A tiny group of gallant men (and “their women”) go underground to fight the evil gynocratic overlords. Is this the plot of a terrible dystopian potboiler from 1971, or a description of how most MRAs see themselves, and the world, today?
Turns out it’s both. I found this pic in the Blue Pill subreddit, and now I really, really want to read this book.
Here’s a book review from someone who did.
Also, I should’ve said fertilization instead of creation
@ Skye: “At the same time, it seems a terribly depressing way to look at the world and at relationships.”
It is a horribly depressing way to look at the world and at relationships, which is why I feel more pity than anger at men who feel that way. To me, a couple of the quasi-trolls we had here (Undfreeland and Bittersteel if I remember correctly) sounded to me like they were emotionally truncated and fairly near the edge of clinical depression. The lives they proposed for themselves seemed to me to be emotionally deprived to an almost unlivable extreme.
@WWTH: You are correct, but even so male supremacy has been pretty common in all sorts of societies, and in any case the MRAs generally come from the industrial society tradition and the Western-style middle class.
Re abortion: My wife and I have two great (grown) children, and I have two more by my first marriages. We decided to stop at two, and I have always been conscious of the fact that that decision meant that other potentially great children were denied the chance to exist, but if you follow that thought to its logical conclusion you would have a totally overpopulated devastated Earth (much more than it is already). I have always been uncomfortable with abortion, but I recognize that since I cannot become pregnant it is not my decision, and that the best I can do is to try not to cause a pregnancy that might need to be terminated by abortion.
Being a terminally snarky individual, I have always wanted to lead a crusade to end the Holocaust of the Unconceived. Every day, when I go about to stores or schools or whatever, I see vast numbers of healthy women of childbearing age who are not evidently pregnant, and I want to cry out about the hideous fact that they are denying the right of birth to a potential human being. I know that certain religions are doing their best to correct this situation, which seems almost like murder (it has the same effect as abortion) by trying to restrict access to birth control, but it would be more helpful if they would encourage women to not refrain from becoming pregnant even of they are not married. Now, some might ask, How can we possibly provide for all the children that might result (assuming that Swiftian solutions are out of the question)? The answer, of course, is that if we birth them, god will come and provide — just like god already does through much of the third world.
Ugh, the whole theory-of-mind conversation is reminding me how glad I am that I’m not in college anymore. I have so little patience for arguments of the type “What if X is true, which is completely untestable and contrary to our apparent lived experience?”
The only possible answer is “Then we will continue acting as though it isn’t because this fact can have no possible influence on our lived reality.” What if I’m a brain in a jar? Then I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, because what else would I do?
Citation please. Or, at the very least, please narrow down “traditionally” to a specific time period and place.
I’m a bit late to the conversation, but is that tumblr for real? If those are real posts, wow, they just parody themselves.
And of course the Amazing Atheist would advocate lowering the age of consent to 12-13, being the disgusting human being he is.
And while I was typing away all this crap, my kitty snuck up beside me and stole the ham out of my ham sandwich without my noticing it. She hardly even disarranged to sandwich, so I picked it up and started to bite it before I realized that I had been ripped off.
Skye, I know that wasn’t your intent, And I might just be over sensitive.
One of my aunts miscarried a few times, before my uncle convinced her they should try adopting. I was little, but I remember being really scared and worried for her, because she would be really happy when she first found out she was pregnant, and then she would be really, really sad for months after she lost another child. We still don’t talk about miscarriages in the same room as her, because it would just be painful for her.
My adopted cousins are amazing, and I’m glad to have them. She was a good mother to them. But it took a while before they decided to adopt, because I think my aunt kind of felt like her continued miscarriages were a punishment for something she must have been doing wrong, or because God really didn’t want her to be a mommy.
That second one was baloney: she’s a great mommy to my cousins, and they’re a wonderful family. The older cuz just graduated from high school, a year early.
The first was also baloney: sometimes biology just screws people over.
@lightcastle I was discussing the mindset of MRAs. I don’t want to get into the history of marriage/intimate relationships and its economic basis — you could write a whole shelf of books on that subject. I am mainly interested in stating that the MRAs make certain assumptions about sexual relationships that seem to reflect how things were assumed to be before the latest wave of feminism hit in the late 60s. Certainly I was brought up to believe in the man as breadwinner and woman as homemaker paradigm, but since I have spent the last 30 years in a role-reversed marriage I have been liberated from that sort of narrow-mindedness. The MRAs still seem to buy it though, long after most women have clearly decided that they want no part of it.
