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.
Does anyone else more and more get the impression that the MRM is a cargo cult?
Argenti: I would go as far to say as your argument is invalid because you’re a MRA is not an ad hominem.
Pallygirl — nawh, it’s theoretically possible one of them could have a valid argument about something. Probably not feminism or women, in any way, but something — you’re an MRA and thus wrong about everything is a fallacy, even if they are wrong 99%+ of the time.
Oh, Arctic Ape, I’m curious — where you the Åland Island person on the survey? Don’t have to answer if you don’t want to of course, but something you said the other day made me think it might’ve been you. If so, thanks for making me look it up, it was a fun history lesson!
@Argenti: okay, limiting the scope to their comments re women (which is what I intended, but didn’t express, I agree that MRAs could be right in their opinions on car maintenance, for example), I don’t think that it is a fallacy.
Specifically, MRAs have fallacious reasoning when it comes to gender issues, by definition – it’s a feature of being an MRA and not a bug. For the ad hominem fallacy to be true, the rejection of the argument must be made on the basis of an irrelevant fact. That an MRA is an MRA is not an irrelevant fact when it comes to attacking their “arguments” on gender issues.
Another example, attacking the Pope’s stance on abortion on the basis he is Catholic is not an ad hominem fallacy.
To finish: not every attack based on group membership is an ad hominem.
I’m in Helsinki. I only recently mentioned Åland when Dvärghundspossen and I were discussing military conscription. I always find it amusing that such a tiny scrap of land was granted autonomy for geopolitical reasons 🙂
I don’t know whether the “Apex Fallacy” should be considered an “official” fallacy, but you can certainly make a fallacious argument based on its logic: All African-Americans are rich because just look at Jay Z, Kanye West, and LeBron James. The idea that men are merely figureheads and women are really in charge of the world is frankly delusional. I suppose you could argue that Eva Braun was the power in Nazi Germany and Hitler was merely her frontman, but what could you say about someone who bought that argument? But there is a whole industry devoted to cultivating and nurturing white male grievance. Yes, it is probably true that most men are oppressed to some extent, but it is not by women who refuse to provide sex to random strangers on demand or expect their ex-husbands to help support the children they helped produce. Rush Limbaugh makes (I am told) $50 million a year encouraging white men who have been less successful in life than they expected to be to blame blacks, women, and liberals. This is all a propaganda game to distract men from blaming, for example, the CEO who shipped a thousand jobs to China so he could put another couple of million in his compensation package. And, yes, a FEW of those CEOs are women.
It seems to me that the MRA is largely based on creating straw-man positions for feminists that few or no actual feminists endorse and then ostentatiously knocking them down, but their straw men are so ridiculous that the only people who could possibly believe them are men that already desperately want to believe. I suppose that there is a woman somewhere who has at some time suggested that all men should be killed, but I have never heard of it myself and arguing that it is a position of even the most radical feminist group is just plain false. It is my sense that there are very few women who hate men in general; they just hate some of the ways that some men treat them. It is not hate to call someone out on behavior that is offensive or hurtful — though the MRAs, those fragile-egoed manlings, seem to think it is.
As to the matter of child custody and support, there is no question that some men have been screwed by the system. However, as far as I can see, there are far more cases where the women is either not awarded adequate child support or is unable to collect it. A lot of men seem to think that it is their birthright to walk away from their marriage and children without seeing the least decline in their lifestyle. Divorces can be very unpleasant, particularly when small children are involved — I know, I’ve been through one — and both men and women behave very badly at times, But you’d have to have a pile of actual evidence to convince me that on the whole women behave worse than men. And it is my observation that most women, when they marry and have children, are fairly serious about making the marriage work, and when a woman with young children dumps her husband there’s a pretty high probability that he was a major jerk.
The lawn-mower thing made me laugh because it has a grain of truth but not in the way it’s presented. In real life the guy pursues the woman until she is safely ensconced in his bedroom, kitchen, and laundry room, and then returns to his real love — which is usually his truck. What is pathetic is the idea that the MRAs are mowing their lawns and ignoring a bevy of beautiful women who want them desperately. There is this attitude of men who were probably rejected because they acted like jerks, telling themselves “they don’t know what they’re missing” and “someday they’re going to regret not having put out for me.” Many men seem not to be able to grasp that many women would rather have no sex at all than sex with an obnoxious man.
