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.
“Did I miss any of the standard violence-against-women false equivalence talking points?”
Unless you have a month or so free, you couldn’t possibly cover all “the standard violence-against-women false equivalence talking points.”
The first thing you have to do is ignore the fact that most men are significantly bigger and stronger than most women, so they tend to do a lot more damage. If a man is in a rage, and the woman tries to push him aside to get away from him, and he punches her in the face and throws her to the floor breaking her jaw and her arm, would you consider them equally guilty (or the woman more guilty because she resorted to violence first?). It might be more useful to consider how many women vs men show up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Of course we know they all just slipped on a banana peel.
@Arctic Ape:
Cool! That’s how Mr Kittehs and I mow over t’other side. 🙂
@Woody:
LOL. He’ committed to being a grifter, that’s for sure.
@fauxmy, great photo!
@Kate Kampmiller, hi, have a Welcome Package!
So glad you and your son are shot of the deadbeat ex. What a piece of shit he sounds like.
@GrumpyOldMan, general applause. 🙂
RE: pallygirl
I’ve drooled over Alan Cumming in every role he’s been in.
My husband has too. (I, alas, am mostly ace, so am mostly using his own taste for the Hot People posts. But he assures me that they are well and truly hotastic.)
RE: DJG
And somebody recently who was complaining about the lack of out bi male role models simply dismissed Mr Cumming (when presented to him as one such) out of hand as insignificant and relegated to people who only thought about Broadway
My husband makes an indignant noise, and so do I. My first exposure to Cumming was through mainstream US movies! X-men 2 and Spy Kids, to be specific. I’ve seen WAY more of him in film than in theatre, and it wasn’t until recently I actually heard him with his natural accent, rather than performing a different one. (That said, I have the soundtrack of Cabaret where he performed.)
RE: Woody
I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Paul is anything but fully committed to what he does.
It’s okay, Woody. We know you’re blind.
He likely can’t keep a full-time job with all the work he puts in on AVfM.
BAHAHAHAHA. Oh, Woody, Woody. I know you can’t possibly be real, but every once in a while, you do amuse me.
Well, Woody’s probably right that Pauly can’t hold down a job. He’d get fired in no time.
… I keep wanting to write that as “Pauly’s Woody”.
Woody
I have no problem with Elam living off the donations of MRAs. I do have a problem with him not telling people that he was doing so, until recently. Though, supporting Paul Elam is probably a better use for that money than most any MRA cause; at least Elam dipping his hand into the donations helps at least one person.
Grumpyoldman
That’s actually a problem with some studies. I think the research on interpersonal violence against men has gotten better, but for a while they were using what’s called the conflict tactics scale. From the wikipedia article:
Note the categories “psychological aggression,” “sexual coercion,” and “physical assault”; now note that responding to attempted rape with threats of violence (i.e. threatening to defend oneself) or responding to attempted rape with actual violence (i.e. defending oneself) all count as severe violence. Any act of self defense proportional to what one is receiving will be marked as equal violence from each partner. Hell, yelling so that one can be heard over the yelling of one’s partner counts as “minor psychological aggression” from both parties, despite one’s yelling being necessary for communication.*
It’s a good scale for measuring how aggressive and toxic the relationship is for those involved, but it doesn’t tell us who is culpable, unless the victim consistently refuses to defend themselves. It measure how much violence is going on, not who is causing it.
*I don’t actually have a problem with that; I’m sure being yelled at will be taken as aggressive in situ, and the psychological toll will be similar to that of aggressive yelling. But saying that one is culpable for aggression when one is merely doing what is required to be heard is quite silly.
RE: J. Schmidt
Yeah, and that scale really doesn’t take into account cold, polite manipulators. I remember my rapist never shouted or screamed; he would just take me aside and explain to me, if hours need be, that I was hurting him through crying after he raped me, and this was causing him terrible issues with self-worth, and I needed to TRY and COMPROMISE to make our relationship work.
By that scale, he would win that as a ‘negotiation’! Because he WAS offering compromises to a disagreement; his compromise was just, “Okay, I’ll only rape you HALF as much as I want to, if you promise to pretend enjoyment more.”
That creeped me out. It’s rape, yet they classify it in any way as minor?
