Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of designing posters that aren’t embarrassingly ugly and offputting?
Posters designed by MRAs are so routinely godawful it’s hard not to wonder if there is something inherent about them or their ideas that prevents them from seeing what a complete mess they’re making when they put together something like the poster above, which I recently found amongst a whole collection of similarly terrible posters at the website What Men Are Saying About Women.
In the case of Christian J, the WMASAW poster-designer, there is clearly something more than bad ideas at work here, but I do think the bad ideas of the Men’s Rights movement are a large part of the reason why MRAs can’t design posters to save their lives. Their posters are muddled messes because their ideology is a muddled mess.
Effective political posters are effective in large part because they convey a clear message in an arresting way. But the Men’s Rights movement doesn’t have a clear message. In some cases that’s because MRAs are trying to disguise their misogyny in order to try to appeal to a wider audience. It’s hard to get away with direct expressions of hate if you want to treat you as the “human rights movement” you keep insisting you are.
But in many other cases — as is the case with most of the posters featured in Christian J’s collection — MRA posters are muddled because their peculiar logic really only makes sense to those who already hate women to begin with. Who else would agree with the “argument” of this poster, which seems to be that we shouldn’t give respect to women because some women get drunk and other women … pose with silly expressions on their faces for stock photos?
Meanwhile, in this antifeminist poster, Christian J. offers little more than free-associational word salad, mixing accusations against feminists (“Hating Men is part of the agenda”) with simple assertions cataloging his own dislike of them (“no one likes a feminist”).
He also has posters attacking feminists Gloria Steinem and Hanna Rosin; tellingly, neither of them offer any specific evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either one. I wonder is Christian has read anything Rosin has written beyond the title to her book “The End of Men.”
And if you haven’t yet gotten your full dose of hate, he’s got a few posters attacking Lena Dunham for being … fat. And because Vogue did some rather minimal photoshopping to the pictures of her it ran in a recent profile.
And, well, I don’t even know what this is supposed to be.
Frankly, the more widely spread these posters are, the better. Because their ugliness reveals a lot about the ugly ideology of the MRA that made them.
LOL, bicicles (sic) need a fish?
Strike that, reverse it.
“It takes a village” is obviously a hate movement slogan, too.
I like how the only non-white woman they could think of was Tyra Banks.
I hope Christian J shows up to defend his shitty ideas and shittier art.
I would say the posters reflect not just their muddled, hate-filled ideology, but their complete incompetence at everything except hating. Shite, I’d have done better posters than that as a wet-behind-the-ears graphic artist in my first job thirty years ago.
If I wasn’t already familiar with MRArtwork I’d assume these were made by someone taking the piss out of MRAs.
LOL those “posters”! I would really love to have him pin one of those up for someone who does information design as a living. There would be no pieces of him left after the crit to sweep up!
My favorite, though, was this gem
Because, you know, sexual abuse is bad and all but OMG the tragedy, the sheer humanitarian catastrophe of women correcting schoolboys math and spelling!
Gilly! I think you must have missed that discussion. You see, some MRAs believe that women who are teachers are abusing their male students by NOT having sex with them. Does anyone remember the title of the post that was in? It was kind of a peak MRA moment.
Typography lovers everywhere weep.
Cassandra, I remember that post – it had a pic of Jon Bon Jovi at the top.
Bingo!
http://manboobz.com/2012/10/09/spearheader-the-real-victims-of-predatory-female-teachers-are-the-guys-hot-teachers-arent-having-sex-with/
kittehserf:
I am not anything even remotely approaching a graphic artist, but I spent a little time teaching myself Photoshop when I was a teenager. Consequently, the poster I made for my work Christmas party was more arresting and politically coherent than any of these.
Small point in this shitshow of terrible Design Choices, but Random capitalization of words make my Eyes burn.
Also, how does “no one likes a feminist” illustrate that feminism is a hate movement?
WHY ARE THEY SO BAD AT THIS.
Mis-spellings, randomly capitalized Words, and lots of mustard yellow! That’s how you win hearts and minds!
Or induce headaches in your audience. One or the other.
To be fair, it must be hard to put incoherent rage-gurgling into an organized and visually pleasing format.
Fundamental cluelessness?
LOL tinyorc, I was barely a graphic artist either – cut and paste in those days, doing signage and booklet covers for the railways. (Gah, dread memories of looking through ClipArt folders and thinking “Why is everything in here so saccharine US fundamentalist?”)
Even then the results were better than this …
I done got no idea where that came from.
I find it wort of bizarre and fascinating the sorts of things they project on me, based on nothing.
er, sort of
LOL, I worked as a volunteer and it also included making posters way less shitty than those up there.
I’m wondering now if they’re really bad at making posters or really bad at spending more than 10 minutes in “activism”.
So is this the real image of the Dark Lord? (aka reintarnation)
I like the “free poster for general use” at the bottom of the last one. Also, what the hell is a virus that “only infects carrier”? If it can’t be transmitted, how does it survive? How did the carrier pick it up in the first place? More importantly, is he saying that feminists have no influence? If so, why is he so concerned about them? I think this went from incoherence to something even stranger.
@gillyrosebee – Yes, definitely! I mean, I totally agree with David that the reason these are all so muddled is that the MRA has no message or ideology except for “We hate women” and even then they don’t seem to be able to all agree on the exact reasons that they hate women…
But all cluelessness aside, I do not understand how you finish up one of these and think, “Yes, this is a good poster. Clear, concise, compelling, aesthetically sound.” Unless you had literally never see a poster before. Do crank politics make you bad at looking things? Does extreme misogyny interfere with visual and spatial reasoning? Someone should do a study. I wish to understand the link.
@kittehserf – SHUDDER AT CLIPART
markb:
BUT IT’S STILL THE FEMALES WHO CAN’T SCIENCE.
Honestly, I’d say they are even bad at hating. I’ve lost count af the number of times when I’ve actually thought of a better (ie, more effective/damageing) way to be a misogynist than whatever oaf-of-the-day in David’s current post is spouting. And much like the slow but steady decline in troll quality around here, it seems that such incompetence continues to grow.
Well, to be fair… if MRAs had any skills at even something so simple as poster making, they probably wouldn’t be an MRA. It seems to be the trash heap for the uncreative, the mediocre, insufferable, and uninteresting. When life leaves you with virtually no skills, whine and blame women!
I love the line ‘No one likes a feminist’ That’s a fairly daunting theory to prove. All feminists must be sampled, and no one, including the feminists’ parents, siblings, and significant others must like the feminist. And then, to top it off, no feminist can like another feminist, even though in theory some feminists should have common ground with other feminists.
Which of course means all the feminist celebrities are failures too. Who ever heard of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Patrick Stewart, Daniel Craig, Matt Damon, Ellen Page, Kiera Knightley, Geena Davis, Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake, or Jane Fonda? Obscure people, all of them, never tapped for any leading roles because they’re so unlikable.