Finally, Paul Elam is a grifter who is making a living by preying on miserable socially-inept men, persuading them to go off in a huff blaming women instead of figuring out how to be pleasant to women, and Woody (if he is not in fact a sock) is one of the sheeple getting sheared. MB is a jerk who gets off on superciliously insulting the people on this blog and then promoting his own super-silly blog. None of them has anything worthwhile to say. I haven’t figured out yet whether JudgyBitch is serious or sarcasm — she says a lot of things that, if they aren’t satire, are pretty weird. There was one poster here yesterday who seems to have swallowed the idea that MRAs are for equal rights and feminists are female supremacists — I have no idea how to respond to someone who can’t see that this is obviously wrong.
Well, a good argument is a good argument regardless of who said it. If I were to read a really good argument for the wrongness of abortion, the argument doesn’t suddenly lose its strength if I were to found out that the pope wrote it. Likewise, if I were to read a really good argument regarding something gender-related, then it wouldn’t suddenly cease to be a good argument if I were to find out that the author was an MRA.
(Just to be clear, I think it’s extremely improbable that I will ever come across a really good argument regarding some gender issue and then find out that an MRA is behind it. And I don’t think there are any good arguments, period, for the position that women ought to obey men, women secretly control the world and yada yada yada.)
The reason why it often makes sense in conversation to say something along the lines of “well, you shouldn’t trust that article arguing that P, because it was written by group X, and group X makes tons of money making people believe that P/have strong prejudices regarding P” is that we often don’t have the resources to check the evidence laid out for P in the article. As I think I wrote somewhere above, almost all real-life arguments are inductive and refers to various empirical facts, so whether the argument is a good one or not depends on whether these empirical facts really are true. Usually we can’t or don’t have time and resources enough to check whether the facts are as the article says, so we have to decide whether to trust the article or not based on what we know about the people who wrote it.
BUT. If we DO know whether the empirical facts they refer to are true or not, and IF the argument is a good one, it doesn’t become worse just because the person who wrote it was an MRA writing about gender issues or the pope writing about abortion or whatever.
In that case, why not just make a name for the following?:
1. X is A.
2. X is B.
3 Therefore, all A.s are B:s
Or perhaps there’s already a name for that? Idk, seems like it would be a bit superfluous to name it something, since I doubt that anyone believes that the above is valid?
If I real-life person were to argue that African-Americans in general (no one would say all) were wealthy and use famous hip-hop-artists etc as examples, zie would most likely not be attempting to make a valid deduction, but using inductive reasoning where zie generalizes from a number of examples. And that’s nothing wrong with that per se. Zir problem would be that zie had a poor grasp of what the world looks like. And the way to counter zir argument would be to tell zir that there are tons of poor African-Americans for every rich one, not to go “Uh, you can’t actually deduce that all A:s are B:s from the fact that certain individuals are both A and B, so you did a fallacy…”
Kat
hugs if you need them. Glad that he’s out of you and your sons life
“Or perhaps there’s already a name for that? Idk, seems like it would be a bit superfluous to name it something, since I doubt that anyone believes that the above is valid?”
What about pathetically failed attempt at a syllogism?
“Zir problem would be that zie had a poor grasp of what the world looks like. ”
Exactly. The question of whether women are the principal oppressors — like the question of whether all African-Americans are rich — is a question of fact, and though undoubtedly some women do oppress some men, I think one has to have “a poor grasp of what the world looks like” to believe that women have the preponderance of power and are the principal oppressors. Logic is only one of the tools of rational thought; accurate observation is at least as important. So what if observation is inductive and perhaps not as conclusive as deduction — in the world we live in, you can’t get far without observation and induction. In the real world, absolute certainty is a rare commodity. You can take the proposition that women are dominant, produce some cherry-picked anecdotal evidence and a facade of faux logic, but you’ll never convince anyone who doesn’t believe it a priori. Perhaps the observational evidence that says that men are the dominating gender is too messy to earn a QED, but it’s the way the world works.
