Sometimes I wonder if we’re being unfair to Men’s Rights Activists by allowing them to handle their own publicity. I mean, it’s pretty clear that they’re terrible at it. Worse than terrible, really. Terribler. Possibly the terriblest.
I mean, just this week we saw the official social media director of A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit announcing the conference’s new venue with this:
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/statuses/476822883881459712
Bloomfield now claims this was her attempt to “troll” people like you and me by tweeting what I guess she’s now saying is a thoroughly awful fake quote which for some reason she has decided to attribute to a real person. This makes so little sense by normal human standards that I find this explanation a little hard to believe — but I guess I’m just getting trolled by my own skepticism? Oh, Judgy Bitch, you got me!
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/statuses/476822883881459712
Whoops! I guess I got trolled a third time!
And … oh, for a second there I thought I was going to be trolled again, but I stood firm. For now.
Anyway, all this is just a long intro for some Actual Authentic I Didn’t Make These Up Honest to Goodness Men’s Rights Memes that I discovered on the blog of someone named Francis Roy, an MRA, an AVFM fan, and a bit of a meme enthusiast. The somewhat baffling meme at the top of this post? One of his best.
Which is to say, his memes basically suck, even by meme standards.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, these are all overvalued by at least 997 words. You can find them all in the meme section of his blog, though, be warned, he also posts a lot of graphic and disturbing pictures of dead soldiers and circumcised babies and other horrible things. (Note to MRAs: a lot of feminists, like me, are also troubled by and/or opposed to circumcision. Instead of derailing every discussion of female genital mutilation and alienating potential allies, you might try taking your message to the public at large?)
Anyway, let’s get to the memes. Note: A couple are mildly NSFW.
Here we learn that divorced mothers who have custody of the children are really just keeping them in order to enjoy all that sweet-ass child support cash!
Note: custodial parents who’ve been awarded child support actually receive, on average, about $300 per month. You can almost buy an XboxOne for that! Or, you know, you can try to feed and clothe and care for a child. And pay for child care, and babysitters, and doctor’s visits, and toys, and, you know, shelter. Huh. $300 actually doesn’t sound like that much.
Frankly as a money-making proposition, “stealing me for daddy’s money” seems like kind of a bust.
But let’s just move on to this fine meme, which as far as I can figure it is some sort of attack on underwear models:
Really? Hath not an underwear model eyes? Hath not an underwear model hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick an underwear model, do they not bleed? Does blood not run down their smooth, tight abs?
Pretty sure it does. Seriously. Underwear models need to eat, too! Well, maybe not as much as I do, but come on! Stop the hate!
Oh, did I mention that Mr. Roy apparently considers himself a Man Going His Own Way?
Yeah, let’s just move on.
Lol wut
Oh, come on!
I’m not even a Christian, but, seriously?
I’m going to post two quotes here. One will be from Jesus. The other from a rather well-known Man Going His Own Way. See if you can tell the difference.
Here’s the first quote. See if you can tell if this is Jesus, or MGTOW elder Christopher in Oregon.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Here’s the other quote:
I’m going to be blunt. Have you ever smelled a vagina? Seriously. I mean in it’s natural, unwashed state? Really stuck your nose right down there and taken a deep breath?
Once.
My G-d. The stench could have knocked a buzzard off a shit wagon at fifty paces. To this day I swear there was a cloud of flies buzzing around that portal of doom. Sometimes when riding my Harley-Beasties around the rural roads here in Oregon, I encounter dead skunks. Road kill. We have a lot of them here, and when they’ve been baking in the summer sun, you can smell them a long way off even at sixty miles per hour.
Vaginas tend to be even nastier.
SPOILER ALERT: The first quote was the one from Jesus.
Let’s see what else Mr. Roy has got.
Wait, is that one of Mr. Roy’s memes, or did I just accidentally post a pic from my extensive collection of FemDom porn?
By which I mean, yes that was one of his memes and forget what I said about that other stuff.
Ok, one more.
Yaaagh!
Sorry, I didn’t mean to spring that on you. Hopefully you weren’t eating.
But in the unlikely event that you would like to print out your own high-quality color poster of a glowering Paul Elam to hang over your bed, or wherever you hang such pictures, I’ve got some good news for you! Mr. Roy has helpfully provided a downloadable pdf version!
