Men’s Rights Activists have become known, not without reason, as belligerent assholes whose main forms of “activism” consist of harassment and threats.
One bold Men’s Rights Redditor known as El Rellok thinks he’s come up with a way to counteract this perception and deliver a powerful men’s-rightsty message at the same time.
He wants MRAs to send feminists … pictures of bloody feathers. No, really.
Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.
Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:
The idea that men are violent, rather then the primary victims of violence, is being used to discredit men’s issues.
Well, actually, what’s being used to discredit the so-called Men’s Rights Movement is the simple fact that its members don’t seem to know how to engage in any kind of “activism” besides harassing individual women.
It is glaringly obvious that we need a method of clearly expressing unbounded outrage that cannot be construed as a threat by any reasonable person.
I don’t know that expressing “unbounded outrage” is really the most important goal for any activist movement, but the part about saying things that aren’t threatening sounds good to me.
Gentlemen (and ladies) i propose The Red Feather Campaign.
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, why a feather?
None here should be unfamiliar with the “white feather girls”.[1] , one of the most craven and deplorable pro war campaigns in human history.
In case you aren’t completely up-to-date with all Men;s Rights hobbyhorses, he’s referring to the Order of the White Feather. Founded in Britain at the start of World War I, this was a group of women that hoped to shame men into enlisting by presenting them with white feathers, a symbol of cowardice.
Though the White Feather campaign happened literally a hundred years ago, at a time when the general public in Britain and elsewhere was rabidly pro-war, and thought it hardly won universal support from the suffragettes of the day, MRAs like El Rellok have turned it into a symbol of the intrinsic evil that lurks in the hearts of feminists today.
The white feather campaign was about mens obligation to sacrifice to women, a socially imposed gender role. Feminists, while declaring their total reprobation for all gendered roles, continue to demand that men sacrifice for women by ceding anything described as privilege, regardless of whether the “Privilege” is earned, a “Privilege” at all, or whether a society without the thing described as a “Privilege” can be understood as just ….
Sorry, I nodded off in the middle of that. He finally gets to the point:
SO, I propose we return to them their feathers covered in the blood of the men mercilessly and ruinously sacrificed to their agenda.
Well, he doesn’t mean this literally – he means PICTURES of feathers that look like they’re covered in blood – but we’ll get to that in a minute.
We make this present with the following message.
“This blood is not your blood. To think it is, is a refraction only of your narcissism. This is the blood of men, sacrificed to females, by females, for generation upon generation. When you speak of sacrifice, before our eyes flash visions of bayonets, within our nostrils the waft of trenches, our ears recall the scream of artillery coming to shred our bodies. That is what sacrifice means to men; agony, suffering, death. This feather is a reminder of your inhumanity towards men, your lack of compassion and understanding, and your hypocrisy in declaring gender roles obsolete while commanding men to fulfill the most destructive of all gender roles, the gender who gets sacrificed.”
I dunno about you, but this is creepy as fuck. And more than a little threatening.
Why this tactic? First, the consistent theme seen presented by SJW/feminists is that men are “Violent oppressors who refuse to compromise.” This meme makes clear that it is not us being oppressive, and that the compromise being asked is not just.
Yeah, sending women pictures of bloody feathers accompanied by an over-the-top mini-manifesto charging them with narcissism and cruelty and blaming them for all the death and misery of war (and who knows what else) is definitely going to convince the world that you’re not violent creeps.
By turning the oppression meme around upon the feminists, it creates equal footing in the debate space.
Yes, that’s right, he thinks the way to win the debate is to quite literally argue “nuh-uh, you are!”
Second, it supplants the current “MRA send death threats” meme. MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.
I’m sorry, what?
MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.
That’s what I thought you said. You people really don’t understand how PR works, do you?
If your message does not include said feather, that was not an MRA, as anyone who understands the MRA position would understand the symbolism and necessity of the red feather campaign.
Yes, that’s right, a woman getting El Rellok’s unhinged message along with a picture of a feather drenched in blood is going to say, ah, yes, this isn’t a threat. This is a Men’s Rights meme, and a perfectly rational conversation-starter on the important topic of why women deserve blame for all the wars in the world because a small number of women in Britain in World War I handed out feathers to men who weren’t enlisted.
Third, it allows us to fracture the feminist movement and more clearly identify those feminists who actually want equality and are just being blind, from those feminists who are actually misanderist (i use that term hesitantly, but as i have not had time to create a new term to describe my view of this branch of feminism, so it is necessary). If we can separate the equality feminists from the misandarists, then we can actually start working with reasonable people to begin wide scale social reform on gender issues.
Trust me, any woman who sees your message as anything but the unhinged rantings of a possibly dangerous crackpot is not any kind of feminist.
Depending upon the response I get here, the above shall be sent to AVFM with a proposal for a “Feather Drive” asking submissions of drawings of bloody feathers we can then use.
