s what they’re talking about and if it actually did happen somewhere.)
One feminist, who was being repeatedly shouted down, said “Cry me a river” to one of the dudes interrupting her, and the particular interruption she responded to was him talking about male suicide. Depending on how generous you are, this makes her individually either just someone who lost her cool in a stressful situation or an asshole. One person. It is not reasonable to argue that this is something feminists do routinely unless you can provide evidence.
What has also been documented is that MRAs response to this individual was to doxx her, and send her rape and death threats. Multiple MRAs. Repeatedly. David did a few posts on this.
Nicely played Kiwi Girl, nicely played.
On the current topic, last time I said this First Joe accused me of victim blaming (and found himself on the receiving end of me truly angry), but we need anti-suicide campaigns specially targeting men. The idea that asking for help isn’t manly is deadly, depression has enough layers of an “I’m just a weak waste of humanity” without one of them being toxic gender roles.
On the OP — this feminist finds it far from hilarious when a man commits suicide. I’m not sure I can even have this discussion without fuming, there was a point where it was amazing if my friend group had gone more than a couple of months without someone knowing someone who’d killed themselves, all men, including my ex-FWB’s brother.
Yeah, I’m going to end this comment before I start fuming the implication I find his death funny is too close to attacking my friends, and we all know how that makes me react (if you don’t know, it involves the words “FUCK YOU!”, a lot)
Remember the guy who said he wouldn’t save a little girl from drowning because she’d just grow up to be a feminist?
Yeah, I’ve heard it referred to as the social justice version of original sin. I think part of the problem is that the conversation about privilege rests on an understanding of power imbalances that a lot of people still lack. It’s hard to explain white privilege to someone who thinks racism is dead, you know?
Did you suggest that anything other than the dreadful oppression of men at the hands of the gynocracy was to blame for the suicide rate? If so, I think I see where you went wrong. 😉
And she’s still being invoked on MRA sites as a feminist boogeyman. Boogeywoman? Boogeyc*nt?