1. Anyone who believes that women are the dominant gender is a fool.
2. MRAs believe women are the dominant gender.
3. Therefore MRAs are fools. QED
This brings up a good point, actually: if the Apex Fallacy is real, aren’t they engaging in it when they claim that women are fine because Hillary Clinton and Beyoncé?
“Finally, Paul Elam is a grifter…”
No, he is not. Repeating idiot baseless claims don’t make them true. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Paul is anything but fully committed to what he does. He noted a while back that he uses some of AVfM’s donations for his personal expenses, but that’s OK… I didn’t think otherwise. He likely can’t keep a full-time job with all the work he puts in on AVfM.
Woody: so you’re basically saying that you’re cool with donating cash to Mr Elam to support his life’s work of making life worse for women and not actually doing anything constructive to help men?
Just curious, have you ever complained about paying taxes that contribute to welfare payments for those *actually* unable to support themselves?
And if so, do you see the similarity there, as well as the difference?
(of course this would assume that Mr Elam is able to maintain a full-time job if he so chooses. I have no problem believing that the constant hostility that radiates off him might put a few employers off, and it could be hard finding an industry that doesn’t contain ANY women these days)
Woody, your loyalty and gullibility are so sweet, but isn’t it time to wake up and smell the grifting?
“This brings up a good point, actually: if the Apex Fallacy is real, aren’t they engaging in it when they claim that women are fine because Hillary Clinton and Beyoncé?”
Yes.
mmmm…even in science, which is supposed to be objective, the source matters. If a scientist has been found to fabricate or fudge data, it casts a doubt on pretty much her/his whole body of work. It is generally the end of his/her career. Honest mistakes are a different matter. Observations as reported in the literature do not fall from the sky. We rely on the honesty of the observer, his awareness of his subjective biases and his competence in taking precaution against them. Observations upgrade to scientific facts when they are repeated, in other words, confirmed by independent observers. Its not a good thing when a colleague says that he could not repeat your experiment. We don’t really talk about “empirical facts”. I cant tell if that’s the case in other fields than hard sciences. In any case, in practice, we always look where the facts come from, if its been peer-reviewed etc…because the credibility of the source matters. The facts are never looked at in a vacuum, not at the level that matters, which is the primary literature.
Anyhow, back to the MRA. As an exercise in good faith, I had a cursory look at some of their material. My conclusion is that these guys are morons and life being short, I got better thing to do than their reading moronic BS. Unfortunately, heinous moronitude left unchecked is dangerous. So I am glad this site exists and offers more than often a comic relief on something which otherwise enrage me and frighten me. My father was good friend with a policeman who had a daughter about the same age than me. Like her, I chose a profession which was not traditional for women. She became one of the victims of Marc Lepine. Her name was Maryse Leclair. My father and me talked a lot about it. Since then, I never look at the world the same way. Call it my own 9/11… I dont know if his suicide letter has ever been translated in English. But here is an excerpt followed by my translation (this is not my profession, so,buyer beware).
“Car j’ai décidé d’envoyer Ad Patres les féministes qui m’ont toujours gaché la vie. Depuis 7 ans que la vie ne m’apporte plus de joie et étant totalement blasé, j’ai décidé de mettre des bâtons dans les roues à ces viragos. ….
Etant plûtot passéiste (Exception la science) de nature, les féministes ont toujours eux le dont de me faire rager. Elles veulent conserver les avantages des femmes (ex. assurances moins cher, congé de maternité prolongé précédé d’un retrait préventif, etc.) tout en s’accaparant de ceux des hommes.”
“Because I have decided to sent back to their ancestors the feminists who always made my life miserable. My life has not bring me any joy for the past 7 years and I am totally fed up, therefore I have decided to put a monkey wrench in these harpies….
Being rather traditionalist (except for science), feminists always had a gift to enrage me. They want to keep all the advantages of women (cheaper insurances, maternity leave with preventive leave of absence etc.) while taking all the advantages of men.”
