Why can’t Men’s Rightsers design posters to save their lives? A new theory

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.