A Voice for Men seems to have gone a bit meme-crazy. The site’s official Pinterest page, which seems to be fairly new, is loaded up with 374 memes on such subjects as Sexual Politics, False Accusations, MGTOW, and of course Feminism.
It’s not clear how many of these memes were created by the AVFM “Meme Team” and how many were simply grabbed from the internet. But a number of the memes are emblazoned with the A Voice for Men name and/or logo, so I think it’s fair to say that these, at least, are “official” AVFM memes.
Going through these memes, one thing about them becomes clear very quickly: most of them seem to convey messages that are often considerably different than those their creators seem to have intended.
So here, without further ado, here are 6 AVFM memes and what they really mean.
1) MEN SOLVE PROBLEMS
What this meme purports to say: These two variations on the same meme might (charitably) be interpreted to mean that we should honor the historical achievements of men.
What this meme really says: Men are superior to women. Suck it up, dumb bitches!
2) TODAY HE WOULD BE CALLED A RAPIST
What this meme purports to say: Feminist ideologues have so corrupted the notion of rape that is has become ridiculous.
What this meme really says: We basically don’t understand what consent is. Why shouldn’t a dude be allowed to just go kiss a woman on the mouth without her permission?
3) THANKS FOR NOTHING, FEMINISM!
What this meme purports to say: Feminism has conned women into giving up the joys of motherhood for the sorrows of wage labor
What this meme really says: We believe in a magical prefeminist fairyland in which all mothers were young, beautiful middle class women whose husbands could afford to support them while they raised children. There was no such thing as the working class, or women working in factory jobs, before feminism. Also, we basically think women shouldn’t have jobs, though we get mad at housewives for “leeching” off their husbands all the time, too.
4) COMMITTED TO FAIRNESS IN FAMILY COURTS
What this meme purports to say: Judges should not automatically assume that mothers will make better parents than fathers.
What this meme really says: We hate women, and love to laugh at them, and think that if any woman anywhere behaves badly it reflects poorly on all women due to the transitive property of women being terrible bitches.
5) BAN BOSSY?
What this meme purports to say: We oppose the #BanBossy campaign, for some reason.
What this meme really says: We hate women with any power in the world. We also hate little girls.
6) FEMINISTS WON’T STOP UNTIL WE MAKE THEM
What these related memes purport to say: These two memes suggest that feminism is a vicious, violent ideology that must be strongly opposed.
What these memes really say: We like to portray ourselves as victims of feminist violence, even if we have to imagine it, because that gives us a justification to indulge in wild fantasies of violent “retribution” that for some reason involve fists being shoved into women’s orifices.
COMING SOON: An arbitrary number of A Voice for Men memes that make no fucking sense.
EDIT: Proofreading fixes.
They just love attacking young women with very little power, don’t they? University students are their favourite targets.
Could it be because they quoted a female misogynist who styles herself as a “proto-feminist”? And because they, like Camille Paglia (ugh) are all severely irony-impaired?
@Ally S
I hope you realize the irony in what you’ve written.
Something Christians would never do…
@emily
Do religious studies even touch on the subject on whether god/gods even exist in the first place? I think they just, well, study the religions which believe so. But The God Delusion is in fact about why you don’t need gods and why they probably don’t exist. Dawkins has also said a lot of shit, but The God Delusion is a good book.
And no, nobody is chastising atheists here. But it seems to me atheis*m* is getting a lot of flak, while every time *religion* is only slightly criticized, there’s a cohort appearing to defend the concept.
And while I don’t think religion is “evil incarnate” or the reason for everything bad in the world, I do think the world would be better off without it, yes. It’s not “evil incarnate”, but it is, overall, a net negative factor.
I also love how it starts off with the critique of her clothes. Her clothes that you… can’t really see because she’s holding a big ol’ sign on front of her. I mean, from what I can see, she looks like she’s wearing an outfit similar to my friends and I in college… My college friends and I who shopped pretty much only at thrift stores.
Maybe it’s the scarf, though. I hear big scarves are one of the [arbitrary number] fashion trends men hate.
“Today he would be called a rapist” – well, rightly so, no?
Also, this argument about men having built civilization… that’s just so dickish. For millennia, women were excluded from most posts in administration, philosophy, engineering, the sciences and so on. Men made sure *by force* that *only* they could build civilization… and now (other) men want to claim credit for that?
And apparently, giving women the *choice* between family and career (or maybe both) is not helping them. But men of course should have the choice between parenting and job. And, hah, the poster against “banbossy” is showing *exactly* how ‘bossy’ is a gendered insult based on an obnoxious double standard.
Finally, funny how openly they are against feminism… yet they claim to simply be for equal rights. Yeah sure. That also explains they’re “back to the kitchen” posters: They’re just for equal rights.
“Just a suggestion, though, guys? If you’re aiming to convince people that you’re not a hate movement you might want to pick a logo that looks a bit less like it was scrawled on a wall in blood. Doesn’t exactly say “we’re nice, reasonable, trustworthy people, we are”.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
@Anachronist
Well… maybe that’s their issue,
Maybe they are not just dudes who hate women while still given boners by them.
Maybe they (or some of them) have this huge submission fantasies, and their brains go: “I hate women, and I hate that they rule the world while it also makes me horny as hell so… MOAR HATE”
The young woman with the spilled baby stroller accident just died on April 7th at the age of 25. Beyond vile on the part of AVFM to use that. Disgusting & despicable.