This, El Rellok’s concluding sentence, is also the first sentence of his that makes any kind of sense. This sounds right up A Voice for Men’s alley.
In a followup comment, directed at MRAs who weren’t completely convinced that sending pics of bloody feathers is the best way forward for the troubled Men’s Rights Movement, he added:
OK, There are multiple people Doxxing and sending threats to feminists (and others). We need a way to signify that this IS NOT US. We need a way to signify this IS NOT US while still sending a reply of some form. Sending death threats is not useful, and no, sending a picture of a feather with a message clearly stating it is about mens sacrafice is a threat only to people who would percieve any responce at all to be a threat. So unless you are saying we just need to grovel before our new feminist over lords, tell me what the hell else we do. DO you understand the concept that feminism is not simply going to go away if you ignore them? We need a symbol representing male disposability, to counter arguements that we are privilege defending mysoginists. And it needs to be a historically poinant one, or its not going to stick.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Also, have you ever heard of spellcheck?
So, the way to differentiate yourself from the people sending threats is to… send threats? I, for one, think this will work spectacularly.
I doubt this dude has ever actually seen a bayonet, let alone been in anywhere near a trench or artillery battle.
Also, feeeeeEEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeeeeemales.
Feeeeemales!
I should have refreshed.
Also, telling use of language here. Implies that he doesn’t think he or his fellow men are actually oppressed at all – oppression is just a “meme” for one “side to levy against the other.
Maybe because I am tired and that dulls my reactions a little, but I think if I got one of these messages I’d be less horrified and more puzzled (also quick to report the spam to my ISP). The tone to me reads less “death threat” and more “pompous wingnut spam”.
@Lea, no, never refresh! The hilarity of feeeeeeeemales is not an exhaustive property. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMALES.
I was going to ask where they planned to get the blood, so in that sense the fact that they’re just planning to draw it is good news.
So the plan is to replace the public perception that MRAs are violent, scary people with the perception that MRAs are ridiculous? Well, I guess that would be a step in the right direction considering the starting point.
How in the nine hells can someone think that pictures of bloody objects in the mail ISN’T threatening?
There has never been a possibility of someone handing him a white feather for not enlisting in WW1 either.
The accusation of narcissism surrounded by the rest of that rant is hilarious.
Well, there’s your problem right there.
Are bayonets even a thing that modern soldiers use?
Shit, exactly how many methods of expressing unbounded outrage do they need? It’s about the only thing they’ve got covered.
Actually, thinking about it, I would probably interpret a picture of a bloody feather as “I have killed/am going to kill all of your chickens”, which would be confusing since I don’t have any chickens.
Has this guy even been in the military?
While feminists (female, male, non-binary) have had to work for equal rights regardless of fender and can say they are furthering the work of previous generations, what common cause does this guy purport to show which would justify claiming the sacrifice of others?
Also, if men are being sacrificed for the sake of women, what are women gaining from this sacrifice? The war he is talking about was started by men and for the goals of the men running those countries. Women couldn’t even vote in the UK at that time. (Was there even a true UK then?)
Is this the newest form of peacocking?
FEEEEEEMALES!
Sorry for double post, but I just realized something.
They have woefully misinterpreted “The pen is mightier than the sword.”.
This is competing with their idea that women don’t suffer or get killed in wars for biggest logic fail connected with this proposal. Especially when you remember that the white feather campaign was organized by a man, and that competing feminist organizations fought against it, and the draft, and the war itself.
Someone who subscribes to Fangoria magazine?
Kind of.
Do these dudes seriously think that if not for women, men wouldn’t fight each other?
::scratches head::
If I saw a pic of a bloody feather I’d think
1) Whoops, looks like a cat caught a bird
2) Damn, some poor bird got hit by a car
3) Is Sarah Palin still hanging around watching turkeys being slaughtered?
and possibly, down the end of the list somewhere, that some sick creep likes killing birds.
If it was pictures of feathers, plural, and I knew it came from an MRA, I’d think “Here’s a man who managed to lose a fight with a feather pillow.”
The white feather campaign was at least intended to provoke a specific behavior — you would know your feather had succeeded because the man who received it would enlist. What am I supposed to do with an image of a bloody feather? Feel bad about being a feminist? How would any of these men even know their bloody feathers were “working”?
Also, feminists have historically been pacifists more often than not. t’s a common bit of (naive, admittedly) feminist rhetoric that if women were in charge of everything, wars wouldn’t happen.
They literally can’t seem to make a distinction between actual feminism, and the behavior of women participating in patriarchal culture. If a woman does it, and they don’t like it, it’s feminism. I can only picture living or working with one of these guys. “You ate the last cookie! Feminist!”
It’s that thing where they assume everyone else shares their obsessions again, isn’t it? They’re obsessed with the white feather campaign and the Titanic so of course any random person they send messages referencing those things to will immediately understand what they’re getting at.
A better idea. Leave the feathers alone, and just rescue the poor ducklings: