Pity the poor MRA meme-makers. It’s hard for them to find real-world images to illustrate their deeply held belief that women in general (and feminists in particular) secretly or not-so-secretly run the world.
Indeed, there seems to be a lot of photographic evidence that supports a rather different conclusion about women and power. Do women run the US congress? Nope.
The Supreme Court? Nope. (Dudes circled for easy reference.)
Corporate Boards of Directors? Nope and nope and nope and nope and nope and nope.
Happily for MRAs there are still some options left – like stock photos.
The word of stock photos is a strange one indeed, one filled with women laughing alone with salad and cheering themselves while crouched on scales in their underwear.
Oh, and did I mention that stock photo sites like to make their pics of women sexxxxayy? And that they seem to have the same confusion between sexy and sexist as Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap?
Indeed, when Cate Savilla of Buzzfeed recently tried some common female-centric search terms on stock photo sites, these were some of the weirdly sexualized pictures that showed up in the results.
Bingo!
Apparently a lot of guys imagine feminism as some kind of session with a dominatrix. Never mind that in the real world, men getting trod upon on by women in high heels often pay quite handsomely for the experience. No, in the minds of the world’s MRAs this is a perfect image to represent the jackbooted high heeled stormtroopers of feminazi-ism.
Attach a vaguely threatening caption, and the URL for A Voice for Men, and you’ve got yourself a meme!
H/T — MUH Men’s Rights Activism and Philip Rose
UPDATE: I just realized that I featured this meme before. Well, the post still stands.
@Dolores,
If they’re trying to make memes referring obliquely to the physical and sexual abuse of men by women, why are they sexualizing the acts? That just doesn’t add up at all, especially since the photos seem to be depicting BDSM, not abuse, because the images are clearly sexualized. Photos calling attention to those issues would not be sexualized.
Myriad
The really funny thing is that practically everyone can see this, excepting for themselves. Which is what makes them so laughable. 😀 Not only are they hypocrites, they are also extremely stupid and lack self awareness.
I don’t have a problem with fans shipping platonic relationships as lesbian ones, there’s so little lesbian representation that sometimes you have to make your own. I think a bigger issue is the limited number of female characters in the media we consume, wich often leads to there only being 1 or 2 possible lesbian ships. With limited female representation it means that to create lesbian representation you’ll often find yourself turning the only platonic female friendship into a lesbian one, cause there’s no other options. And at that point you get into “people who are attracted to eachother can’t just be friends” territory.
And in the end it’s just fans reinterpreting a thing they love and sharing it with people, and I don’t really see a problem with that.
mildlymagnificent-UUGHHH! It is already getting flooded with moronic comments like the Always Like a Girl ad. 🙁
I’d expected that.
At least there are some times when I follow the rules of Don’t. Read. The. Comments.
Glad I was right about this one.
@Dvärghundspossen:
Yes 🙁
It’s a heavily used tactic in politics – you repeat the same phrase about the opposition over and over and eventually people who don’t read the news or question what they hear just accept it as fact. Makes me cross that people fall for it and that politicians exploit it. We really need to teach critical thinking in schools, but then politicians would actually have to work for their power and they decide what we teach in our schools, so…
Re: Hypergamy – I met an MRA in the wilds of the internet the other day who was claiming, in all earnestness, that 10% of the men are dating 90% of the women. I’ve heard lopsided dating stats before, spouted as if they were true, but that one–egads, how could that even work?
I decided it was not worth the brain pain to try arguing that one…
@Kootiepatra “Re: Hypergamy – I met an MRA in the wilds of the internet the other day who was claiming, in all earnestness, that 10% of the men are dating 90% of the women. I’ve heard lopsided dating stats before, spouted as if they were true, but that one–egads, how could that even work?”
It becomes easy to understand once you realise that by 90% of women doesn’t mean 90% of all women. It only considers those women the MRA considers attractive, so it’s more like 90% of the women they consider hot enough to matter. All those other women don’t count, duh!
That’s the only way it comes close to making sense to me.
One thing we know for certain. None of these people works in the restaurant trade.
Watching couple after couple walk in. and then often share tables with other couples, tells you that people of all ages, shapes and sizes are partnered up with other people of various ages, shapes and sizes all the damn time.
@Kootiepatra: I have this theory as to how someone might find these numbers plausible.
When they think about a few men getting “all” the women, they simply non-consciously edit all middle-aged and old women and all women who aren’t conventionally attractive out of existence. When they think of “all” women, they therefore actually only think of like 10 % of them.
It’s like that episode in Coupling (which was, in many ways, a fairly sexist shows, but still had its hilarious spot-on moments…) where Patrick is at a party talking to a couple of hot women. The conversation seems a bit surreal in parts, the women say things that makes no sense in the context, and suddenly one of them yells at him and scoffs off for apparently no reason. But that was the conversation from Patrick’s POV… Later, we’re shown what really happened, and it turns out that there was another woman there who was conventionally non-attractive, who also said things, but Patrick was completely blind to her existence. When you hear her lines as well the entire conversation makes sense, and it was actually her who ended up yelling at him for being incredibly rude to her. (Tried to find it on Youtube, but no luck). It’s obviously exaggerated the way he literally can’t see or hear the conventionally non-attractive one, but it does point to a real phenomenon.
Anyway. Since “90 % of the women” actually translates to “90 % of all young and conventionally attractive women, that is, roughly 9 % of all women” it’s really not implausible that they’re dating about 10 % of the men. Because when they think of men, they really think of all the men. Many young and conventionally attractive women date likewise young and conventionally attractive men, something MRA:s consider incredibly unfair, proof of hypergamy and whatnot.
Ninja:d by Spindrift. 🙂 But yeah, what they mean is that 10 % of all the men there are date 90 % of all the young and conventionally attractive women, which isn’t strange and doesn’t prove anything about women or hypergamy.
The idea of 90% of women dating 10% of men just reminded me of something funny.
@Spindrift: *lol*
Eh, that’s just how fanfiction is. Fanfiction knows no gender, species or universe, but it sure as hell knows sex. There’s everything from Twilight x The Price Is Right to Sesame Street x Sons Of Anarchy to Harry Potter x NSync out there, and I didn’t make any of those up. ಠ_ಠ
Minor correction: All the white men. Black men are considered “PROOF OF HYPERGAMY!” Because MRAs are as racist as they are sexist.
RE: Falconer
Hubby says, “BAAAAABIES! :D”
RE: kirbywarp
I wonder about this actually, what a “world without gender” would truly mean…
I’ve read (and written) sci-fi that takes on this concept. And it’s been done a bunch of different ways!
For instance, in Carla Speed McNeil’s comic ‘Finder,’ there is a group of people with two sexes but only one gender: women. It’s impossible to tell the men from the women most of the time. Everyone has breasts, and it’s common not to know the biological sex of even your own relatives.
The ‘Valley of the Silk Sky’ webcomic (which is by a trans person), there is no concept of gender in language, which means everyone uses ‘xe’ pronouns and transitioning is no big deal. It’s just a way to get more comfortable.
And I write a world full of interdimensional immigrants, all with their own gender systems, and for sheer convenience, everyone just goes by a number-ambiguous, gender-ambiguous pronoun I ‘translate’ as it. If you need to be treated a certain way, you say so. That said, having surgery is still something they try to dissuade you from, because it’s difficult and dangerous due to tech levels.
RE: mrex
However, I have a hard time believing that transitioning is ever as shallow as saying “Gee, I really liked playing with Barbies!” That POV just sounds so hateful towards transpeople to me.
It’s also totally unrelated to reality. I’ve known trans people who agonized for DECADES over their identity, who suffered divorce, disownment, and homelessness when they came out. It’s NOT a light decision.
Also, there’s an Alistair Reynolds short story about a future society where reproduction is artificial, and everyone is an XX, because that’s somehow easier to make. Although they use “she”, sex and gender isn’t shown as mattering at all. What’s cool is that the plot doesn’t really have anything to do with sex or gender, but about war robots gaining sentience.