Maybe they’re just hoping that if they pester enough feminists they’ll eventually find Elsa the sexy Nazi from Indiana Jones.
auggzilliary:
Possibly because it implies that living in a grass hut is inherently inferior and less civilised than living in a big concrete apartment block, and therefore is actively insulting to all the indigenous and tribal peoples who still choose to live in this way?
That bothers me because in my opinion the whole civilised/primitive dichotomy is bullshit. Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of electricity and running water, but I don’t think that makes me superior to people who don’t have/use those things. In fact, I think people who live in grass huts have it right in the long-run, because their way of life is actually sustainable, while “civilised” folk are gobbling up the planet’s finite resources at a terrifying rate.
That racism analogy (created by a trilby wearer of course) is such a fail. Men are the privileged group. Black people are not. A more appropriate analogy would be something more along the lines of Whitetip: Remember not to stalk and shoot a black teenager walking home from the convenience store.
Viscaria:
Hahaha. So according to AVFM, men in general don’t give a shit about a women life, ambitions or personality… but it’s still the men who are “fucked” when it comes to dating. Riiiiight.
Like seriously, why would I (or, you know, anyone) want to date someone who doesn’t give a shit about my future plans, who never asks about the other people in my life, who expects me to be boring, who fakes interest in the stuff I care about and doesn’t care if I never speak as long as I look pretty.
Misters, I think the reason you might be “fucked” is that you don’t actually want to date another human, you want to date a girl-shaped object that breathes and make “mmhmm” noises at the right moments. I can’t believe they don’t understand how dehumanising that list is.
It’s awfully similar to the “black people should be grateful for slavery, ’cause if we’d left them in Africa they’d be living in mud huts” line.
What irony? You may be misreading her.
Definitely not. It’s (ideally) an objective study of a social/anthropological phenomenon.
From what I recall, It’s also about why religion is terrible and possibly even the worst thing in the world (isn’t that the book where he says that raising a child to be religious is abuse?). But my issue isn’t so much with The God Delusion itself, as with the people who think that having read it makes them an expert on a subject that, in fact, they know very little about. The God Delusion, and many of its fans, uses Abrahamic religions as a stand-in for religion in general and handwaves the rest away. Then people come in here, or wherever, and say things like “religion oppresses women” or “religion is anti-science” or conflate “religion” with “Christianity” or something similarly reductive and incorrect.
Reading that book also apparently causes people to continually forget the first rule of holes.
@Octo, please can you let this go?
There was no irony. Ally wasn’t imply that atheists are monolith. She is stating that the atheists that have been chastised here have been chastised because they were being jerks. At that particular time. With what they were saying.
A girl is wearing a coat, jeans, and a scarf and doesn’t have an inch of skin showing. Aaand they still criticize her outfit.
Huh. And yet, when that big earthquake hit Kobe, Japan, several years ago, one of the few buildings to emerge completely unscathed was a Buddhist temple built entirely of bamboo.
Bamboo is a grass.
Yes, that’s right: Grass huts are more earthquake-proof than “civilization”.
(And you’re right about the racism, too. Paglia can fucking bite me.)
I like how she’s apparently “smug” in that picture. But they think every woman the see is “smug”, as far as I can tell.
emilygoddess
Dawkins actually did not say that it’s abuse to teach a child a religion, he said it’s abuse to tell a child they ARE (for example) christian. He said it would be like telling a child, you are a democrat or you are a republican.
At least that’s what I’ve heard him say, correcting people’s alleged misconception.
Octo, Ally meant that people here don’t criticize atheists for being atheists (many people here *are* atheists) but we criticize those particular atheists who are “being jerks who want to portray all religion as monolithic.”
And we criticize particular atheists who are sexist assholes. Particularly those who devote a lot of their energy to attacking women who are also atheists/skeptics.
He said it was abuse to teach a child about Hell. And he said that raising a child to be a certain religion was worse than molesting them. FFS.
damarismarie, that’s so sad – do you know any more about it that you are willing to tell?
I triple dog dare ya!
@Viscaria That dating chart is absurd. It’s basically saying “we don’t care about any women’s traits except what they look like”, and then complaining that women get a free pass on every trait except looks. Who’s giving them the pass in the first place? They’re like someone who stands in front of a theater handing out free tickets, then getting mad at the ticketholders because they didn’t have to pay to get in.
It’s also pretty misandric to imply that men are so undiscerning that any set of hobbies, job, friends, education, and personality will do, because women are all identical and interchangeable.
::snort:: Sounds like Dawkins is having another communication fail, aka backpedalling furiously. For a writer, he seems oddly unaware that people can go back and read what he wrote.
Okay, Ally in that statement I quoted might have meant particular asshole atheists, but it started off a conversation in which the atheist movement as a whole was kinda portrayed as self-righteous.
What he said, at least in The God Delusion, was that putting the fear of hell in a child is child abuse, because it can leave lasting psychological harm. And yes, he did call that worse than “mild” forms of child molestation. Which is kinda screwed up. But I think his main point concerning children and religion, at least in The God Delusion, was that it is silly to speak of “Christian children” or “Jewish children” or “Muslim children” or whatever just because their families are – in his opinion it makes as much sense as speaking of “Keynesian children” or “Marxist children” or “Neo-liberal children”.
I don’t at all agree with his relativation of child molestation, and I don’t even think you can call the hell thing abuse. But I do think it’s a bad thing regardless, and I do think that if you think about it, applying religious identities to children is kinda as silly as applying economical schools to them.