If the Men’s Rights movement is looking for a celebrity endorser, I think I’ve found just the guy for them: the mixed martial arts fighter, and erstwhile porn actor, War Machine, currently sitting in jail on charges of brutally beating and attempting to kill his ex-girlfriend, porn star Christy Mack.
Men’s Rights activists should be able to look past these criminal charges; after all, as they remind us all the time, women are forever falsely accusing innocent men of all sorts of terrible things.
And in so many ways War Machine is perfect for them. An MMA fighter, he’s already only one letter away from being an MRA. A misogynistic asshole with rage issues, he’ll have no trouble fitting in with the Men’s Rights crowd. And, especialy important for a movement that has a lot of trouble getting any good PR, he’s a bit more comfortable on camera than the Paul Elams and Dean Esmays of the world, with experience on television (on the reality show The Ultimate Fighter: Team Hughes vs. Team Serra), and in seven films (albeit pornographic ones).
Best of all: he’ll need no ideological education from what A Voice for Men likes to call Fuck Shit Up University. War Machine – real name Jonathan Koppenhaver – is already an outspoken proponent of many of the Men’s Rights Movement’s core beliefs.
Consider these selections from a little Men’s Rights manifesto War Machine wrote a few years ago during a previous stint behind bars, serving time for felony assault after two bloody bar fights. His rant, which a friend posted to the internet, would fit right in with the sort of stuff we’ve seen regularly posted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, or The Spearhead, or A Voice for Men. I’ve bolded some of the Men’s Rightsiest bits:
The oppression of MEN is worse than oppression of Jews in Nazi germany, worse than the slavery of Blacks in early America…
There has always been the oppressor and always the oppressed. Before, it was blatant … NOW the oppressor has learned to disguise his evil. You can see man, but you can not see MEN. How easy it is to oppress a minority that is invisible to the eye! How genius of the oppressor! And what a better target too! …
Men challenge injustice from Government, MEN fight for their Constitutional rights, that are slowly being taken away every year. …
And they don’t just oppress us by making more laws and taking away more freedom, they are far more clever than that! Ask yourself what your REAL dream was?? If you gave up on this dream, why? Because of the brainwashing of the Government, that’s why! They taught you to “play it safe.” They told us a responsible man has ONE wife, a house, good credit, good job, and kids. How are you supposed to chase your dreams while maintaining all of that!?
Men are supposed to take risks and be aggressive! What accomplishments have ever come of a man scared to risk it all!? None!? Where would the world be? Still ‘flat!’ Still ‘Earth at the center of the universe!’
If any of you have your Men’s Rights Bingo cards out, I’m guessing you might already be close to scoring a bingo. We’ve got a comparison to slavery that could have come straight from the pages of A Voice for Men, a marriage-is-death-to-male-dreams rant that could have been borrowed from any MGTOW forum, and an evo-psych-esque argument that men are the true risk-takers and the world’s real innovators.
And I don’t think War Machine would have much trouble with Paul Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” either.
[I]t’s Christmas day and I’m laying in my bunk wondering “Why in the hell do American men get married!?” … If your wife is being a bitch you can’t slap her, if your wife is yelling at you, God forbid you yell back … Next thing you know it will be illegal to fuck your wife! LMAO! Maybe then, MEN in this country will get the fucking hint and MOVE! This country forces you to be a bitch!
In another online posting, War Machine touched on another Men’s Rights hobbyhorse, the notion that the justice system is stacked against men:
[L]ook at the prisons, they are FULL of MEN, not women. Are men “evil” and women not? Or do the laws target and attempt to restrict NATURAL MEN’S BEHAVIOR? How many of the HEROES in American history would avoid prison if they lived today? Davey Crockett? Thomas Jefferson? David Bowie? General Grant & General Lee? Shit, George Washington. … Laws target MEN and men’s behavior. Women want to bitch and cry about their rights and equality… LMAO! MEN are the ones locked away like animals, while women run free!
