Congratulations, A Voice for Men. You are having an impact upon the world.
Or at least upon one organization in India, a truly reprehensible group called Masculinist India, which has adopted the histrionic rhetorical style, and even some of the specific arguments, advanced by AVFM and other North American Men’s Rights groups for a series of graphically challenged “masculinist” memes posted on Facebook and on the group’s web page. Masculinist India has even adopted AVFM’s preferred nomenclature, describing its members as “Men’s Human Rights Activists.” They are of course the complete opposite of “human rights” activists, campaigning instead against basic rights for women.
The influence of AVFM and other Western Men’s Rightsers can been seen again and again in Masculinist India’s posts and memes, which have all the sophistication and subtlety of Chick Tracts.
The “feminists made me a misogynist” logic of the meme above, for example, echoes the argument made in “Hate Bounces,” an influential MRA screed by MRA/MGTOW elder “Zed,” and by countless other MRAs including former AVFM Number Two John Hembling.
Other memes borrow not only the arguments of Western MRAs but recycle the same tired stock photos, like the angry woman in this meme, a favorite amongst Western MRAs.
Masculinist India’s graphics-makers are as obsessed with this “argument” as is AVFM’s Paul Elam.
And they share AVFM’s fondness for threatening rhetoric — in this case complete with violent imagery.
And while AVFM’s Elam argues that men serving on juries should vote to acquit all men charged with rape, even if they’re obviously guilty, in order to protest an allegedly “misandrist” court system, the Masculinist India crew celebrates a court decision allowing married men to rape their wives with impunity. The following meme appears on their website under the taunting headline “Know Your Role, Girls.” [TRIGGER WARNING for rape apologism, offensive imagery.]
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I don’t even want to know why they chose bloody fingers for this graphic.
This meme, meanwhile, suggests that it’s an injustice that men are not allowed to forbid their wives from wearing blue jeans.
Human rights: You’re doing it wrong.
Unfortunately, Masculinist India is not some obscure little group with no influence in the world. Its Facebook page has nearly twenty thousand “likes” — several thousand more, that is, than that of AVFM itself.
Apparently in India as well as the United States there is a market for this brand of hatred.
NOTE: Thanks to Cloudiah for bringing these memes to my attention.
Syburi: on that topic, I was looking at an article on xojane (a particularly whiny one, as some of them are) about 30 year old women seemingly not being attractive to men anymore. Cue a stampede of MRAs fresh from Return of Kings claiming that yes, men only want 20 year olds and will always want 20 year olds because evo-psych and other “scientific” bullshit. Along with their standard buffet of sexism and ridiculous ideas.
Here’s the link if you want to play MRA bingo. You’ll probably fill your card.
http://m.xojane.com/sex/30-is-the-new-50-old-age-is-killing-my-dating-life
@sunnysombrera – That evo-psych garbage is such a wank.
As for the attitudes in the rest of it, including architect Alex, give me cats any day.
thanks, kittehserf! 🙂
Syburi: “rage stage” is a good term for it. before I “discovered” feminism and started reading a lot on- and offline about it, it was just a feeling of wrong and unfair from time to time. feminism has helped me a lot to analyse it, which was (and still is) essential to the process of getting rid of the indoctrination.
the “your husband or boyfriend should not be your source of income. it’s a relationship, not a job opportunity”-meme is so fucking ironic. you know what, assholes, you can have that. i don’t think a lot of women actually like to financially depend on guys like you. stop harrassing women when they go outside or are at work. stop treating your wives, daughters and sisters like property. let them get education and let them take a job. and i guarantee you that a lot of women will take the opportunity to stand on their own feet and work to have their own income.
ah, but you wouldn’t like that, wouldn’t you. you want women to continue doing all the work athome and children require – but additionally only need air to survive.
Syburi: and every time they spout it off they never ever provide a source to back it up. Or if they do, it’s something that a) doesn’t confirm their views at all b) says the opposite of their views when in context c) has been debunked ages ago or d) is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Tyra: Their unofficial goal is to have women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen in every sense of the phrase. That’s all that their rantings and ideas can possibly add up to.
