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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.
@Falconer
That was my first exposure to TMBG! Blasts from the past…
http://youtu.be/7pG0QTzO-K0
Puddleglum – must be. 😀
Oh, I left a reply for you in the Open thread about that reading, too.
I didn’t know about them until Beloved introduced me to Flood in college, about 1999 or 2000. Then I told my brother about them, and bam! Instant fans. Happened that way a couple years earlier with Pratchett, although we’d read Good Omens shortly after it came out.
Here’s one I’ve been singing since I learned one of the Gits calls themselves Sargon of Akkad:
http://youtu.be/jAMRTGv82Zo
If MGTOWs actually “went their own way” I might have some respect for them.
Get a house, rent rooms out to other MGTOWs. All of you have jobs and contribute to the home space monetarily, with repairs, and games (or whatever) – like a big frat house but without girls.
Ok, cool. That actually sounds like a good, workable plan that would either allow you to work just a little and spend your time and money on hobbies/other pursuits or charge ahead full-steam with a career and amass a small fortune (or retire early and travel – whatever).
LIVE THE DREAM!
It could be pretty sweet.
If that were actually a thing that these guys did, they’d at least be living their stated philosophy in a workable way…
…but all the ones I’ve run across just seem like whiny a-holes.
You know, the guys who fat shame over the supposed health problems of being fat are also the ones who say that women’s health issues are a distraction and not important
Thought occurred to me: Wouldn’t the Raleigh tale, even if true, be an actual real-world example of the inverse MRA myth of the Apex Fallacy? Sure, Queen Elizabeth and other female monarchs had guys kowtowing to them (and QE1 played the game better than almost any before or since), but that was only because there was literally no guy higher ranking than she was.
Damn, once again, an MRA talking-point turns out to be a massive case of inverted projection.
Falconer – thanks for that! I had never heard that before. Don’t think I have one of their albums more recent than Lincoln.
Proxieme – that would make a great reality show. We could watch the Brohaus gradually degenerate into a manky, borderline uninhabitable Lord of the Flies pesthole. (Autocorrect wondered if manky should have been manly. Heh.)
The thing with Raliegh and Elizabeth that you can’t forget is that given the state of London’s sewage system at the time, that puddle [i]probably[/i] didn’t contain much water. It wasn’t just wet feet he’d be keeping her from.
*raises hand* Yeah somehow I imagined myself walking out of the graduation ceremony, math degree in hand, and then companies would fall all over themselves to offer me well paying jobs.
It didn’t turn out that way.
When your only value, only source of money and social standing is in pleasing a man sexually and thinness is required to be an adequate sex object, you’ll do anything to stay thin. My grandmother once told me that in her family you could be a drunk, a gambler or the biggest whore in town and still be welcomed back home, but you better never get fat. Her cousins laughed and agreed that it was true. Being fat would have brought shame on the whole family.
I really liked that Lincoln picture… Thanks for stealing it, AVFM. Stop trying to ruin things I like!
As far as I can tell, the Lincoln artist is a bloke called Jason Heuser who is on deviantArt as ‘Sharpwriter’. He also has one of Nixon fighting a sabre-toothed tiger. The Lincoln image is his best-known, however.
I know there are two college graduates working at my local grocery. Both are men. I know a woman with a business degree working as a receptionist. I know alot of under employed people. In this economy, it’s common.
I also know a woman with a second job at a strip club because being a single mom is hard. She tends bar, but she’s still expected to dress a certain way. I’m sure MRAs would still consider here a lowly tramp. I once lived with a sociology major who was stripping and I had art classes with another exotic dancer. That’s not an easy job either! Have you seen the things they do on those poles? They don’t just shake their groove thangs in their panties. When they helicopter down to the floor head first and stop right before they hit bottom, it honestly scares me. That’s some Cirque du Soliel shit. Respect.
Sir Walter…was HYPERGAMOUS???
Oh, the unmanly, unMGTOW ignominy of it!
Part of me wants “John Galt” to come here and explain what his memes are supposed to be because they’re so incomprehensible. I’m not sure an attempt at explaining would even help though. Considering the MRA penchant for nonsensical teal dears.
Wait but so … as a feminist I complety agree that sex, attraction, and intimacy should separate from financial obligation. A marriage contract has a financial component, legally and/or depending on how the partners define it. (Children obviously are both parents’ obligation, which has nothing to do with their relationship to one another.) I have tried and tried to explain to some MRAs that a culture that enforces financial dependency on women is antithetical to most feminist’s ideas about love, that liberating men and women from these roles would solve the problem they are complaining about, that they can’t have it both ways (women at home and yet also magically financially independent). But of course, they were not trying to hear that.
I always thought the Sir Walter and the cape story was told on him to show what a sycophantic toad eater he was. Then subsequent generations of men called it chivalrous and blamed women, of course.
Oh lordy! These are just awkward.
OT, but someone on the tweeter alerted me to this:
https://twitter.com/astro_bastard/status/543196435638784000
PUAs are puh-thet-ick.
I love factory showroom by tmbg – Till My Head Falls off and The spiraling shape
How much of a hair trigger do you have to be on to jump instantly from “someone wasn’t allowed into a country” to “EXTERMINATE YOUR ENTIRE RACE!”
They aren’t actually the masters of the universe, they just call themselves that, secretspy.
They are a bit touchy, aren’t they? This will totes convince the Japanese government to let you back in later, guys, so do keep it up.
@acrannymint — Those are great, too.
@Robert — if you asked me to tell you what the best TMBG album is since Lincoln, I don’t think I could. That’s like choosing between my children
or worse, a favorite Doctor. Check ’em all out. I think most of them can be found on YouTube as full albums.… Did it really just take two hours to get my kids to sleep? Yes, yes it did.
I’m not satisfied with any of the pictures I’ve taken of them recently, either. Poo.