The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
From time to time I like to check in on the Facebook page for A Voice for Men, to see how that eminent men’s human rights organization’s program to advance the human man rights of human men through badly designed and even more poorly conceived graphic “memes” is going.
Well, I can report that this program is going, and going, and going, a bit like a famous battery-powered bunny.
Looking through them today, I couldn’t help but notice the weird sexual undertones — and overtones — of many of the memes, and realized that, while none of the memes tell us much about the world, they do, in an altogehter accidental way, offer some pretty interesting insights into the ids of those making and “liking” them on Facebook.
You don’t have to be a trained psychoanalyst to see the not-very-well-hidden straight male sexual insecurities that lie behind a large number of AVFM’s memes — both the ones they create themselves and the others that seem to have arrived on the AVFM page after being forwarded via email from someone’s cranky misogynistic uncle. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1) AVFMers have apparently convinced themselves that the history of mankind is the story of nice guys being nice to snooty women who won’t date them.
2) The straight men who make up the bulk of AVFM’s audience are pretty much terrified of women.
3) A lot of these guys seem to really enjoy fantasizing about women being forced into crappy jobs and/or sex work.
4) One of AVFM’s meme makers, the fellow who goes by the name of “John Galt,” has trouble distinguishing between the real world and certain (perhaps unacknowledged) sexual fetishes he appears to be a little obsessed with.
5) Straight cis male AVFMers hate fat women who don’t please their boners, and are angry at feminists for convincing at least some fat women not to hate themselves.
6) These AVFMers evidently prefer women who are very young, very thin, and photoshopped into anatomically implausible proportions and positions. But they simultaneously hate these women for giving them boners.
8) AVFMers really, really hate male feminists — and pretty much every man who doesn’t hate and fear women like they dO — and not-very-subtly project their own sexual insecurities onto them.
9) They also really, really, really hate me.
But I think that’s probably because they’re jealous that I have that second pair of arms.
Even the attack chickens would disdain it.
I get it, he’s a fan of old-timey music. “Walk Like a Man,” and all. Very ’50s.
This guy comes on a feminist blog and thinks he’ll score points by using “feminist” as a term of abuse. Bit if a reading comprehension issue here, methinks.
This dude seems to have so many issues, the reading comprehension problem probably gets lost in the mix.
If you say you don’t hate men, then brag about drinking male tears, you might be a feminist. Only feminist are capable of saying something as bigoted as “I drink male tears.” It’s clear I’ve reached the cesspool of the internet here. The hypocrisy, the attacks and the bigotry! But not all feminists are like YOU, right? Ha! I’m done with you bigots. Thanks for the hateful feminist bigotry screen caps!
What do you suppose man walk is. Sorta like the baby elephant walk or the dance of the sugar plum fairies?
It’s?
Is that supposed to be “meme is a fast food worker” (however odd that would be) or did he just use “it” for the woman in the meme?
((English is not my mother tongue so maybe that’s why this looks so jarring to me.))
Um, you know that Rorschach tests are just pictures of inkblots shapes, right?
Even if we accept that the pictures used in MRA memes have same amount of meaning as some random blotches, what about the text?
Is that some kind of “Rorschach text”? The apex form of “Words mean what I want them to mean”?
We have a flounce! Bit of a copy pasta flounce, similar to so very very many previous MRA flounces true, but I will give it a three if he sticks it.
I went to their page, I had a “discussion” with a MRA on YouTube a while back, that FB page is equally sad. Most of the men in my life are evolved far beyond those levels of pathetic ignorance. I was sorely tempted to respond to some of their posts but I know it’s pointless. I think it’s a good thing that they are as hateful as they are, hopefully most of them will be too fearful of women to ever spawn.
I hope he doesn’t, I feel like watching troll fireworks tonight…
TIL words mean whatever some random d00d wants them to mean, no more, no less.
(I totally encourage you to screen cap that. I think it’s rather misandrous) 🙂
Man tears, man tears,
Booey-hooey man tears!
Man tears, man tears,
Drink them up, YUM!
I liked that one. The impotent rage, the clicheness, the meaningless threat. A 7 from the Angeleno judge.
You can cut the dramatics fella, you’re doing a very poor job of baiting imaginary feminist stereotypes. No amount of fake outrage is going to turn this conversation into anything other than us making fun of you and these sadass memes of shitbag MRA talking points.
