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?
@Redpoppy, Normally, guys embracing something made for little girls like “My Little Pony” would be something I’d absolutely cheer on, if they didn’t have to shit all over it first, and threaten, and obfuscate, and try to ruin it for the little girls, before they could territorialize it for their own. Though, you know, before they say it, #NotALLBronies.
@marinerachel, Um, either, that is someone you dearly love, so he’s totally worth it, or that is among the worst oversharing dates ever. Or, you know, maybe if he was new but did it just right, it was a totally endearing human moment! Ack, I don’t know what to think. 🙂
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.
I am reminded of this:
Mr Prosser’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times whilst his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent’s house being consumed by fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made him feel very nervous…his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses and smoke and the stench of blood. This always happened when he felt miserable or put upon, and he had never been able to explain it to himself. In a high dimension of which we know nothing the mighty Khan bellowed with rage, but Mr Prosser only trembled slightly and whimpered.
Fark, redone with proper tribute to blockquote monster paid this time
I am reminded of this:
marinerachel- my husband is lactose intolerant. If anything, I’m the one who is “punished” if he’s had something very milky. The bathroom is unusable! lol
Belladonna- Yeah that’s why I don’t like them. In general. The #notallbronies caveat aside, I generally find them to be quite insufferable. I also hate it when they pick on characters like Rarity because (she’s my favorite btw) she’s very feminine/prissy. She also has confidence and knows what she wants. A lot of them hate her for it and think she’s like evil or something or a “bitch.” It’s like, hey dudes. Your misogyny is showing. And it’s weird because this show is technically for…umm. GIRLS.
*gasp* Which one?
Are you related to Roza Shanina?
@redpoppy
So I would like to respond intelligently to your commentary about Rarity, but I’ll admit you’ve gone far beyond my knowledge of either My Little Pony or bronyism. My only real experience with this, in stream-of-consciousness, is that I was at an all-night filk not so long ago, and I was tired and ready to go home, but my son, who is awesome, was there with me and having a good time and wanted to stay and sing along, so I was sort of trying to sleep in a chair, except that—air conditioning—I was freezing, and I must have said something about how cold it was, because some dude offered me a fuzzy blanky, and I totally wouldn’t even have noticed that it was kind of pink and had a pony on it, except he said something about “brony.” I just smiled warmly at him, and I really didn’t care, except I felt maybe even a bit more affectionate toward him, because quirky, but mostly it meant I was going to be warmer soon. So ultimately, even though that guy may have been among the world’s worst asshole bronies, ever (although, I can’t help doubting that was true of some guy who’d sit in a filk circle), I feel some kind of fuzzy towards bronies, because his silly blanky kept me warm.
belladonna- there’s always a possibility that he’s one of the good ones. I thought it was really sweet when a bunch of people got together to put up a support page on Facebook for a little boy who got horribly bullied at school for liking MLP. I think some bronies did that. But a lot of people joined it anyway because who cares if a little boy likes My Little Pony? Girls can like things like Ninja Turtles (I did) and Transformers so what’s wrong with the wee boys liking MLP? 🙂
@ marinerachel:
Well… At least you can say he lets it all out…o0…
Thinking to myself… This would not gross me out that bad… I grew up with an RN.
Used to hearing about gross stuff over dinner.
redpoppy: Indeed, if these horrifying MRAs would get behind the idea that it’s okay for little boys to like MLP or Barbies or whatever the fuck interests them, and hey, that’s okay for little girls, too, well . . . , well . . . , um, they’d be feminists then, I guess.
Belladonna- They would be feminists but you know what that means….MISANDRY is afoot.
When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about women’s rights, she started out with a description of a battlefield littered with the corpses of beautiful young women. Her intention was that the male readers would recoil with horror at the thought of the slaughter– so that she could then point out that it was just as horrifying for a woman to contemplate the beautiful young men in their uniforms so terribly slain. She argued that, were women given more say, they would be more anti-war than men.
I think she may be too optimistic. But the point being, it was one of the earliest feminists of all who tied feminism to peace movements. Mother’s Day was invented during WWI as a protest for peace. The white/red carnations weren’t about whether your mother was alive, but whether your son was.