If that does not sound standard MRA discourse, I don’t what does. Even the pompous pseudo-intellectual tone is there. Here is the link of the integral text: http://www.philo5.com/Textes-references/LepineMarc_TexteIntegralDeSaLettre_891206.htm
The Apex Fallacy seems like bs, but what you guys are describing is usually called “the availability heuristic” in cog science. The idea is that examples that are more easily available tend to be over-estimated in frequency or importance. Like how abduction of children by strangers is less than 1% of all reported kidnappings (the rest are all usually family members or custodial disputes) yet people still think that their kid getting scooped up by some stranger in a windowless van is a serious danger that happens every day.
There are a few specific fallacies that are attributed to the heuristic but to be honest as a psychologist I was always more interested in how it worked on the back end than in the philosophical end.
No True Scotsman is my favorite fallacy, because I do like sugar on my porridge and I am of Scots descent.
Isabelle — I have actually been thinking of Marc Lepine (although I had forgotten his name) ever since the Elliot Rodger massacre. It seems to me that Lepine’s massacre was the closest to Rodger’s that I can recall in the (deranged) thinking behind it.
It seems to me that science is about using careful disciplined thinking in order to base ideas on evidence, following that evidence wherever it may lead, rather than the all-too-human tendency to believe what we want to believe and try to muster to support for it. In other words in science the evidence comes first, and good science requires a thoroughly open mind, while non-scientists tend to draw a conclusion and often cherry-pick evidence. Science doesn’t always get the right answer, but it gives you a better shot at it. In hard sciences you can often isolate a phenomenon and measure it; in the softer sciences it is much harder to isolate and measure phenomena, but you can still get benefits from applying the methods of science. What the MRAs do is dress their confused ideas in phony rationality, which is the opposite of science while pretending to be science.
By the way, MRAs, can any of you tell me of an example of a man-hating feminist who attacked a classroom and shot 28 people (24 women, 4 men), killing 14 of the women. I’m waiting. [Crickets.]
i just ran across this from a friend on facebook (don’t judge). i do believe it is a fabulous pictorial rebuttal to ‘we hunted the mammoth’ frothers
https://www.facebook.com/dosomething/photos/a.67150811751.85843.7630216751/10152135698586752/?type=1&fref=nf
True, but the fallacy also applies to claims as well as arguments. And pretty much what the MRAs write is claims (or conclusions) in the absence of argument. To attack a claim such as “men make up the the majority of DV victims”, such as Dean made in the video with the professor, as “you would say that, you’re a MRA” is not an ad hominem attack.
The Availability Heuristic. There is a man bites dog phenomenon — everyday occurrences are not newsworthy, unusual ones are — and as they become more unusual, they also become more newsworthy. Stranger abductions of children have declined from about 200 a year to about 100 a year (one is still too many of course), but they make exciting news. Every few years a beautiful blonde schoolteacher seduces one of her teenage male students, and it makes the national news. Sexual abuse of teenage girls and boys by male schoolteachers is an everyday occurrence that almost never makes the news. This tends to skew the public perception of the relative frequency of these events.
Serious female violence is rather unusual and often makes a lot of news (for example, Pam Smart was one of the few murderers here in NH to make national news, but then she combined two major rarities — cold-blooded murder of husband by wife, and seduction of teenage students by a female school employee). Men murder their wives or girlfriends every day, ho-hum.
By the way, MRAs, can any of you tell me of an example of a man-hating feminist who attacked a classroom and shot 28 people (24 women, 4 men), killing 14 of the women. I’m waiting. [Crickets.]
Sorry, I goofed. I failed to reverse the gender of Lepine’s victims. Should be “and shot 28 people (24 men, 4 women), killing 14 of the men. I’m waiting. [Crickets.]”
@Grumpy: but men being called creeps is just as bad as using the n-word against a black person! Also some blog commenter once said that men should be shot so women are just as bad! blah blah MISANDRY something something MAN-HATING blah yawn MEN DIED IN WARS sigh headdesk WOMEN BEAT UP MEN SOMETIMES god almighty I can’t keep this up …
Did I miss any of the standard violence-against-women false equivalence talking points?
@fauxmy, That’s awesome.