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?
Excuse the extra “founding president of” in my comment.
It’s especially mind-boggling to me when American dudes whine about the draft and the white feather and etc. We have a couple of wars on right now, and these guys for the most part don’t seem to have served in the military. In fact, I’m pretty sure a majority of American men managed not to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such disposability, such unavoidable cultural pressure to go die for women.
Now that I think about it, there’s a lot of this in the MRM: relatively privileged and comfortable men claiming other men’s hardships as common male experiences, because they know damn well they can’t claim to be oppressed on the basis of their own lives.
Or at least to blame women for their mediocrity.
And if you REALLY cared about equality, you’d focus on *men*.
I sincerely hope “dumbcluck” gets added to the WHTM vocabulary.
Amd Leocigale, your illustrations of that are great!
I had a LiveJournal sock account as “Miss Anne Dree” (socking was fairly common on LJ, so you could post in social justicey communities and not get harassed on your personal journal). I’ve thought about using it on Tumblr or something, but I don’t want to deal with MRA harassment.
Yup. But when have MRAs ever taken a global perspective on anything?
More so if the feather was on fire!
There’s an asshat on LiveJournal who calls it “Misandrony”, but I think he’s been using it since before the MRM became a thing.
There was a thread on the Bad History subreddit dealing with the suffragettes, the white feather campaign, and women and WWI:
http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1zynqo/on_the_role_of_women_in_world_war_one_or_white/
Two words: Alpha Dog.
And the Pankhursts were suffragists, and their work went on hold during the war. Women didn’t start campaigning for the vote again until after it was all over, when there were no more stupid excuses left. And far fewer men to vote, too.
Suddenly, it all makes sense. It was an ANTI-feminist campaign after all! AND misandry…from Teh Menz!
Overladies. Your new feminist /overladies/.
Is there an What I Will Do If I Am The Evil Overlady list ?
I enjoy the idea that they think they’re going to intimidate people with red feathers in order to open a dialogue, or that they’ll ever open a dialogue. Because what’s going to happen when they open that dialogue? When you get right down to it, that respectful dialogue is going to be about how they actually believe that women use sex to coerce men to do what they want, which is something that men who are not MRAs mostly grow out of.
If this bullshit caught on, there would be men who have not seen battle sending these whiny rants to women who have.
How messed up is that?
*clears throat*
I like Pinky Pie best. My kids’ favorite pony is Rainbow Dash.
This is the shiitiest evil calling card I’ve ever seen. And I once read a book where the ruler of the world was a ten year old Ayn Rand enthusiast.
There was this history teacher who used to call me Boadicea when I was 11. Not sure exactly what he’d been smoking to make him associate a tweener with attacking Romans.
Zolnier, that’s a heck of a blurb. What was the book called?
Billy and Howard, I’m doing a let’s read read at Spacebattles, want a link once I get it up?
Huh. And who started those wars? Hmm… men.
“its members don’t seem to know how to engage in any kind of “activism” besides harassing individual women.”
Like you did to this individual Redditor?
The rest of this was just childish non-arguments
@person
“Huh. And who started those wars? Hmm… men.”
What’s your point? Unlike you lot, we don’t feel the need to cast one half of the population as the perpetrator.
You do realize, too, that the 1% of men in power weren’t the ones enslaved to the battlefields, right? Or are you truly that stupid?
Bloody idiot.
El Rellok, is that you?
Oh dear, and he’s a Brit too judging by the idioms. Please allow me to apologize on behalf of my people for this one.
DonB, are you running with the same MRA crowd and Reddit crowds that David talks about, because, if so, you typing this bit might just make me laugh my socks off:
Dude, fedoralings do that kind of stuff all the time! Really. You could play a fun round of bingo with the stock “Every thing bad comes down to
womenfeminists!” phrases they toss out.Hey Don old son, “mocking on a blog” is not harassment. Sending threats, veiled or otherwise; doxxing; physically attacking – these are threats and these are the stuff of MRAs.
So, y’know, piss off, troll.
Eh. He’s no more embrassing than the fuckwits we see from Oz or the US or Canada.
Needs to get more creative, though. Where are the cries of DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH?
Kittehserf: It’s fall, so Farmer Mikey who lives Directly on the Beach and was in interior Carolina visiting his Girlfriend’s Condo is too busy harvesting his Fields of Wheat to be able to tell us all about his Being Older than My Dad and having kids Younger than Me Propositioning Him….
…while fluctuating madly between typing with a forced southern twang and normal text.
You were not around for the last week of discussion in which we found that women were blamed by MRA’s for sending men off to war over the centuries.
We don’t blame JUST men for war, things are always far more complicated.
However, the subset of men discussed on this blog do claim, and blame women for, sitting at home and sending men off to die.
In other words, they blame all women for war.
Person was refuting that bit of nonsense.
But you’re just here to manspleen at us until you feel good and vented, or until you get booted, whichever.
So you might as well have a good whine.
I mean, it’s not like your opinion of our intelligence actually matters to any of us.
Teh lolz are apparently harassment now. These fellows are funny!
“I said something completely fucking stupid on le Reddit and got laughed at on blogs across the internets” is not harassment. It’s a reasonable consequence for being an idiot in public.
It’s funny that these losers are never critical of those men in power who are responsible for utilising men in war (while women were dropping like flies at home in maternal death. It was fucking awesome for them!) They just do mental gymnastics to somehow determine women made those men do dat as women are indeed responsible for all the ills of the world.
But, wait a tic – I’m supposed to believe the bros DON’T try to portray women as responsible for all the world’s ills? But that’s all they do. While they could be advocating for changes in society to improve the lives of male persons they instead bravely soldier on in the neverending fight to portray women as at fault for EVERYTHING that has ever been disadvantageous to a man.
It’s not even going to the space where he normally hangs out and mocking him, which you could kind of maybe sell as harassment. It’s a bunch of people on a blog he’s never heard of before making fun of ideas that he happens to share. Oh, the horrors, how dare we.