This whole notion of equating a woman yelling at a man with him hitting her is where MRAs get their claims that men suffer as much domestic violence at women’s hands as vice-versa. Yeah, shit-eaters, and three men are murdered by the women who are their intimate partners every week in the UK and every day in the US … only, not. It’s the other way around.
Hi GrumpyOldMan,
You see natural sciences pretty much as I do. I would think soft sciences offer a whole different sets of challenges….because, well people, those mysterious creatures :p . I got no pretension to understand them. Scientists have tools to diminish confirmation bias, and peer-review is also a way to mitigate it, but its still a reality.
There is a lot of similarity between what happened back then and Elliot Rodger, imo. I think often of ML because it hit close to home. But I realized its the first time in over 20 years I talked openly about it. In fact, a lot of people were talking about it but not young Quebec women in science and technology faculties. Not in my circle anyway. I think the thought that a man could hate so much what we represented was just too chilling. I remember all the details vividly of where I was when I got the news and then just numbness. The only person I ever discussed it was dad, and it was about how his friend was dealing with it. He was on duty that day, and its on the crime scene he discovered his daughter was among the victims. I think in non-traditional professions, anyway back then, it was hard enough to prove yourself, that if you started thinking that some guys really hated you just for living your life, you would have frozen. One thing that changed is that while I was mostly hanging with guys, I started cultivating much more feminine friendships and mentorships.
All in all, its quite obvious that the treat of violence is often implicit behind most guys belonging to the manosphere. I find the people here confronting them quite courageous. And I think that beside bearing children, its probably the main difference between genders in how we experience life, women are in fear an awful lot more often. Among the white population, I think only trans-cis and gay men can truly relate as a group to women because they are often targeted by the same level of hate. I am lucky that I did not have to fear any of my companions, and certainly not my late husband.
Is that the original version? The way I heard it, no true Scotsman likes ketchup on his haggis.
My parents disagreed over this. Dad only likes porridge with salt, mum only liked it with sugar. So they had to make separate batches, just to be difficult, which really is being a true Scotsman/woman.
My Scots blood must be pretty thin – I like my porridge with honey and milk.
Guh. The Conflict Tactics Scale. Don’t get me started on that piece of pseudo-academic bullshit.
Here in Australia 70 women die each year from intimate partner violence. In NSW, women are hospitalised at six and a half times the rate of men as a result of spouse/domestic partner violence, and in the 15-24 age group that blows out to ELEVEN times.
I get SO MAD when the manosphericals try to muddy the waters of a real problem by claiming feminists don’t care about male victims because we talk about what a huge problem DV is for women. Part of the reason male victims are reluctant to seek help is EXACTLY because of the corrosive gender stereotypes MRAs try to enforce and get pissed off at women (and men!) for defying.
I looked up the actual paper that details the CTS. It looks to me that your experience would fall under “sever psychological aggression,” since he (I assume) was accusing you of being a “lousy lover.” (Page 14 of the pdf) But…
I was initially going to defend this. The CTS is, ostensibly, a measurement of aggression. Rape doesn’t have to be aggressive, so some incidents of rape falling under “minor” aggression isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Except, while looking to see where LBT’s experience would fit on the scale, I noticed that calling one’s partner fat or ugly was rated as “severe psychological aggression.” What the fuck? In what fucking world does calling one’s partner fat rate as more aggressive than rape without physical force (minor), and equally aggressive as rape with physical force (severe)? But, silly enough, insulting one’s partner is only rated as minor aggression. What the double fuck? Why are those specific insults classed as “severe,” but insults in general classed as “minor”? Why is “you’re fat” worse than “you’re a failure” or “you’re nothing without me”?
Sure, there are going to be problems in separating levels of aggression into “none,” “minor,” and “severe,” but I think some semblance of reality and consistency is still an attainable goal.
strivingally, yep. From VicHealth: “Intimate partner violence is responsible for more ill-health and premature death in Victorian women under the age of 45 than any other of the well-known preventable risk factors, including high blood pressure, obesity and smoking. ”
Source: http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/Programs-and-Projects/Freedom-from-violence/Intimate-Partner-Violence.aspx
Globally, intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence directed against women, often leading to death.
Source: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/vaw/launch/english/v.a.w-exeE-use.pdf
(I know the regulars know this stuff, I’m a bit of a noob with citations. Practice!)
Rape is always aggressive. That’s the nature of it. It’s an attack on another person, however it’s carried out.
