A Voice for Men’s ongoing campaign to convince the world that “Men’s Human Rights Activists” are a bunch of petty, malicious, sexually insecure douchenozzles continues apace.
I mean, that must be what they’re really up to, right? Because no one who actually had any real interest in human rights of any kind would produce “memes” like the one above and all the rest below, delivered to your eyes straight from AVFM’s Fcebook page.
At their best, AVFM’s memes are merely baffling …
… or ridiculous.
AVFM also loves appropriating the images of famous people, and pretending that these people are somehow on their side. But their choices of imaginary celebrity endorsers can be a bit, well, ironic. A couple of days ago in one of my posts on the iconography of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theorists, I posted a neo-Nazi meme showing a crudely photoshopped picture of Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock endorsing Adolph Hitler — a rather odd conceit, given that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are both Jewish, and that the original Star Trek series promoted tolerance and a very 60s-liberal sort of multiculturalism.
Well, here’s AVFM’s attempt to make Spock an MRA:
Dudes, hate to break it to you, but Nimoy is actually a … feminist. Really. In the 60s he demanded that Star Trek’s producers pay actress Nichele Nichols the same as her male counterparts on the show. And as a photographer today, Nimoy acknowleges that he is heavily influenced by feminism, partiularly the writings of Jewish feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the founders of Ms. magazine.
So that’s not really his “listening to feminism face” at all.
An astonishing number of AVFM’s memes are so sexualized that they are more or less soft-core porn. Even their anti-male-rape memes, ostensibly attempts to raise consciousness about the rape of men by women, feature seductive, scantily clad women, undermining whatever message they are supposed to be getting across.
But the most, er, revealing memes are the ones that hint at deep sexual insecurities on the part of the meme makers and those who “like” them on Facebook. (The images that follow are mildly NSFW.)
This meme, for example, actually features the dreaded vagina dentata:
[slightly risque meme removed]
And this one attempts to shame male feminists by suggesting they enjoy being penetrated, an act that’s really only “shameful” if you have some rather fucked-up notions of what is and what isn’t appropriate male sexuality. And a certain degress of hatred and fear of female sexual agency.
[slightly risque meme removed]
AVFM meme-maker John Galt also continues to be weirdly obsessed by me.
And then there’s this lovely meme, intended as a joke at the expense of a feminist activist who’s been on AVFM’s enemies list ever since she told some AVFM dudes to shut up at a demonstration several years ago. (I’ve crossed out her face, because no one really deserves to be made into an AVFM meme.)
[slightly risque meme removed]
The joke is obviously supposed to be at her expense, suggesting that she is so unattractive that she makes penises wilt. But you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to realize that this isn’t the real story here. This is a woman demonized by AVFM and other antifeminists because once, several years ago, she shouted down some dudes. It’s not her appearance that frightens their penises; it’s the fact that she wouldn’t put up with their bullshit.
Guys, you’re not fooling anyone, except yourselves.
Bina,
Every troll thinks he’s going to deliver something we haven’t seen before. Does he think it’s our first week on the internet? Or does he have an over inflated ego and think his tired ass MRA talking points and random caps locked words are a sign of great intellect?
Found Duerstisms’s source for the feminist quotes copypasta. Tried googling a couple to see if I could find their source. Could only find anti-feminist sites that reproduce the quote ver batim without linking to the quote in context.
Duerstisms, I doubt you clicked the link to a previous article on this blog where many of those quotes were dissected, so here’s a little taste. This one:
Here’s the full quote, minus the ellipses. (hope this embeds!)
http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/marilynfrenchactualquote.png?w=604
So yeah, when she says “the vast majority of men in the world do one or more of the above,” “the above” includes much less extreme things than just beating, killing, and raping.
My STEM interested daughter is writing a paper on Gamergate.
I think there is something sort of karmic about all that hate toward women being the source of an “A” on a girl’s report card.
“Research your own fuckin’ movement why dontcha? It’s rife with baggage and has a TON to answer for. It’s not all rainbows and sprinkles.”
Oh. I see. It’s full of fabricated quotes and out-of-context quotes from works of fiction that none of us have ever, ever seen or investigated before ever.
Thanks for doing our research for us. Clearly you excel at research.
Yeah, I think I’ve seen that copy-pasta list before. Wasn’t it also posted by another snot-nosed young MRA, that “Voice for Male Students” guy, whose name at the moment eludes me? I think it was. And it was debunked. That was MONTHS ago, if not years.
And yet, that stupid listicle is STILL making the rounds. It’s like these guys are so new to the Internets that they actually have no idea that this thing is that old, and that long debunked. It must be terribly shocking to realize they’re onto nothing, let alone anything new. No wonder they feel like they have to yell at us like we’re misbehaving little kids.
The funny thing about shirtgate is that feminists didn’t get all that outraged. We said the shirt was sexist and inappropriate and emblematic of misogyny in STEM. It prompted many women to tell their stories of misogyny they experienced in these fields. We even recognized that is was a move made out of ignorance. That he was more privilege blind and careless than malicious. After he apologized, we moved on.
It’s misogynists who threw the tantrums. They’re still complaining about it months later. They’re the ones who went into a frothing rage.
Typical projection that we always see from reactionaries. They are angry all the time. They are aggrieved and full of hate. So they accuse of us of over sensitivity, hysteria and hate. They respond to reasoned criticisms or snarky mocking with rage and then call us over emotional. It would be funny if it didn’t so often lead to death threats.
@grumpycatisagirl:
Silly, we aren’t supposed to actually research the quotes, we’re supposed to just look up buzzfeed-style “top 10 evil-bad things feminists said” and subsequently give up the whole enterprise. Actually looking at the quotes in context and how they were manipulated to sound much worse than reality (if you can even find the context, because the buzzfeed-style lists just reproduce the text), is misandry.
When the shirt guy apologized, that’s when he started getting hatetweets from antifeminists. It is not feminists who attacked that guy.
The oddest thing is that a number of that list, even in context stripped, mangled form isn’t all that bad.
Like the Susan Brownmiller ones. Some men raping helps enforce a systm where the threat of it is a problem.
The worst thing you can say about that is: “well, I guess that’s true. Huh”
@Fibinachi:
Yeah, some of the quotes only start sounding terrible if you bunch them up with a bunch of other more sinister-sounding quotes. Your brain starts latching on to the bad-sounding things without really paying attention to the content. It’s basically psychological priming, and it works as long as you don’t read too carefully.
It’s beside the point because sexual preferences aren’t oppression. Because getting laid isn’t a human right.
But, I’m wondering why he’s assuming that American women think uncut penises are gross. I’m an American woman and I don’t think they are. I’ve never heard another woman say it either. And I tend to make friends with women who are open about sex. I’m guessing this assumption comes from TV and movies. Misogynists always get all their information about female sexuality from either pop culture or men on the internet. It never even occurs to them to listen to women. Penis size and appearance is actually not a big priority in choosing a partner for the vast majority of us.
Also, he ignores that some women are lesbian or asexual and don’t have a penis preference and some men are gay or bi and very well may have a penis preference.
Misogynists these days are so inconsistent. Which is it, boys? Are feminists man hating lesbians or heterosexual pretty girls who were so cruel as to fuck men who aren’t you? It can’t be both.
Hello, Canadian woman here (that’s NORTH American), just chiming in to tell you you’re dead wrong here (as you have been everywhere else so far, ha ha). We’re not socialized to have any opinion or preference on the matter at all. I’ve had sex with men who were circumcised and men who were not. Could hardly tell there was any difference. To be honest, the only thing I could see was that the uncut guys’ dongs were wearing hoodies, while the cut guys’ dongs were not. It made no difference to their performance or their apparent enjoyment of the act. It made no difference in terms of being able to use condoms. And it certainly made no difference to how I responded. The guy’s individual personality is far and away more important to any woman than how his penis looks.