You’re clearly dedicated to the “does this bother you, I’m not touching you, why is this bothering you, I’m not touching you” school of pre-teen internet taunting/debating. You haven’t made even one half-decent response yet, puzzlingly, seem to think you’re somehow clever. Congratulations, you’ve proved to be an exceptionally poor communicator and petulant manchild in multiple medias, now go back to the worst parts of Reddit.
He haz teh disappoint because we’re not taking his hatemongering seriously enough and flaming him back. Which only goes to prove that Margaret Atwood was right when she said that a woman’s worst fear is getting killed, while a man’s is only being laughed at.
Hmm. Comparing women to monstrous creatures; shaming random women for not fitting into a very narrow cultural ideal; objectifying those women who do fit into that narrow beauty ideal by using their scantily clad bodies to randomly adorn a poster; ridiculing young women who work in low paying jobs because the economy sucks; ridiculing sex workers, and implying they are stupid; implying that women are so flighty and delicate that a “sexist shirt” would drive them away from a STEM field; body-shaming a man who doesn’t agree with you; shaming feminist men by comparing them to a woman’s body part, because obviously anything related to women is shameful and disgusting; and commiting grave historical errors = men’s rights!
Ironically re-appropriating the stereotype of the “man-hating feminist” and chuckling over the whining of misogynist men who complain about not being able to treat women as objects = horrible bigoted hateful attacking bigotry!
@Manwalk
You do realize we don’t actually drink men’s tears, right? We also don’t take pleasure in men’s pain. As others have mentioned, feminists aren’t trying to deny men rights or make them suffer. We do enjoy laughing at misogynists, trolls and everything in between, though.
I know this might be hard for someone from the manosphere to understand, but when we talk about drinking male tears, it’s not accompanied by bizarre power fantasies involving men’s suffering. We aren’t saying “ha ha, men cry and that makes me happy” (or at least I’m not). I’m sure there are some feminists who do go that far and do want to see men suffering, but that’s not because they’re feminists. It’s because they’re vindictive assholes. Generally, I don’t see many feminists poking fun at the serious issues men face*.
On the other hand, many of the men in the manosphere DO seem to enjoy the idea of women suffering for whatever reason (see: women being sexually exploited just so they can pay their way through college). It’s outright vindictive. When Elam made a t-shirt with “Misogyny Bunch” written on it in an attempt to be satirical of how AVfM is viewed… well, there’s plenty of evidence that he IS a misogynist, so it didn’t have the same effect as when we feminists/’SJWs’ talk about how we feed on the privilege-filled tears of white cis men.
In short: no, we aren’t going to drink your tears or steal your sperm in the night. I know that’s hard to grasp for manospherians. We will, however, pretend that we’re going to do that until you go away. Oooga booga!
*No, poking fun at male entitlement and misogyny is not the same as, say, making fun of men who get raped, men who go through abusive relationships, men who are suicidal, etc. The latter is what I mean by ‘serious issues [that] men face’. Just clarifying since people who support AVfM memes can’t seem to tell the bloody difference.
My guess is it’s something like this, only not as entertaining:
http://feminspire.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tumblr_inline_mp34ccERgS1qz4rgp.jpg
I read this blog, and a lot of other feminist blogs, semi-regularly but don’t usually comment. I just had to today so that I could say, thank you. This comment thread has been a thing of beauty.
Oh, if only the Man Walk was the Silly Walk! Or at least, that type of silly walk.
I think he’s trying to tell us we’re crazy, and that he’s qualified to judge this based on how we react to his random gibberings over the Internet.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/692/19789999.jpg
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
We’re actually the good cop.
Mezza
Speak for yourself… I regularly break into homes in the middle of the night and steal sperm. I’m known throughout Great Britain as spring-heeled sperm-jack.
Considering that they make prison rape jokes, or belittle men who get abused, or suggest that men they don’t like kill themselves, I don’t think the supporters of AVfM truly consider them to be ‘serious issues.’ Well, unless they’re useful for attacking feminism.
About the meme in number 9, I don’t get the “no mum I’m busy” part. Obviously David is successful as the Managing Editor of a tabloid, so why would that be the title of his memoirs (I’m assuming it was an insinuation (and attempt at shaming) that he lives at home with his mother)?
Actually that whole meme makes no sense at all. It starts out as being suggestive of a missing persons poster, but then it’s actually an advertisement for a phone number to call to get a book signing? How does that work? But I guess that’s pretty par for the course with John Galt memes.