Nova:
Or maybe Lyudmila Pavlichenko?
Why is it that we feeeeeeemales don’t have flashbacks from the feeeeeemales who served? Is that a flaw in the man collective?
I have to say I laughed for a loooong time when he said:
I believe my coworkers are going to talk about me behind my back now. That deserves an image of something. It needs to be the MRA rallying cry! MRA types need to shout from the roof tops :
Ok… having trouble stopping my laughter again. How did he not stop at that line and just wonder “What am I doing with my life?”
Other possible uses of “Misandairy”: The fact that people don’t mind cows, but don’t like putting up with MRA “bull”.
Or: Refusing to listen to MRA’s rants and instead going out to get a milkshake.
That female cows are useful to us alive, but male cows are only useful dead.
And both male and female bovines are generally just called “cows” as a catch-all! Imagine if we used such gendered language on people…. oh wait.
Well, there’s also
breedingspermjacking for the Alpha Bulls.My milkshake brings all the boys to the battlefield.
The Order of the White Feather was in fact fiercely opposed by a number of feminists at the time – some of whom alternatively organised a peace conference in the middle of WW1. (The International Women;s Conference at the Hague). This was attended by both Belgians (who if you know your history had reason to be pro-war) and Germans, alongside the British and American attendees. ,
This was followed up by a tour crossing the war zones and liasing with governments for peace headed by feminist Jane Adams.
In Australia where I am from feminists were heavily involved in opposing conscription in WW1.
The Order of the White Feather is a sad mistake by some feminists – particularly conservatives – but certainly not the only expression of the movement in that period.
The Order of the White Feather was created by a man. He recruited pretty ladies to execute his idea. Why does no one have any problem with him?
We’d been casually interacting for weeks prior to going out together and it had become apparent I had a habit of oversharing that he’d been horrified by a couple times. My whole family works in healthcare. I remember having a friend over for dinner when I was about ten. She vomited at the table because my mother was discussing rupturing ovarian cysts and didn’t realise, hey, that’s gross, particularly when you’re eating. I’ve never curbed the oversharing habit because most of the people around me also work in healthcare or at least have super high gross out bars.
When he began sharing his diarrhoea story and we both realised where it was going he said “Wow, we’re talking about this” and I told him to go ahead. It’s near impossible to gross me out and, at worst, it was payback for a couple overshares of mine he’d been grossed out by over the previous couple weeks.
We went back to his place so I guess it worked.
Our dynamic seems to be I’m hyper-cautious of what I share because he’s the first person in years I’ve had to be sensitive to regarding gross stuff and he’s super relaxed with me to the point he offends himself with some of the intimate details he catches himself sharing with me.
And yes, misandairy is when an MRA starts moaning about injustices against men and you get up and walk away to procure ice cream.
OR when you have diarrhoea following consuming dairy and an MRA has to use the terlet after you.
@Tony C
What reason do you have to call them feminists? They don’t sound like feminists to me. Also, I am highly skeptical of the notion that there can be political conservatives who are also feminists. Most of the time conservative “feminists” are people like Sarah Palin — they use the word, clearly without understanding what it means.
A bit late to the thread (as usual) but I have battle flashbacks, too! In them, I’m Boadicea, razing Londinium. I have a certain empathy for any mother who would go Hulk smash after her children were abused. (Yes, I do realise there was more to it than that, but I heard the mythic, raging mother narrative when I was little, and it… warped me).
Just a guess, but I’m thinking Nova would rather not post information that could potentially identify her to her asshole ex.
Famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were part of the White Feather campaign, and as far as I can see they’re pretty much the sole reason the MRAs like to blame the whole thing on feminists. Does anyone even know the names of any feminists/suffragettes that were involved besides those two?
Wikipedia says “In August 1914, at the start of the First World War, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with support from the prominent author Mrs Humphrey Ward.”
Clicking on the entry for Mrs Humphrey Ward, I learn she was the founding President of founding president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.
And also:
So no, the White Feather campaign doesn’t sound like it was very much led by feminists to me.