I don’t know where you got the idea that circumcision has anything to do with a woman’s wants at all, since it actually has its roots in patriarchal religions in which women had little or no say in their sons’ lives at all. And in more recent times, it was done across the board (again, by a very male-dominated medical establishment) as a hygienic precaution, since pulling back a baby boy’s foreskin and washing underneath it can be tricky for a new parent (not necessarily the mother; dads are just as capable of bathing babies as moms are, and frankly, they should step up to that plate.) The hygienic aspect does have some validity, as circumcised men get fewer sexually-transmitted infections than uncircumcised ones do. It is easier to keep a trimmed penis clean than an untrimmed one, and infections happen more often to guys who can’t or won’t wash under their foreskins. That’s just a plain old scientific fact. As is the fact that smegma is full of dead skin cells, urine, old semen and all kinds of bacteria, and can smell bad if it’s not thoroughly washed away. If you don’t want to go near a long-unwashed vagina because you find it gross, you can’t reasonably expect us to be thrilled about your own less-than-clean peen. Any repugnance a woman may have toward an uncircumcised penis is likely to stem from poor hygiene and smegma odor, not the mere appearance of a foreskin. And that problem is easily solved by plain old WASHING.
And sometimes there are even medical indications for circumcision, such as a too-tight foreskin cutting off circulation to the glans, or one damaged in an accident becoming scarred or infected. If you have to lose some skin to save the organ, that’s no tragedy.
But none of that can honestly be called “mutliation”, as it does not impair penile function at all, and you are being frankly ridiculous to characterize it as such (as Kirby has already pointed out from his own experience). If you’re not getting large chunks of the shaft lopped off, as happens to the clitoris in FGM, and then getting the remainder stitched up so tightly that you can’t have sex without a lot of pain, and can hardly even pee, you’re NOT being mutilated. The honestly worst thing about it is the fact that it is so often done without informed consent, sometimes not even from the parents — and, if part of a religious rite, possibly by men not qualified to do minor surgery, under less than sanitary conditions, meaning slip-ups and infections are a much greater risk.
But again, women and their (imagined) sexual preferences have never had anything to do with ANY of that.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
Sure it can! All it takes is a little
http://cdn.teen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/spongebob-imagination.gif
(My sincerest apologies to Spongebob for associating him with these terrible people.)
Is it strange that I’m kind of enjoying this troll? It sucks that he doesn’t seem to want to actually respond to anything, but once you accept that’s how he operates then it turns into something like a gameshow, where he’s putting out challenges for us to dissect and argue against. If he moves on, that indicates we “beat” the challenge and qualified for the next round.
He’s just hands-off enough that I can sit back and enjoy everyone’s fisking, and his subject is mainly men rather than women so the tediousness is lacking that extra edge that makes it super offensive.
Perhaps when he starts repeating himself and acting like nobody addressed the point eight times before, he’ll start getting too boring. For now, however, at least for me, it’s kind of relaxing.
Could the belief that most women prefer circumcised men come from all the porn MRA’s tend to watch?
Ditto.
I have heard women say they don’t like them as much as circumcised cock. . That’s what normalizing something will do. It skews our vision of how people “should” look.
It never kept any of those women from having affairs with uncircumcised men. So, they must not have been too turned off by their uncut state.
@spindrift Probably. MRAs seem to have taken a lot of “women’s sexual preferences” ideas from porn e.g huge dongs, jackhammer sex, that women will orgasm if she says no but you force yourself on her anyway.
I think so. The prevalence of porn (an industry traditionally controlled by and marketed to men) combined with a lack of sexual education in the US contributes to alot of misconceptions about sex and the human body.
I like a little pr0n in my life, but most of it is just grotesque. The dry vaginas and chafed penises. The guy who pounds away like he thinks women get off by having their cervix jack hammered. The terrifying, overflowing cornucopia of bigotry and abuse. The uncomfortable positions and general awkwardness. The horrible, horrible production quality. The seemingly universal hairless and spray tanned bodies. The complete lack of anything resembling actual attraction or passion. All of those things make pron far less appealing than it could and should be.
Thank goodness that is changing. We’re seeing more feminist porn, more variety of bodies, ages and races that are not fetishized or demeaned.
Does anyone else ever listen to Sex Nerd Sandra? I do occasionally. It’s made me appreciate how much we need sex educators. We need activists to take the dialogue about sex away from fundamentalists and bigots. I think we also need activists in the porn industry.
Guest
WAIT WAIT WAIT. Like Sacramento, California? Or is there another Sacramento I’m not aware of? I only ask because I live in the California one.
