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.
Random juvenile thing — I can eat trolls for breakfast, but spiders terrify me AND I HAD ONE ON ME EARLIER!! I’m still all squirmy and swatting every time my hair touches me.
FUCKING SPIDERS!
RE: cassandrakitty
Does it work as well as bras?
ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT! 8D Beautiful people tumblr tag, ACTIVATE!
@Woody: okay, using small words and short sentences, here we go.
We put PUAs, MGTOWs, MRAs and incels together on this blog because this blog is about misogyny. Hating women for being women. The view that women aren’t entitled to the same things that men are. The view that there’s something different about women that makes them inferior to men. That women somehow manipulate men and only have the power that they skim off men’s achievements. The crazy conspiracy theories that tie any bad thing that affects men to women’s scheming and plotting.
PUAs hate women and treat them as recipients for cock. MGTOWs and MRAs spend HUGE amounts of their time talking about why they’re swearing off women, who they blame for everything bad. Incels argue that women are somehow personally attacking them if they’re not putting out on demand.
The common theme is hatred for women, which is what this entire website is about.
You say that putting radfem separatists and modern feminists in the same boat would be equally offensive. If the forum was a blog dedicated to third-wave feminism, then yeah, you might have a point. But this blog is about something else, so your point is irrelevant.
This blog is about men’s negative attitudes towards women, and pointing out the flaws in their underlying assumptions. Which you demonstrate the need for every time you recycle another talking point about how we just Don’t Understand. We know what you’re saying, buddy, we just haven’t committed ourselves to your toxic worldview.
A purple poodle with a lesbian mom*: double misandry!
*I’m not the only one who thinks that photo is from a Pride event, am I?
I’ve drooled over Alan Cumming in every role he’s been in.
Woody: I just demonstrated that it could be one and . All I’m saying is that the apex fallacy is potentially valid.
Ok. You’ve now admitted it’s not an accepted fallacy, but a propositional one.
As you also admitted: As I said, and as you’d know if you bothered to think about it, I demonstrated that the apex fallacy is valid IN THEORY.
So go ahead, prove it is one. Until you do, we are more than reasoable in considering it to be a piece of false reasoning.
Because theory is a wonderful place. I wish I lived in theory. Everything works in theory. Sadly I don’t live in theory, I live in practice; where the apex fallacy is a load of festering pigshit.
Which will remain my considered opinion unless you can (rigorously) prove it to be otherwise.
Ball’s in your court. Score is 30-Love.
Oh, and Woody: I see you’ve stopped trying to defend Paul “Long Con” Elam’s skill at planning conventions.
Better part of valor and all that,I suppose.
Dear woody: Your “apex fallacy” is based on the idea that feminists are supposedly saying any + all men have power over any + all women. That’s not how privilege works. Privilege is directional, stratified and contextual.
If the vast majority of powerful positions are occupied by men, that indicates that men have more influence at that level of power. If men are being paid more than women for the same shit-kicking entry level customer service job, that indicates men are benefiting from privilege.
It does not logically follow that the entry-level male has more power than the female CEO. That’s bordering on Not Even Wrong, and also ignores the fact that there’s more than one axis of privilege – something that feminism has acknowledged since the beginning of the Third Wave, and which anti-feminists seem determined to not credit them with.
Sorry, I should have said “it does not logically follow that *feminists are arguing* that the entry level male” etc etc.
30-love? Ouch!
Does that mean you play? Cuz I’d love a good match. Lost my racket when I got evicted though…
I have played. I am not great at it (was only decent in High School and I’m getting ready to stare at an officially long time since my graduation (long enough that attending the reunion is something I’m considering).
But I think I have a pair of rackets somewhere, and if not I can afford to pick a couple up.
Let’s give it a go some time? I’ll email you in a second as Interesting Shit has happened on my end.
Wow, laura72bristol is even more incoherent than Woody. That takes some doing.
This whole fucking fallacy thing… I’m really not a fan of these internet lists of “fallacies” that lots of people seem to study and then bring up in discussion. They mix so many different phenomena under the common name of “fallacy” (in fairness, though: the actual Wikipedia page does make distinctions between different kinds of mistakes in argument and overall seems a bit better than most of these lists you come across over the internet).
For instance, the “no true Scotsman fallacy” that often has a place on this kind of list – it usually doesn’t say why it’s a problem to argue in this way. There are two problems with the conversation typically posted under the heading of “no true Scotsman fallacy”; firstly that the people talking use different definitions of “Scotsman”, meaning they talk past each other, secondly that one of them uses a definition according to which the claim that Scotsmen eat porridge becomes an analytic and completely trivial truth. (Even one of these problems taken in isolation would mean that they didn’t have a good argument going.) If you’re gonna make a list of supposed “fallacies” and post it on the internet, shouldn’t you explain these things so that people who read it might actually learn something?
