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.
Thebewilderness — yeah, it royally sucks that what, to me, seems an accurate and useful term has been turned into an esentionally meaningless insult (I won’t call it a slur, but insult doesn’t feel quite right either). Because the likes of the bug aren’t “just” transphobic feminists, it isn’t low grade discomfort or anything, it’s the sincere, and often very vocal, or downright violent, belief that you’re either cis (not that they are ever to be called that) or abnormal, disordered, delusional, etc. and shouldn’t exist.
I guess the other half of the problem is that we’ve seen a language shift with the -phobias and -isms where they don’t mean outright hatred anymore but include unconscious bias and the like. So “transphobic feminist” can mean anyone from a cis woman who’s a rape survivor and uncomfortable around trans women because she associates the mere thought of a penis with her trauma (which is, kinda sorta transphobic, and I’m intentionally using a controversial example), to the people who literally would rather trans people die than be allowed to, well, anything. Simple existence is too much for them. And, imo, we do need a way to seperate the people who hold some transphobic views and are feminists, from those who consider the existence of trans people to be anti-feminist.
In my brain, that’s why I like the term TERf, but that’s in my brain, which is, thankfully for the rest of you, not how the world funtions. Maybe in society at large it has been too corrupted to mean anything useful. But then, I still think we need a term for them that doesn’t let them hide behind the cover that all cis people hold some transphobic views (as do most, if not all, non-cis people — society just sucks too much for any of us to escape the socialization pushed about trans people being freaks [but that’s another topic entirely])
@pallygirl, Thanks. 🙂
@Argenti,
See, you’ve made a really good point, and that’s why I’m still on the fence about using TERF, because I have experienced exactly what you said from feminists who think like that. Even if you’re not trans, if you advocate for trans inclusion, they either decide you must be trans yourself or otherwise claim you’re dangerous to the cause. They DO make transphobia part of their feminism, central to it even.
But then, that term is being thrown around willy nilly, so that it’s not applied just to militantly transphobic feminists, but to feminists who really don’t deserve the title.
That’s precisely what Ally claimed until she got called on it. You think she’d have bothered clarifying with the “Oh no of course I didn’t mean that how dare you etc etc” if it’d been let slide? She’d got to the point of claming biological sex is a social construct; this was pretty clearly related to that.
In other words, everything Alex said.
…Just noting something.
I call myself eclectic Pagan.
By Pagan I mean “Earth-based spirituality.”
There’s a lot of other Pagans who believe in a wide range of stuff.
Some of that stuff I’d be morally opposed to, much of it I just simply wouldn’t find useful.
Oh, and some of them would find me not sufficiently Pagan… Oh well, they can go sit on their Power Crystal and spin for all I care of their opinion of me.
Blahlistic, forgive me, this thread’s been all over the place and I don’t remember all of it: are you responding to something in particular? Or maybe just joining our little Pagan party?
I read that as electric Pagan.
Which sounds rather fun.
Depends, your wattage may vary.
XD
Gives a whole new meaning to Power Crystals, dunnit?
I used to call myself that, but it lead to too many people in the local community believing it meant I hadn’t bothered to pick anything (and would then graciously pick something for me) or else that I was a modified-style Wiccan. Nope. Then I started using animist, since it’s a lot more accurate, but it still sometimes leads to other debates, lol.
Argh, noooo! You put images in my head. I must laugh & wince now.
My work here is done! 😀
Argenti,
Have you seen the movie Errors of the Human Body? It heavily features axolotls and one of the characters dresses as one for Halloween. I’m watching it on Netflix now and it made me think of you.
Or a costume party or something. I got distracted reading WHTM and am not entirely sure.
@ emilygoddess someone was saying something about Dianic Wicca, Z Budapest, and transphobia…
…So I was just rambling a bit and sort of thinking about how much (ahem) ground the term Pagan covers.
Many subgroups thereof will snootily insist they are the True Pagans, and everyone else is full of crap…and…
…Also thinking if you put all those groups together in one fairground how fast that could possibly turn into a situation calling for riot police to separate some of them.
I mean…I dunno about you, but white-supremacist Norse Pagans make me real Thor….
#notruepagans
Now that’s just mind-boggling. Am I wrong in thinking paganism has a lot to do with polytheism, and the whole my gods vs your gods shouldn’t really apply?
Before I decided I was more comfortable spiritually buggering off and doing my own thing, I bumped around the periphery of the local Pagan/Wiccan scene, and a lot of them seem to have a great sense of …um…grandiosity… in their assorted traditions….which they often assure me are of great antiquity and/or handed down through their family and in the blood so on and suchforth…And it MUST BE DONE in such a way and seriousness and blahblahblahdeblah.
Not like, doctrinare so much as terrifically self-important.
Ah, yes, but you can still pick the wrong gods, for the wrong reasons, and do your worship the wrong way, and…
Short version – people can always find something to disagree about.
Eeep, that sounds like my brushes with the Spiritualist mobs out here, only worse, with all that ancestry/antiquity waffle. It’s even written in Spiritualist principles that you don’t judge someone else’s experiences, and there isn’t meant to be any “must believe this” dogma, but the group I had most contact with were into being a capital-C Church, and if you didn’t follow what the president and pastor said, you were out. Feckin’ creepy, those two. Doctrinaire and self-important.
“Spiritually buggering off and doing my own thing” is exactly what I did, too. Having contact with like-minded people would’ve been nice, but it turns out they weren’t. Also, having a Wurlitzer organ playing at services made me want to scream.
And to feel superior about, if they need to feel superior to other people…Hmm…
*takes look in mirror at that…*
*adjusts ego…*
So did they think that suffering makes you holier or what?
I think they might have.
They didn’t have bagpipes, I doubt it.
I like bagpipes, they would have been a great improvement (though maybe not in an enclosed space). 😀
Skeeviest thing about that president: she was busy telling me that Mr K was “very naughty” – her words – ‘cos according to her people who’ve crossed over shouldn’t be in romantic relationships with us who’re still here. That was bad enough; I was ready to blow my stack with you’re presuming to judge a man ten times your age and your superior in eveyr fashion I can think of, but the truly creepy part was her heavy implication that I should be out fucking some earthly man, because, well, how could I deny myself the joys of catering to some hypothetical dude, that’s not LIVING. Being happy with my own situation didn’t count, being in love didn’t count, nope, it was all about fitting her dogma. I’m betting she was only in a Spiritualist church ‘cos a fundamentalist Christian one wouldn’t have let her be boss.