@contrapangloss: “sometimes biology just screws people over.”
Ain’t that the truth.
My former brother-in-law did everything right: he was a vegetarian, a runner in excellent shape without an ounce of fat. He died at 41 from pancreatic cancer.
I had a friend at work who was desperately trying to get pregnant since she was in her mid-30s. Finally she succeeded, so I bagged up the pregnancy/babycare books I had from my kids and brought them to work, only to find that she’d had a miscarriage. A couple of months later here husband dumped. I understand that he wanted children, but …
… her husband dumped her …
Her husband left her because she had a miscarriage???
Katz: seconded, all the way.
@ GrumpyOldMan I am still in shock at the ninja skills of your ham-stealing kitty. Any kitty that is that good at ham-theft deserves the spoils.
Miscarriages are something I don’t really know much about: I know my mother had a few before and between babies, but she doesn’t really talk about them. It never occurred to me that she might still have any pain attached to those memories. It’s all such an abstract idea for me at this point: all of my friends with babies are accidental parents, so I’ve never really spoken to people trying to conceive and have never had to support someone in that situation.
I think I brought it up once in Catholic school, asking “Aren’t miscarriages God’s abortions?” but they just told me that I didn’t understand.
Contrapangloss, I’m sorry your aunt went through that. I’m glad she was able to adopt and be good mom to her children.
Also, yeah the guy ditching his wife because of a miscarriage is a complete jerk
Ah, no argument there. That this is a belief they are working from isn’t something I’m going to question.
True, but it almost seems like she dodged a bullet there. Better to find out his true nature in this manner.
@saphy: I think I brought it up once in Catholic school, asking “Aren’t miscarriages God’s abortions?” but they just told me that I didn’t understand.
“It’s Ok If You’re A
RepublicanDeity”I see where the creators of “Gayn[I just can’t type the rest] from Outer Space” got their ideas.
In this movie, the titular gay n-words are the heroes, ridding men of those horrible, horrible women. Watching that was an interesting experience… I was horribly offended, but not for the reasons I expected to be offended.
I won’t call him an asshole, because while the anus is a fairly unglamorous part of the body it is useful and necessary for life, and lack of usefulness is a common characteristic of people on which that epithet is often used. I do understand that he wanted children, but there is always adoption. (I was adopted, and my parents didn’t love me any the less because I wasn’t biological.) But he was cruel to dump her in the first place, and to leave her in a very precarious financial situation so that he would be free to go on and find a new wife and have a family with her.
I still can’t recall where I have actually seen this book. It’s not old enough to be one of the books of that type I found sorting out my father’s basement.
The smarter of my two cats used to wake me by going onto the window ledge and knocking the cylinder from the vertical blinds against the wall.
It leads directly to the manosphere, it seems. Your explanation is fairly good in terms of how the guys who end up there see things (not necessarily so much true in terms of how things actually played out in the past, as has already been mentioned), but the part that you left out is fear. Men who hate women are scary. How do we know what they’re going to do the next time they rage out against women as a group? Who wants to be the woman standing next to them when that happens?
The fact that they honestly believe that they can scream at and threaten a woman into changing her mind about them not being a desirable partner is pretty much the ultimate proof of the fact that they don’t understand us at all.
So many comments to catch up with!
@fauxmy:
Ermagerd, Boris has learned Ultimate Evil!
@emilygoddess:
And failing in trying to transplant a real form of address for people with titles to a different situation. Nitwits.
It’s almost like our extensive community involvement is part of the reason we were selected as mods!
Amazing, innit? 😀 Apparently bonobo boy can’t figure that out with his manly man rational brain.
@Policy of Madness:
Quite right, too.
@Viscaria:
::assumes martyred look:: It is, it is, but someone’s gotta do it.
@katz:
You’ve summed up my feelings about the whole thing.
@Grumpy Old Man:
Ahahhahahaha! Clever evil kitty.
genedaniell3
For a different look at what is and what is not “traditional”, I heartily recommend The Subversive Family by Ferdinand Mount. Not a historian but a journalist. Easy to read, and a bit of an eye opener in places.
I know I’m a little late to comment on the affluent dystopia point, but has anyone noticed that most dystopian protagonists tend to be from their society’s middle class or higher up the class ladder?