Also the “appeal to authority” thing… I’ve seen both the general claim that it’s a fallacy, and the more precise claim that it’s only a fallacy if used in deductive arguments, and I’m like “huh?”. This is a valid deduction:
1. Everything that the pope says is true.
2. The pope says that abortion is wrong.
3. Therefore, it is true that abortion is wrong.
Obviously, the degree of belief that you’re justified in having in the conclusion depends on the degree of belief that you’re justified in having in the authority-appealing premise(and this goes for deductive and inductive arguments alike), so when someone makes this move in conversation, it all comes down to whether the supposed authority really is an expert or really is trustworthy in this area or not. I think most people can figure that out on their own – saying that this is some kind of special “fallacy” probably just confuses people.
Overall, it’s bloody impossible to remember an entire fallacy list and what each fallacy means, even if you were to find a good one. It would really help if people tried to grasp some basics about evidence and relevance instead of just shouting “YOU JUST DID A FALLACY!” in order to win an argument (the fallacy fallacy?). Like, there’s a reason why we don’t hand out fallacy lists when we teach basic logic and argumentation to freshmen at my uni… but try to teach them how to think instead.
So, with that rant out of the place, the “apex fallacy” – it’s true that the fact that the leaders of the world are predominantly of a certain gender doesn’t logically imply that this gender overall has most power, since various MRA theories about how women are pulling the strings and so on describe logical possibilities. This, however, is really uninteresting, since almost all real-life arguments (including arguments about feminism) are inductive anyway. No feminist has ever claimed that most leaders being men logically implies that men has more power and women as a group are discriminated against. What feminists claim is that when you put together a number of observations of how the world works, whereof “most leaders being men” is one, we can conclude (obviously not deductively, but that’s not a problem – no knowledge about the world is based solely on deductive reasoning) that men as a group has more power than women as a group and that women as a group are discriminated against. This obviously doesn’t mean that any individual man has an overall good life in today’s society or that any individual man has more power than any individual woman, but this is not what feminists claim either.
The other issue, of course, is that we can bring science (Science!) into testing the MRA theories because we have data. And what we find is that there is no evidence for the MRA theories but lots of evidence for alternative, competing theories. So, following the scientific method, we discard the MRA theories as being wrong, and retain the competing theories that are supported by the data.
Whereas, the MRAs complain that everyone else is misinterpreting the data (even those of us with statistics training and experience) whereas they are the true arbiters of facts (even though their scientific qualifications are noticeable by their absence). In addition to which, they add individual pieces of self-fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias-associated assfacts.
They have no credibility outside of the echo chamber of their own supporters. And, coming back to my point in another thread, MRAs: scientists are laughing at you.
LBT,
I could watch Alan Cummings take that tie off on loop forever.
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 (when Mr C has done pretty much everything). That made the complaint sound much more whiny.
I have no problem, in principle, with the last one. Men do matter, but Elam is one of the last guys you want on that poster.
There actually is a “Fallacy Fallacy.” It’s the idea that since a conclusion was reached via fallacious logic, the conclusion must be wrong. It’s easy to see why that’s terrible reasoning in math: “2+2=4 because the moon is made of cheese” is completely fallacious with an accurate conclusion.
@pallygirl
“MRAs: scientists are laughing at you.”
I second that. Its not so much that their opinions are offensive (which they are), its that they don’t make any kind of sense. In a way, its re-assuring because it does not take any work to debunk them. On the other side, its frightening that some people take them seriously. They make me think of a cult, all critical thinking has flown out of the window a long time ago.
My favorite is when people scream “ad hominem!” whenever you’re not nice enough in presenting your opinion. I’m surprised we don’t get more of that here.
WWTH: We do get a lot of it here. A fair number of people, when one starts to poke holes in their logic resort to it. There is also a “weak” version of it in tone-trolling, wherein they say being less than polite in language can only lead to being discounted in argument.
Since a significant number of those who pull that trick have said some pretty offensive things, all while being “polite”, I see it as a serious case of micro-aggression; and one that is broadcast at everyone who disagrees with them.
So I give it short shrift.
BAHAHA oh the one about “stealing me for daddy’s money” reminds me of my ex. He never paid child support and racked up 10k in unpaid support, and demanded that I drive our son 300 miles to see him after he moved away. He would threaten to file for full custody (we had joint) and after the last time, when he picked up my son and took him out of state and I had to go retrieve him, I filed for full. The $200/month he was supposed to pay shot up to $500 when he OF COURSE didn’t appear in court. So he called me one day and asked if my husband would adopt my son so he wouldn’t have to pay any of it.. I was like, DONE. He hasn’t asked about our son in over 10 years. MRA’s are stand up guys. Oh and he was also controlling, manipulative and abusive.. he went after me because I was very young and he thought, easily controlled. Too bad for him…
Oh yeah I know there’s a lot of tone trolling I just meant they don’t actually say the exact words “ad hominem” that often. You’d think they’d say that in attempt at sounding intellectual. I see tone trolls on other sites use it often.
WWTH — oh, once they go all “your argument is clearly bull because you’re a feminist”, if you reply “that’s an ad hominem, care to address the argument asshole?” Well, asshole is apparently an ad hominem (it isn’t, it’s your good old fashioned insult)
Re: mowing: This morning I was quite literally mowing my own way, as I used a scythe to cut down a lane in waist-high mass of weeds to get easier access to certain parts in the communal garden.
#menmowingtheirownway