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?
Cassandra: Are bayonets even a thing that modern soldiers use?
Define use? We train with them. Our rifles still have mounts for them. The last bayonet charge I know of was in the assault on Mt. Stanely in the Falklands.
They are a very good training tool (you have to suppress a lot of perfectly rational defensive behaviors to use them, which is handy when someone is trying to kill you, up close and personal. It’s sort of calming to have learned what can happen, so you can deal with what you want to prevent from actually happening), but as a weapon of common resort?
No.
So much no.
Argenti: No, no, and no. He did not just claim that men, all men, as a fact of being men, have flashbacks to the trenches of WWI. Right>?
Oh, he did. I’ll also bet he’ll say, “Women have the vote, and can work, and there’s no more coverture, so they need to get over the past.”
Asshole is as hypocrite does.
They’re welcome to use it. It might even be less offensive than the one they’d pick.
Oh My. Esmay is claiming to be something like 70 years old:
Even giving him some benefit of doubt (I’m old enough to remember the ’70s. I have a sense of the ’60s, and had friends who were old enough to remember the ’50s), if he’s not in his later ’60s he can’t say he remembers, “much” of them.
(much give him some props, he copped to being a bloviating windbag).
Well, I don’t know about all men. I have flashbacks to the Seven Years’s War, for some reason. My masculine programming must be awry. I guess any war for which I wasn’t alive and didn’t serve is fair game, right?
And you have to love this bit:
Love the way the comma confuses things.
@Cassie’s Major Domo
Ooooh I’m totally flashing back to fighting along Hadrian’s Wall then. Or maybe just go full tilt and have full memories of serving in the Battle of Five Armies.
Damn, blockquote monster finally got me.
According to Wikipedia, the Order of the White Feather was founded by a MAN, Vice-Admiral Charles Cooper Penrose-Fitzgerald of the British Royal Navy. He recruited young ladies to hand out the feathers to any men in the streets who weren’t in uniform.The government had to issue a badge to civilians to identify them as doing war work, to spare them from this public harassment.
I have never heard of this in any other context but from MRAs whining about.
They harp on this and their other century-old gripe, the alleged “women and children first” protocol on the Titanic. At least their beef with the US draft is only 40 years out of date.
The fixation the Mra have on something that happened a century ago in Britain that was a mans idea in the first place as some sort of proof feminists hate men just makes them even easier to discredit.
“No, you are!” could be the Men’s Rights bumper sticker.
@Cassie’s Major Domo
It is a canny beast.
I should start going over some of my old D&D campaign notes and find which of those I can mine for trauma as well. I’m pretty sure I punched Cthulhu once at some point, he then promptly ate my soul but that should definitely be worth a few posts of self absorbed Reddit whining.
@Ivy Shoots
This is true. Blaming wars/drafts/the subjugation of working class men on women is a bit like blaming female objectification on Hooters waitresses. Ignoring that 99% of the problems are caused by wealthy men, and instead blaming the people who’s objectified bodies are used as pawns for those wealthy men is the MRM’s MO.
I haven’t even gotten to the comments yet. Heck, I can’t even get through the quotes in the post because of this
He should use the term hesitantly, because even if you set aside the fact that it refers to a highly questionable idea, he can’t manage to spell the word correctly (‘misandrist’ is the proper usage according to my understanding) or EVEN SPELL IT CONSISTENTLY! I mean, okay, use your made up ‘gotcha’ word, sure, and complain that spellcheck doesn’t recognize it, but then AT LEAST spell it the same way every time you use it!
I notice when people talk about women being killed today, literally as we speak, that’s just some kind of whiny victim mentality. Just an observation.
If ‘misandry’ ever ceases to get the red squiggly line treatment we’ll know something has gone very wrong somewhere.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but there’s thread on the ‘Parks and Recreations’ IMDB message board titled ‘Is the pro feminist, anti-male tone of this comedy too much sometimes?’
There is no escape.
Well, my sister has a lot of vivid dreams about battling aliens, so take heart, men! In the future women will handle the tough stuff by cruising around in space fighting monsters/enemies. You can stay home handing out feathers and growing victory gardens or whatever.
Spell check is MISANDARY! No, wait… MISANDERY! Um…
Well, you know, the fact that some women somewhere at some time in history did some things that were mean/rude/cruel to the men around them means that feminism is totes evil and horrible and women are just rotten to the core, so a 100 year old anecdote that has absolutely no relevance to today’s conditions is completely relevant and a super-awesome platform on which to base
memes to harass women withImportant Activism.Of course, anything that isn’t happening to a woman *right now* (and maybe not even then), is irrelevant to the cause of equality and women should stop talking about it, stop dredging up “ancient history” and just get over it. Because feminism has totally won, don’t you know, and if you REALLY cared about women, you’d focus your attention on *those* women *over there* who have it totally way worse than you do!!!
This post and its commentary has had me thinking about a lot of things today. People have brought up that you’d think the MRAs would be supporters of women in the military if this is how they feel, or that they’d be more supportive of actual men who didn’t want to fight, or veterans. I’m thinking there’s a paradox at play here. I don’t think these guys actually want men to stop being the ones who sacrifice and die in war. This “noble” sacrifice isn’t the problem for them. The problem, I think, is that we keep refusing to give them the proper adoration and thanks for this sacrifice (which, of course, they’re just doing for women). By lack of proper adoration, I mean, we keep suggesting that women’s bodies may be more than their rightful reward for being men, who you know, even though they aren’t soldiers themselves, are kind of like the people who have historically been soldiers, because they have penises too.
I keep bringing up the whole sacrifice thing, because this part of El Rellok’s statement keeps coming back to bother me:
My first thought was, “Well, what in the world do you think sacrifice means to women?” But the more I think about it, the more I think that “sacrifice” has historically not meant quite the same thing for men and women. At least, in the myth and stories our culture is founded on, men sacrifice, but women are sacrificed. Which is why I think we end up with ideas like daintydougal pointed out:
I think this would make perfect sense to these assholes, because (to them) women really are only victims of suffering and sacrifice, but men, you know, choose nobly to do it for others. They only become victims when we aren’t properly grateful and servile to them because they did whatever it was we didn’t ask or necessarily want them to do in the first place.
Sorry for the unfunny. I just haven’t been able to stop thinking about this one.
Semi-OT: turns out about half of Viking warriors previously thought to be men because they were given a warrior’s burial with their sword and shield were actually women accorded that same honour.
Guess we’ll hear the MRAs revising their opinions about how women have always sat at home and sent men to do the sacrificing any time now, right?
Right?
Didn’t think so.
For people who complain about victim complexes, MRAs sure like to keep that martyrdom crown tight.
@Julie
Of course! You see, reactionary asshats constantly get this notion that social justice is about guilt. The MRM is a cargo cult mock-up of a real social justice movement composed mainly of reactionary asshats. Make the math.
Also I don’t think ‘sacrifice’ actually does mean any of those things to most of the mrm. I’d imagine sacrifice to them means occasionally having to act like a grown up. What does this armchair warrior know of ‘agony, suffering and death’?
Probably about as much as he does about history.
Misandairy.