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.
katz and kittehserf
comment #160.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120114092358/http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/12/dawkins_and_the_religion_petit.php
Meanwhile, if it said “You’re FUCKED” under the female sign across the board, it would be completely accurate.
@ kittehserf
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/04/18/peaches-geldof-funeral-easter-monday-church-paula-yates_n_5171789.html
On the other issue that seems to be taking over yet another thread…
Sorry, but once “molesting children isn’t so bad” becomes part of your argument, the little nuances of the other parts of your argument are pretty much irrelevant.
kittehs – the young woman with the stroller is Peaches Geldof (daughter of Bob). While out walking with her son Astala a couple of years ago, she hit a pothole on the sidewalk. The pram tipped and dumped her baby, but he landed on the hood and was fine, if a little startled. She got a lot of flak in the press because paparazzi captured the whole incident and she never dropped her cell phone. There was a lot of huffing about “a REAL mother would have….”
Just about every parent has some incident like that happen – a baby rolls off a bed or changing table, a carrier tips over, a toddler falls out of their crib, the baby gate at the top of the stairs accidentally gets left open. It doesn’t mean the parents are narcissistic or neglectful. People love to rush to judgment and claim that they, of course, would have reacted totally differently in that situation, because they, of course, are perfect and always react correctly to every situation. There’s a lot of backseat mothers out there.
@ katz
Yeah, I’m trying to take my own advice here, but I’m really not feeling all that inclined to cut people who describe the argument that teaching your kids about hell is worse than molesting them as “kinda screwed up” all that much slack.
(With the important caveat that if he wasn’t trying to say that molestation isn’t really that bad and he just got misquoted or was being unclear, then by all means, correct that. But he’s repeated that sentiment several times in various contexts and it’s pretty clear that that’s exactly what he means.)
1) I don’t get the #BanBossy one, because it looks exactly like a meme the actual lame #BanBossy campaign, or whatever Sheryl Sandberg thinks it is, would use.
I’m inclined to embrace bossy, and bossiness in all of its many forms, and so much more agree with bell hooks and her hashtag response, which was #bossyandproud. And which should definitely disturb misogynists WAY more.
2) Camille Paglia is a racist piece of shit. So are MRAs. They’d get along brilliantly.
3) And also as someone who had both the Rapture and Hell thrown at me as a child, yeah, it’s fucking abusive to do that to children. You are messing up their minds and scaring them, and unlike fairy tales, which have the useful point of teaching children that monsters and evil can be defeated, there is Zero about the western abrahamic religions that is not, in fact, horrifying abusive. And when you are a girl child, yes, there are things in those religions that are absolutely tantamount to mild molestation. When you get taught that boys will be boys and he just likes you when he hits you and you are a girl so be nice and small and don’t fight, yeah. You’re being abused. You’re being taught to be abused. (And for those who got taught those things in a non-religious context, I’ll just remark that our entire society has been influenced, in America, by a book in which boy children are valued, women are raped and the rapists are excused, girls are unclean and cause uncleanliness from birth, and women and children are to be quiet.)
Now I don’t think Dawkins is a great guy, and he can also be a misogynist of the first water, but he is totally not wrong when it comes to western religion, and all the things that are core to those religions. Christians/Muslims/and Jews can liberalize and modernize and ignore and pick and choose things out of their books until the cows come home, those religions inherently hate women, period. And there is an argument to be made that the basis of most modern misogyny is absolutely religious.
That article from Dawkins about how he was sort of molested and he didn’t let it bother him was pretty much the final straw as far as my having any time for him as a human being. He’s intelligent, no doubt about that, but he’s a pretty awful person.
Also, as someone whose mother was actually abused, in a very direct, sexual, non-figurative way that affected her for the rest of her life, I’m going to have to bow out of this conversation before I start to get nastier than David will allow, because if anyone tries to tell me that what happened to my mother was on a par with, or less of a big deal than, being subjected to, say, standard Catholic teachings about hell, I’m going to have a really hard time not punching them right in the teeth.
Please, no. Please not the religions/beliefs/theist/atheists thing again, I beg you. This gets personal too quickly because you attacking what people believe, what is core to themselves.
…Setting aside that you clearly know fuckall about religion, did you seriously just make the argument “if a non-religious person teaches a child something misogynistic in a non-religious context, then it’s still religion’s fault?”
Look, I could offer you a rebuttal, but you’ve just crapped out a giant pile of unsubstantiated claims. You could go bring us an equally giant pile of citations if you wanted to be taken seriously, but you just want a stick to beat religion with. So go have fun.
And @Lili Fugit, you are generalising your experience of religious teaching.
And please don’t tell other people what they can choose to believe or not. Or I will start telling you how fucking insulting that is.
Sometimes I think we need an “open thread for religion wank”, to which these discussions can be moved when they crop up.
But I would like to ask: what is it that bothers folks about this topic? Is it the repetitiveness? The way nothing seems to get resolved? Boredom? I’m just wondering where y’all are coming from.
Now I don’t think Dawkins is a great guy, and he can also be a misogynist of the first water, but he is totally not wrong when it comes to western religion, and all the things that are core to those religions. Christians/Muslims/and Jews can liberalize and modernize and ignore and pick and choose things out of their books until the cows come home, those religions inherently hate women, period. And there is an argument to be made that the basis of most modern misogyny is absolutely religious.
Religions don’t exist apart from their believers. There is no Platonic form of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism that exists irrespective of how actual Christians, Muslims, and Jews (or any other religious believers) practice their religion. You cannot, cannot determine what a religion “truly” believes except by talking to the people who practice it.
Hey! I used blockquote! WTF?
I know people who were legitimately traumatized by or abused with the threat of Hell, but I’m not touching the “which is worse” question with a ten-foot pole, because there’s literally nothing good to be gained from ranking abuses.
All of the above, plus the fact that people have been repeatedly asked to drop it and refused to do so, which is a shitty way to behave.
All of those are reasons I get annoyed with these discussions, but the thing that bothers me the most is that the atheist derailers are typically so smug and prejudiced towards religious folks here.
@emilygoddess As above plus it inevitably get s personal. THat troll spotted our achilles heel – drop a weak atheist video onto the thread, watch us demolish it but also hit a few of our atheist friends’ sore spots, ‘causing them to feel attacked & want to justify themselves which then rebounds onto theists and round and round it goes. A whole mass of friendly fire with everyone hurting by the end of it..
Totally off topic but has anyone else been watching the Dragon spacecraft? In the Uk, we had a great view of the ISS flying over, this evening, with Dragon in hot pursuit.
Sorry – it was the astronaut picture reminded me …
Would the thread accept my apologies if I included this video of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart playing “The Newlywed Game”?
Not only that, people repeatedly bang on about “the defenders of religion” with apparently blithe indifference to the fact that most of the people asking them to ease up on the smugness are other atheists.
But basically the dynamic seems to unfold as follows.
Person A : BTW, religion is horrible. Let me splain.
Person B : Could you not? It’s a bit of a touchy subject here, as we’ve discussed before. You remember, that last time where you were asked to drop it and eventually agreed to do so?
Person A : I know you just asked me not to, but let me splain some more.
Person C : Watch me pay no attention to what everyone else has been saying. Splainey splainey splain.
Person D : Ugh, not this again.
Persons B and C : Do you religious people not understand how wrong you are? I know you already said you were atheists, but I’m allergic to listening and I don’t care if I’m annoying people. Splainey splainey splain.
All of it. Plus, like titianblue said, the smug coming off some of my fellow atheists drives me up the fucking wall. I don’t particularly care if some someone’s religious or atheist, I really don’t care to hear much about either.
@kittehserf
the late Peaches Geldof