Someone might have to explain to War Machine that David Bowie is not actually a famous American HERO but a famously androgynous British musician who once recorded an album called “Heroes.” (Mr. Machine may be thinking of James Bowie, a well-known 19th century American frontiersman and slave trader, and the guy the Bowie Knife is named after.)
But other than that, he seems ready to go.
There is, of course, that whole attempted murder charge to deal with.
It’s true the Men’s Rights Movement has had few problems in the past rallying behind men with histories of violence. But War Machine might be a harder sell as a Men’s Rights hero. His alleged attack on Mack left her with a cracked rib, a ruptured liver, numerous broken bones, missing teeth and her eyes swollen shut. (See here for photos of her injuries; obviously this link is NSFW and could be triggering.)
While Mr. Machine denies attacking Mack, he joked to a TV host last year that if she were to leave him “I would just kill her” and get a tattoo saying “Rest In Peace” above the tattoo of her name he has on his neck.
And several hours after allegedly trying to murder her, War Machine tweeted this lovely message about his ex:
https://twitter.com/WarMachine170/statuses/497663075831787521
War Machine does seem to be at a low point in his life. Even aside from the charges he faces, and the time he seems likely to serve, his career in porn is almost certainly over. The “Alpha Male” clothing line he helped start wants nothing to do with him. Nobody but the prison system seems to want this guy.
In other words: Men’s Rights activists, this is your chance! War Machine may not be the, er, hero you want. But he’s certainly the hero you deserve.
Huh.
That is actually true, cassandrakitty. The evil bees. I guess I just didn’t notice.
That’s very spot on.
Aside – that was an excellent post, that describes a depressingly common problem very well. Anyone who hasn’t read it really should.
Seems like this thread is developing into apologizing for feminists who only want to concern themselves with people born with a vagina? In that case, here’s MY minority opinion: That is not okay, and people who do that usually vastly overstates how different your life experiences will be depending on whether your born with a vagina or not. There are trans women who knew that they were trans since they were kids, and who internalized all kinds of misogynistic shit even if the people around them didn’t consciously aim it in their direction since people around them assumed that they were boys. And on the other hand, I’m a woman born with a vagina, but there’s tons of stuff that I haven’t internalized the way many feminists tend to assume that all women do (and there are probably various psychological explanations as to why that is, but I won’t go into them here).
So no, I see no good reason except for transphobia to exclude trans women, sorry.
HOWEVER, people has made really good points as to why we shouldn’t just yell at each other as soon as there’s a disagreement, and I’m not gonna yell “transphobe!” at anyone who disagrees with me on this one. 🙂
I hope I’m not coming across as making excuses for Ally. Obviously, she would need to change her behavior if she wanted to get along in this community, and obviously, she didn’t.
Wait, what? (I both can’t parse that and am not sure what you’re referring to.)
Puddleglum’s comment re TERFs?
Yeah, and Kitten’s comment on how norm women have different concerns.
Missing stair! Yay, that’s it! I knew I should have been able to put my finger on the problem earlier.
I’d been doing the she’syoung, shehasahorriblelife, she’sdepressed, it’salloutofcontrol, thing without finding the words to say these are explanations but that’s no help. No matter how good the explanations are, they aren’t excuses.
BORN women, sorry, autocorrect.
dvarg, why is it transmisogynistic to acknowledge that people are going to have different concerns, and that minority groups, such as lesbians, get to say who they do and don’t want included in their spaces? Why is it transmisogynistic to talk about pregnancy or birth control, things that affect trans men, but not trans women? When did it become necessary to pretend everyone’s biologically identical, or has identical concerns, to be equals?
It’s the painting of trans women as a group entirely victimised, with no acknowledgement of the utterly appalling shit that goes on with some activists there, that’s creeping me out. That stuff gets glossed over to the point where Ally couldn’t bring herself to even write the name of a trans woman blogger who pushes back against that shit, because oh noes, trans misogyny! (The terrible terrible trans misogyny in question is one woman saying “Yes, I’m a woman, I am assimilated as a woman, but I’lm also biologically male and nothing actually changes that, so get over it!” instead of pushing the “My lady peen!” line.)