The rest of your comment, yes, I agree. Their classifications are all over the place.
Makes me wonder if they were put together by men with assumptions about how aggressive and upsetting it is when women talk back …
RE: Isabelle
Trust me, as a gay trans guy, there is STILL a lot of misogyny in both subcultures. (A lot of which boils down to, “I’m too short to reach the male privilege shelf sometimes, and this REALLY MAKES ME SAD.”)
@KS: you’re right, I really should get into the habit of presenting my evidence when I say something like that.
Source for my 6.5:1 – 11:1 ratio statement from earlier:
NSW Healthstats, Interpersonal violence hospitalisations: Persons injured by perpetrator type
I remember how shocked I was by the Lepine Massacre — I grew up in New Hampshire and used to listen to Montreal radio stations sometimes, so it seemed close to home. That level of hatred was incomprehensible to me. With both Lepine and Rodger the hatred seems much too intense to be merely the result of the normal bad interactions with members of the opposite gender that everyone experiences at times, it seems to indicate a much more severe underlying pathology with misogyny as a conveniently available peg to hang that hatred on.
I got part of my education at the Federal Prison in Danbury, CT, where I spent most of 1971 and 1972 as a Vietnam-era draft resister. In prison the macho power games are naked and they can be brutal. Draft resisters are regarded as basically women, because real men fight. I had a number of fellow inmates tell me how cute and pretty I was and how I walked with a wiggly ass like a woman, and several of them told me to meet them in the shithouse at 2 am or else, but I didn’t go and nothing happened. Danbury was a short-timers joint and I don’t think anyone was raped in the forcible sense while I was there — if the victim resisted and yelled the guards would be there to break things up. I think there was one young and particularly spacey guy who was coerced into having sex. But I did have to be a bit careful not to encourage certain guys, and I did have to stop speaking to several fellow prisoners. The biggest disappointment was trying to strike up a friendship with the only guy there who had served time at Alcatraz, and having to give up because he interpreted every sign of friendship as a sexual invitation.
But in a real penitentiary when the men are going to be there for decades and aren’t even thinking about getting paroled, people do get raped. Some guys get raped basically on a daily basis for years, but of course it isn’t really rape because they give up resisting. (Sarcasm alert.) The interesting thing about prison rape is that if A rapes B, A’s manhood cred is increased and nobody thinks of him as homosexual, whereas B is regarded as a homosexual and like all gays in prison is thereafter referred to with feminine pronouns, always mentioned as “she”. This strongly supports the feminist idea that rape is not about sex but about domination, about imposing your will on another person, making him or her subservient. I once heard a fellow inmate say that when he was in the penitentiary he heard men say, “it takes a real man to rape a woman and twice as big a man to rape another man.”
So I had at least a glimpse of what women face. Scary shit, but I was never actually attacked.
strivingally, no worries, I was thinking of my own citationlessness*, not anyone else’s! 😀
*of course it’s a word.
Er, and by “I’m too short to reach the male privilege shelf sometimes,” I mean, “I’m not getting the amount and quality of male privilege I feel I so richly deserve.”
RE: J. Schmidt
It looks to me that your experience would fall under “sever psychological aggression,” since he (I assume) was accusing you of being a “lousy lover.”
Oh no, he thought I was fantastic in bed… if I’d just stop fucking crying and freaking out. But I’d have to “get over” it first. He was very fond of phrasing things as compromises and rape as a normal relationship thing. And because I was a child at the time, I would never have seen it as severe psychological aggression; I thought this was how all relationships worked.
“Part of the reason male victims are reluctant to seek help is EXACTLY because of the corrosive gender stereotypes MRAs try to enforce and get pissed off at women (and men!) for defying.”
In a world where “:pussy-whipped” is a hated and feared insult, actually getting injured by a woman is a hideous threat to a fragile male ego. (Sorry if you think “fragile male ego” is redundant.)
@kittehserf: you haven’t lived until you’ve invented a few words. Right now I am positively thrilled by my invention of “manling” to name MRA types.
GrumpyOldMan, LOL! True. I take great pride in being one of the creators of the word Furrinati.
Neologisms are great. I’m kind of hoping “manosphericals” will gain traction. 😀
I’m fond of “scrotosphere” meself. No idea who came up with that one. 😀