@Elektra Kenway
Welcome! Latin American here too 🙂
Have your Paquete de Bienvenida!
Re the use of English on the posters, given the number of languages & dialects on the Indian subcontinent, it does make some sense to use English for your publicity.
Those cats coped better with the water than any I’ve ever seen.
Some of that is over the top, I would admit.
India of course comes from a different starting point in culture and M/F expectations than Western societies, so we are judging some of that rhetoric by our own societal standards.
But this is what radical feminism has wrought, a pushback that threatens to swing the pendulum far the other way, and stay that way. The main difference is, when men put their mind to something as group, have a well conceived plan and goal, it gets done and it gets done conclusively – e.g., A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.
For decades most men would not concern themselves with the womens’ rights movement, because fundamentally they agreed with equality for women and they saw no danger to themselves in reaching such goals.
But now, after years of just letting women have their own way with public policy and law, men have as a whole begun to feel what exactly radical feminism had in mind for them. And they can see where it will go. Hence the Men’s Human Rights Movement.
And in the getting back to some kind of gender based public policy sanity, there will be excesses that are not pretty or kind. But that is what happens when men get pushed hard, and dumped upon, not just by women but by the society and legal system of misandry they have created.
The two-finger salute is of unknown original meaning. It doesn’t carry any particular threat or evoke any particular action (at least in Britain). The folk etymology linking it to cut-off fingers and firing bows is largely disproved, IIRC
The fingers on the poster aren’t right for ‘flicking the vees’, anyway – they should be straighter and the backs of them pointed to the viewer.
I interpreted the picture as referencing ‘proving’ a marriage had been consummated (from the martial rape context), which is a different kind of messed up. “This is what your husband did to you, and what you can’t deny him from doing again because that’s how marriage works”. *spits*
Although, if it is a photograph showing medical attention after trauma, is there a chance it’s related to a specific court case we’re unaware of?
Random Pest,
The MRAs in the west are majority white and completely uninterested in and admit to being ignorant of the ongoing oppression of black men or other men of color. Sure, they’ll still try to piggyback on their oppression when it suits their narrative of all men being oppressed for being men, like pointing to the large numbers of men in prison. The MRM is a bigoted reaction to progress, just like the idiots whining about White Rights and White Pride. In fact, there is a significant cross over between the two groups. Deal with it.
I guess I missed that. And, WTF…as if feminism had nothing to do with politics. How clueless can you get? Anyhow, a “like” gets their news items in my feed, so I just follow those and not the comments. Facebook comments are often too much like a sludgepit, anyway.
That’s…pretty much what I figured it meant. All the rest are so atrocious, why stop short of rape advocacy? Ugh.
And we’re back to patriarchy as a protection racket. “Nice gender you got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.”
I thought the same things. I also thought she looks a bit like Disney’s Pocahontas. Um, wrong Indian.
I always figured that the British two-fingered salute (which is often accompanied by a razzing noise) meant “Up yer bum, and may it make you fart!” An insult-to-injury sort of thing, in other words.
And speaking of “up yer bum”:
Wall of text is assfax. Please to put it back where you pulled it from, and cram it sideways, clown.
Good to see AVFM’s message going global and men being encouraged to express their thoughts freely without fear of being silenced.
You might want to try peddling your snake oil to rubes, because this isn’t the only point in which you are completely and utterly wrong.
Remember folks, death threats, gang rapes, and acid attacks aren’t silencing tactics, criticism is!
Oh really. Pray tell me, which ones are not over the top? I’m not asking because I want to know whether or not you’re a misogynistic asshole, but because I’m morbidly curious as to what brand of a misogynistic asshole you are.
Yeah, because that’s not a veiled threat or anything. “Sure we rape and murder you, treat you like second-class citizens and all that, but you should really stop pushing for an end to injustice against you, or we’ll do something really nasty!”
If you’re defending a “pushback” that involves treating women even worse than you are now, then you are, without a doubt, a hopelessly, disgustingly terrible human being. People like you embody the worst aspects of humanity.
