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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.
Yeah, that sounds right. I can usually tell someone doesn’t know a lot about education if they think that the humanities is a dead end and that STEM degrees are auto-jobs. STEM isn’t vocational school. I know plenty of people with degrees in biology, math, etc, who didn’t have an job prospects without doing more schooling after. They’ll find that out when they finish high school and then college.
Hey, isn’t John Galt that closeted male sub? Jesus, dude, embrace your kink already, so you can stop trying to express it in incoherent memes.
Haha! We did Cartier (and other early European explorers of Canada) and the Riel rebellion and then (briefly) early 20th century history and then straight into the USSR. I’m still not sure why the 1980’s Canadian government thought it was important that their school children be able to name at least 5 Soviet Republics, excluding Russia.
I am sad I missed the history class teaching about ride-able bears.
We learned all about Lincoln McPieFlag and the 101st Grizzly Brigade in my school, but that was because all the teachers had feminist hair.
Also, LOL at the comma in “I now pronounce you, husband and wife.”
@Cthulhu’s Intern: My questions began at, why does the alligator have a nuclear device?, rose through Are those the golden arches back there? and petered out about the time I got to the wheel chair mecha. Then my investigative faculties shut down and I just let it all wash over me, as the clear brook washes over a stone. I was among it, but unchanged by it.
Yes these confusing posters (and the creepy logo is such a nice touch) all just scream Human Rights Movement. I can imagine young men everywhere seeing these and waking up to the terrible oppression they face every day.
“YEAH! Fight the power! FUCK…uh…Abraham Lincoln. And…bears, apparently. DOWN WITH PUDDLES. NO MORE SHARKS! NO MORE SHARKS! NO MORE SHARKS!”
I bet you today’s US history textbooks don’t even mention Rush Limbaugh, while the mainstreaming of his radical ideas into the Republican party is the major theme of conservative politics since like, before Waco.
So, about that free autographed copy of “no mum I’m busy”…
@Cthulhu’s Intern
…I like this version of history a lot better.
Okay, those presidental images are awesome. All portrait paintings ever should involve riding your choice of a) bear, b) velociraptor or c) robotic unicorn with lightsaber horn.
grumpyoldnurse – if the pedestal had a flared peak, it’d be more akin to sitting on a stool, which I think is supposed to be better for your posture?
So clearly putting a coat over a puddle is really just trying to make sure you don’t get back problems!
Given all the sub subtext here, I’m starting to think some of these guys are joining these groups so they can feel like women have their balls in a vice without having to admit they wish a woman had their balls in a vice.
#1 just shows how little MRAs understand of feminism. Pretty sure the feminist version of history is highlighting the women that did do awesome stuff, but get glossed over in history class because they are women.
Actually, the meme makes even less sense than that, because MRAs believe history consists of men doing awesome things and riding bears while simultaneously being at the beck and call of all the women who are responsible for all the evil wars and killing.
A better version would be Rosalind Franklin at the top, and the bottom would have Ben Franklin taming a T-Rex to lie over a puddle so a woman in misandrous stilettos can stay dry. WHY DO YOU HATE DINOSAURS, FEMINISTS? HUH?
I really want to believe that Lincoln is holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. The image just wouldn’t work otherwise.
I tracked down the source of the Lincoln poster to http://sharpwriter.deviantart.com/gallery/ – it’s pretty good – I especially liked “FDR in power armor” – but he started running out of ideas when he got to some of the later presidents, and by the end the best he could do was “Obama riding a lion and wielding a crossbow and a lightsaber.”
“Putting a cloak across a puddle” is an apocryphal story about Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I. In the story, Elizabeth was impressed by his faux show of humility and rewarded him with a whole pile of clothing of greater value. (But if the picture is a reference to that then the artist got Elizabeth’s clothing and accessories all wrong.)
So I guess the point the artist is trying to make is that history tends to give leaders more credit than they deserve – leaders rarely do great deeds on their on. Many times they just surround themselves with flatterers and live a life of idle luxury while other people manage the great deeds with no recognition. That’s true enough, only I’m not sure why he thinks feminists are to blame.
After looking back, a bit, I’ve decided that #3 is actually the worst of this bad lot. It’s the way they imply that all female college/university students are sex workers. While I’m sure that is a thing for some people, the idea that any student at a ‘respectable’ school is prostituting herself to pay tuition seems like a misogynist sexual fantasy. It also plays into the ‘women get ahead with their weaponised sexuality’ thing they love to drone on about.
Whatever happened to meme #7?
They’re all telling, but the most entertaining is wives as insatiably hungry, wet, pink, sharp toothed, fishy orifices ready to devour their husbands.
That one is a Freudian field day.
If so, that at least makes a lick of sense. It would hardly be the most extravagant thing a courtier ever did to court the favor of royalty.
The fat shaming vs. the impossibly skinny siren just scream: “It scares me when women don’t conform to my ideal of femininity and it scares me when they do.”
M the Social Justice Ranger
“#6: … Where the fuck are her organs? O_o”
Organs make you fat and are thus misandristic,
Feeling jolly proud of my three kidney transplants right now.
If it’s the constitution, than it’s a mirror image of that horribadness that was Michelle Bachman asserting that the founding fathers fought against slavery.
Re. the pedestals – I think a character in one of Stephen King’s short stories said it best, but I’m going to have to paraphrase: “Why would men think that a woman would ever want to be put on a pedestal? A woman will piss down her own leg if she can’t squat.”
They just don’t know which is scarier. Is it a woman using her boner pleasing prowess to control and oppress teh poor menz? Or it an unpleased boner? Either way, it’s all our fault. It’s misandry to expect men to think with something besides their boners.
@Puddleglum isn’t that one of the abilities of the Social Justice Druid?
I looked up the coat-puddle thing and apparently it was a story told about Raleigh and the Queen but he probably didn’t even do it. It was the kind of over the top thing he could conceivably do, though, and definitely not something any old bloke would do. I can only talk for the 17th century, but in bad weather, ladies who had to walk anywhere in the rain would wear boots (although they’d better change their stockings as soon as they got home) but if they got caught unexpectedly in the rain with daintier shoes on, gentlemen would probably direct them into suitable shelter and go fetch a carriage. Or if it was just one unexpected puddle or muddy patch, and they were with a gentleman acquaintance, one option would be to be jumped or carried over it. Or they would just walk through it and deal with it. That kind of ‘chivalry’ wasn’t that common, and generally ladies would take possible rain into consideration when making plans or picking shoes.
@seraph:
“Please, Your Majesty, someone’s going to go to the New World and
discover a whole new category of cancersget rich importing tobacco, and I would really really like it if you chose me.”