All of the above graphics are by Francis Roy and under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I don’t know how to not be like this, though.
So, according to Woody, Paul is an MD?
Given that Woody seems to suffer from a chronic case of fanboy-ism I doubt even he knows exactly what he believes. Whatever Pauly tells him to, basically.
Dr. Paul is the new Dr. Laura. Shudder.
SHUDDER
… I read that as “until I took a big papercut”.
I’m laughing at the whole Paul is so too educated and a big wheel psychiatrist, yah! from Pauly’s Woody, when it’s so blatantly obvious he’s not.
$17.99 sounds about right for the costs of his education.
Important! Is that your kitty, GrumpyOldMan?
Janet, it’s okay.
You’ve just got a bit of a rough start. Bad feelings all around.
You haven’t done anything irredeemable, yet, so don’t worry too much. Just try to take the feedback and roll with it.
What’s helped me in the past (in email conversations, and an adjusted method for meatspace) was taking a half hour offline/away after reading/hearing negative responses.
Pet a dog, make funny faces in a mirror, draw a smiley face on my boots in an off color shoe-polish, then polish them in with the right color, so my feet always have hidden smileys (goofy, I know), stuff like that.
Then, I sit down and try to make sense of it. The responses generally have to be short and to the point:
“I think I understand why you felt like I was implying —–. I’m sorry, and that wasn’t my intent. In reality, I meant —–. I’ll try to be better about not implying —–, and I’m thinking about what you’ve said/written”
The time away thinking about other things/drawing smileys gives me a chance to calm down so I don’t go all overly-defensive. Overly-defensive me usually means words stream forth that are hurtful, overly sarcastic, and unhelpful… But that’s pretty me specific. Other people don’t seem to have that problem, and don’t get axe-tongue. Since I do, smiley-boots. They help me keep the hatchet burried. Smiley-boots.
Then I can actually figure out what people were having problems with specifically. If it’s a good thing to have problems with then it’s an implication I don’t want to make, so I figure out a rewording that doesn’t fall into that trap. In the case that what I said turns out to be completely wrongheaded, I admit that instead of rewording.
If they are saying things completely off topic (You must be advocating fricaseed babies, then, since you typed that you think that yellow is a boring color!) I just ignore it off into the sunset.
Generally, no more than a sentence for the —- sections, though, if it’s on topic and something I really don’t want to have implied, meant, or anything.
This may not help you, but it’s a staple for me.
You may have noticed my tendency to teal deer; it means I have a good chance of “foot in mouth”. I just try not to get in too deep in my holes. 🙁
Also, Janet, I think a lot of folks were responding in general to the “calling someone fat” ideas, not specifically to you… They just happened to comment after you.
Hope that helps. I really don’t intend to be piling on, so I hope you don’t take it that way. If you do, sorry! Let me know, and I’ll work on it.
Okay, I’m going to stop trying to be helpful now, since I might just be making it worse…
My mother enjoyed child support for years after she kicked me and my sister from the house. My father worked hundreds of miles away at night in a menial job so he could pay that child support. That top meme, as offensive and untrue to reality as you find it, really speaks to me.
@Janet, it’s quite simple. this is a tough & advanced site. If you screw up either in your thinking or how you express youself, people will call you out on it, big time. It’s not personal. Noone is exempt. not you, not me, not even David. When you get called out – when, not if, because we all do at some point or other – the only thing to do is think about why, about what people are telling you, understand where you’ve screwed up, apologise, promise to do better, and move on.
As I’ve said, noone is exempt from this. That includes you. So if this is too much for you and threatens your emotional wellbeing, then step back for a while. Lots of us take time away from here, lots of people lurk or just post comments on innocuous subjects (kitty pictures etc) until they are feeling strong enough or brave enough or well enough to post more. There is nothing wrong with doing that because self-protection is important.
But do not ask us to give you a pass. It won’t happen and it is unfair of you to ask or expect it.