I read kittehserf’s comment as disapproving of the attitude in the group she mentioned. We’ll have to see what she says.
I personally don’t see TERF as a slur; it describes their beliefs about trans women and those beliefs are terrible. I don’t care if bigotry is coming from an oppressed group. It’s still wrong to demonize a group with less privilege than you have.
@ Katz
My concern is partly that if people frame this problem as being entirely about Ally they may gloss over all the other community dynamics that allowed her behavior to escalate and cause such a problem. If we do that it’ll just happen again with someone else.
Does anyone happen to have a link to the comment where I should start reading re the missing stair? That must have happened between me posting here earlier, getting busy and not posting, then coming back.
Here ya go: its Cliff Pervocracy’s blog on the matter.
http://pervocracy.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/missing-stair.html
http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html
Cassandra: Quite so. The problem is not one person (it really is); we’ve had the same problem before with different groups of people.
Ha! I haz ninja power!
Exactly. We’re allowed to call gay or working class racists racists, we’re allowed to call black homophobes homophobes and so on. Calling a lesbian a TERF is no different.
Well, firstly, there are lesbian trans women, so it’s not “lesbians” per se we’re talking about, but cis lesbians. It’s not a problem if lesbians say they want a purely lesbian space with no straight women in it, but it is a problem if cis lesbians say they want a cis lesbian space only with no trans lesbians in it, just as it is a problem if white lesbians say they want a white lesbian space only with no black lesbians in it and so on. It is a problem for those lesbians who get excluded for belonging to one more oppressed group than the rest of the bunch.
Secondly, it’s not transmisogynistic to say that “in this space we talk about pregnancy and pregnancy-related concerns for people whom this may concern” or something like that, but I don’t think that anyone has ever had a problem with that either. If you have an event that centers around pregnancy in such a way that it only really concerns those who have a womb, I think things will simply sort itself out. It’s not like trans women are gonna press for inclusion in that event anyway. The problem is that there are lots of feminists who go on about how different life experiences are in general for cis women vs trans women, and therefore it makes sense to have cis women events only, even though we now talk about events and spaces where trans women want to be included because the issues they handle do concern them.
Also, TERFs aren’t always lesbians, are they? Rosanne Barr has said some horrific things about trans women but I don’t know if she’s a rad fem.
It’s when TERF is spread to include anyone who doesn’t centre trans women in absolutely everything, or disagrees with a trans woman over something, that it’s a problem. I say trans women advisedly, because I don’t remember Ally ever saying anything about trans men, and she really did want the term to be TWERF. When shit is aired here about lesbians being required to “examine their preferences” wrt trans women – specifically, those with male genitals – as if sexual orientation is as changeable and impersonal as what brand of socks one wears, then that’s downright nauseating. That wasn’t one walked-back statement, that was a progression, and damn me if it doesn’t sound more like male entitlement than anything else. I don’t believe it’s representative of trans women AT ALL, but it says something that it took that level of boundary-testing to get a pushback.
I’m not seeing this conversation being more productive; if anything, it’s heading back to the stuff we’ve gone over already in this thread, at length. Dvarg, there are elements of the issue I don’t want to go into in public, because there really are some very nasty people out there, far worse than MRA trolls, and I’ve been advised to be careful about even saying this stuff. I think we’re going to have to know we’re not likely to agree on everything about it.
Okay Kitten. 🙂 And I agree that the whole “examine your preferences” tends to be…. problematic, when it’s brought up.
To say the least of it! 😀
kitteh, yeah, when the term is tossed out without just cause, I agree. I’ve seen it with another person. Example from this thread:
Yeah, no.
When I think of TERFs, it’s feminists who accuse trans women of trying to infiltrate women-only spaces to commit rape and that’s a vile accusation.