Lea
QFT.
At best, the shirt was damn tacky, and to wear it on national television while announcing a huge scientific breakthrough should be a no-no.
At worst, it is, as many other commenters have mentioned, a symptom. This kind of little thing is usually a red flag indicating what kind of environment his workplace is.
Also, way to erase the contributions of his whole team, you horrifically angular fuckbucket. He was NOT someone who single-handedly landed a satellite on a comet, he was part of a larger team, and they all did their part.
He was chosen as a representative, and he flubbed it up. And he apologized, so we’ve moved on. He realized he was wrong, and he said he was sorry. That’s all we wanted. And then people attacked him for apologizing, and attacked us for “forcing” him to apologize.
Really, y’all need to make up your minds.
Honestly, if I fucked up like that though, and I knew I was going to get complaints either way, I’d rather err on the side of not looking like a complete ass and just apologize.
I tend to think the vast majority of men who complain about circumcision don’t genuinely care about the issue but just use it as a cudgel against feminists. To my knowledge most men do not feel like their lives have been negatively effected by it. It usually comes up when anti feminists bring it up. Certainly MRAS don’t care about bodily autonomy.
@WWTH Agreed. Same with the draft. They’re probably aware that it’ll never actually happen to them but the fact that it exists in theory is enough. Even though the existence of the draft has nothing to do with women or feminism and they get told this REPEATEDLY, they keep waving it around like it’s a valid accusation.
I don’t know why, but I find this entirely too hilarious. I’m going to steal it for IRL use, okay?
Yup.
And even more ironic, circumcision arose in times of extreme patriarchy, was perpetuated by a blatantly patriarchal sense of conformity, and the current trend away from it can at least partly be credited to feminist moms who value their sons’ right to body autonomy and informed consent. Not only is the idea that “women EXPECT circumcision” false, but the idea that feminists are somehow promoting it is so ridiculous as to be downright laughable. No, dude, we’re not pushing for boys to get snipped so we can oppress them; in fact, some of us are, at least in our own private lives, pushing back against it. Not so much because it’s oppressive, mind you, as that it isn’t strictly necessary for most guys, and avoidance of unnecessary medical procedures is, in fact, a feminist thing.
@ParadoxicalIntention–yes, the one and only California State Railroad Museum:
http://www.csrmf.org/
If you haven’t been there, and like trains, you’re in for a treat. I did a project there one summer and had a blast except omg it was hot. I remember the first time I visited I walked 30 blocks from the train station to an office I was going to and I thought I was gonna die.
@gilshalos–I was in the Outer Hebrides in the weeks leading up to the referendum, and pretty much everyone there was a Yes, so I was surprised and disappointed at the result. Have you noticed any changes/negative repercussions since then? The fact that the vote was so close, despite such blatant No media slant, should have been a wakeup call, but I haven’t heard anything since the immediate aftermath.
fromafar2013
Go ahead. It’s the result of an insult formula that seems to be working for me rather well:
[Adverb] [Adjective] [Swear] [Noun].
Guest
Aaaaah yes. I’ve been there before when I was really little on a school field trip. I spent from kindergarten to the early parts of the fourth grade in Sacramento (when I was unfortunately dragged out-of-state by my abusive stepfather), and we had some cool field trips. We went down the river on an old-timey river boat for one. I forget the name of it, but it’s still in service.
Old Sac is a really awesome place, though sometimes the curbs can be a hassle. I love going to Evangeline’s Costume Mansion around Halloween. Because holy shit they have some good stuff. (They sell the cheap shit too, but their steampunk/Victorian stuff looks so pretty and well-made! Like it was for regular use!) My uncle took me in there when he was looking for a shirt for his Obi Wan costume last year, because my little cousin (his grandson) was going as R2-D2.
http://www.evangelines.com/
Year-round, they only have the gift shop open, but there’s some cool things in there too! I found some really nice Deadpool magnets I wanna get my hands on eventually.
WWTH
Of course they only care about it when we’re involved! They have to keep up appearances when they’re around us to always seem like they’re better!
That’s why they puff out their chests whenever one of us walks in a room. They’re getting ready to blow a lot of hot air.