Yeah, this. Often, discussions here take a life of their own, and people are sometimes talking in general terms about a phenomenon related to something an individual poster wrote about. Looking back at my comment now, it seems unnecessarily whiny since this is a sore spot for me, but rest assured, Janet, I was not responding to you specifically (the way I see it, the gist of the discussion was “why do some people feel the need to give their unsolicited comment on other people’s weight in the first place, since chances are it will accomplish nothing positive in any case?”, and I felt like going all “true dat”).
@kittehserf: Was my cat. Unfortunately Nikki died a couple of years ago, but we had her for 16 good years. (She previously belonged to my daughter’s friend, who had to give her up when she moved to a no-pets apartment.) She was a very sweet-natured kitty, but in the right light she had those glowing red eyes that made her seem like a devil kitty, and that’s why I chose her for my avatar. We currently have six cats, five of which we adopted and one adopted us.
Advanced??
Which website (that does not include 101 in the title, in all probability more to do with US colleges than the room in 1984) does not like to say about itself that it is advanced? Maybe time for umpteen pages of required reading before commenting, like certain other sites.
And I don’t don’t know why it takes an essay to apologize. Why can’t “Sorry, I screwed up, I was wrong” suffice?
Another note, to David, which I take here instead of the thread about moderation because I shouldn’t write there. When you delete posts,why can’t the the name stay and the content is replaced with “deleted to to breach of comment policy”, or something. That would make the posts less confusing to read.. Also it works as a mark of shame for the offender.
That’s a good idea. Threads get really confusing when everyone replies to a post and then it gets deleted.
For a far less sensitive example — “wow, your hair is long!” Nawh, I somehow missed that every time I brush it!
Yeah, it’s meant as a compliment, not an insult, but point here is that those of us with traits outside the “norm” already know this. And if it gets old hearing it as a compliment, I can’t imagine how tiring it must be when it’s meant as an insult.
Thirding Talacaris.
I like talacaris’s idea too.
RE: Kittehs
… I read that as “until I took a big papercut”.
Well, how ELSE would I end up disabled, I ask you? I wouldn’t get taken down by a mere ORDINARY papercut…
RE: Chthon
That top meme, as offensive and untrue to reality as you find it, really speaks to me.
Nobody’s saying that women can’t be abusive neglectful asshats. The thing is, that’s not FEMALE PRIVILEGE. That’s an abuser working the system, something abusers of all genders are really fucking good at. The meme may speak to you, but the meme is still WRONG.
Chthon
“My mother enjoyed child support for years after she kicked me and my sister from the house. My father worked hundreds of miles away at night in a menial job so he could pay that child support. That top meme, as offensive and untrue to reality as you find it, really speaks to me.”
I’m sorry to hear that but we’re not saying that it doesn’t happen (it really does), we’re talking about how it doesn’t happen as much as MRAs say it does.
Paul: “the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.”
Pauly’s Woody is the finger puppet Paul puts on his perpetual hard-on to keep it from freezing off when he comes up north.
This seemed to be the best, recent thread to post these in.
US data, female share of bachelor degrees: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/
Back the the bloody armchair diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders, we have at comment 4:
Followed by at second reply to that comment, name slightly different so not clear if this was the same commenter:
I do find it hard to believe that 50% of male computer science undergraduates in the US have Aspergers.
The mirror graph for male share: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword-of-gender-equality/
I’m not sure why one person in the comments is saying the numbers are wrong for computer sciences, when that is an amalgam of computer and information sciences, relevant link is here: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_314.asp
Just taking computer science, the 1980s saw the advent of personal computers, which expanded through the 1990s, then we had the development of high performance computing post 2000. The numbers going up and down are what I would expect.
They talk about the death of a thousand cuts but that’s nothing to the death of a thousand papercuts.
… My fingers hurt just thinking about that.
Oh hell, when Chthon said “the first meme” I thought they meant the damn stars one. If it’s the ‘stealing me’ one… why is there only compassion for men and boys? Do girls not get kidnapped? Do assholes fathers never run off with their kids?
The meme is still kinda like saying, “Stepping on a nail hurts! Have compassion for men and boys!” They’re talking about a global phenomena as though it only affects one gender.
RE: pallysgirl
Yeah, I’m calling horseshit. The autism spectrum folks I know do all sorts of things. I know autistic biologists, artists, child care workers, accountants, graphic designers, engineers… because shock! Autistic people have varying interests and skills, just like allistic people!