Oh, like MRAs organizing a get-together?
Nice historical revisionism you’ve got there. “All successful projects were made by men, and all failed projects… well, there’s bound to have been a woman messing it up somehow.” But you’re not a misogynist, I take it?
Oh, I know where this is going. “It was a mistake! Them ebil wimminz took a mile and established a matriarchy where men are disposable and silenced! Misandry!”
Oh my, you really are predictable.
A little sidenote here: MRAs don’t speak for any kind of majority of men. They certainly don’t speak for me. They speak to the kind of misogynistic, regressive, power-obsessed, entitled and hateful sort of men who are seeing the world slowly become more equal… and hate it.
Face it, buddy, we men have never been oppressed as a group. We need a Men’s Rights Movement just as much as we need a hetero pride event. MRAs are like that entitled brat at another kid’s birthday party, crying because he’s not the one getting showered with presents and attention. You’re pathetic.
Also, adding the “Human” to MHRM only sends a subtle message that you don’t think of women as fully human, as opposed to men.
More veiled threats. “I’m warning you: Stop trying to build a more equal society, or we will seriously hurt you, and be totes justified in doing so.” You and others in your “movement” truly are miserable excuses for human beings.
You don’t speak for me. You don’t speak for men. You don’t speak for anyone but terrible, self-centered assholes who should not exist in this day and age. Go cry in your sad little corner on the internet, you sack of shit.
@RandomPest:
Yeah, what others have said. MRM is largely a white movement in the west, where whiteness is seen as the standard. I know MRAs are more interested in random gotchas than making an actual point, but do try to keep up, sweetie.
Cranthom Roberts: Kindly get the fuck out of here with your :look what you women made us do” abuser logic.
Just fuck off back to whatever sewer you crawled out from.
Are you seriously, seriously, in all seriousness actually saying that the spin-off Masculinist India group has emerged as a push-back against the oppression of men in India?
Are you for fucking real?
Please return and provide citations. I really, really want to see how you can justify your arse-backwards thinking. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Some of it? I don’t think that quite covers it.
Yes it’s true that India is behind some other countries and has yet to completely transition to industrialized and fully developed nation. So yes, it’s expected that things like gender relations aren’t progressed as much as some other countries. But that doesn’t excuse virulent misogyny. It doesn’t mean change shouldn’t be expected and it doesn’t mean Indian men are inherently misogynistic and can’t change.
Wait, I thought that this violent rhetoric from Masculinist India was due to their culture being less progressed than many other countries. That’s what you just said. How exactly is the oppression of Indian women the fault of western feminists then? You can’t have it both ways.
What exactly have you done that’s so great? Or are you just doing the standard MRA thing and taking credit for things that other men have accomplished simply on the basis of sharing a gender? It’s not like men never screw up their plans. Or do you think women planned the Vietnam war or Nazi Germany’s attempted invasion of Russia?
Also, if women are such feeble planners, why is that “radical feminism” has taken over to such an extent that you believe a violent pushback is justified? Do you think feminism just happened? No. It didn’t. It took women, as a group having a well conceived plan and goal and getting it done. On a smaller scale, women get shit done everywhere every day. Women go to work and still do the second shift (most of the domestic and child rearing work). Do you think that doesn’t take planning and execution? Fuck off with your bullshit. It’s not only men who can do things.
This is not true. There has always been a lot of pushback against feminism. Not from all men but from plenty of them. Plus there have always been anti-feminist women too. Despite the fact that many anti-feminist women know will use the same “feminism has gone too far argument.” Just one of many results from 2 seconds of Googling proves you wrong here. http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm
Not being able to rape and abuse women? Having to treat your female coworkers like human beings and equals? Oh, the horror! You’re so oppressed!
“Look what you made me do!” The abusers mainstay. How original.
Malcolm,
Are you saying that you agree with Masculinist India? Are you saying marital rape should be legal? Be honest.
What exactly have you done that’s so great?
Excuse me, but have you seen those posters?
Shut up, Malcolm.