Is this the holy grail of MRA infographics?
Designed — if that’s the word for it — by an MRA and #GamerGater who calls himself BJSparky, this lovely “poster” offers up a 2000-word wall of text in such tiny type it’s impossible to read.
Well, not completely impossible. I snagged the largest version of the poster I was able to successfully download on BJ’s Deviant Art page and enlarged it until the text was a more reasonable size for reading — albeit a bit blurry. (There may be a larger version, but I got a broken image when I clicked on his download button.)
A quick scan reveals that this particular wall of text seems to have been built mostly with straw: it’s a list of allegedly feminist beliefs that no feminists actually believe. (Admittedly, I didn’t read every example; for all I know, the entire right side of the poster might be made up of passages copied from Supernatural fanfic or James Joyce’s Ulysses.)
Here are some of BJ’s straw feminist nuggets:
As you can see, BJ is as elegant a writer as he is a designer.
I would kind of love to see these straw feminist nuggets blown up and used as signs at some straw feminist demonstration.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the poster has gotten a more enthusiastic reception than I have given it here, garnering more than 100 upvotes and inspiring this amazing comment:
Sorry, bro, but I think there is a definite possibility that you have low and/or unusual standards.
H/T — the awesome chewinchawingum on r/againstmensrights
This translates to feminist makes snarky comment, and is threatened with death or rape… It reminds me of a creepy gamergate thingie where Brianna Wu posted a meme mocking gamergaters, so the gamergaters used the image to make some that called for rape and her suicide and other such “lovely things.” Of course, they saw the 2 as equal and Wu should have expected that if she was going to talk shit and hurt their manfeels.
Ha! It was on WHTM!
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/11/yet-another-woman-in-gaming-has-been-driven-from-her-home-by-death-threats/#more-13718
I’m reminded of when I used to read comments below news articles (don’t do THAT anymore, that’s for sure!) and whenever there would be an article about a male teacher sexually abusing a female student, someone would always reprimand people who showed disgust by saying, “If the teacher were a woman, you would call her empowered and the kid lucky!”
Then, of course, that article covering the female teacher abusing one of her male students came around, and WHO was saying the kid was lucky? The same asshole who said everyone else would say that!
Oh and David… The right side was so not Supernatural fanfiction! Not Supernatural fanfiction at all! *sobs*
Seems to be listed alphabetically. I wonder if that was intentional?
Hi there. Long-time lurker, first-time poster.
I saw a link to this on the Men’s Rights subreddit, and knew it would be amazing since Deviantart users are notorious for their uninformed opinions. I took a look at through the favorites of the people that liked this “masterpiece”, and immediately saw a poster ranting about how Obama had chosen tyranny over freedom. I ended up at a rant against Western women that said, “I’m not a misogynist…Western women are lazy, spoiled bitches.” Clearly, these people know what they’re talking about.
I hope MRAs make more posters like this, since I always need a good laugh.
@kirbywarp
I almost put in a comment about PUAs, but I just couldn’t get past that use of the word “empowering.” You’re right though. The popularized methods some men use are in fact sexist and oppressive and manipulative and horrible and about a thousand other adjectives, but I don’t have my thesaurus handy. Those methods are what we object to (and rightfully so).
I haven’t read “The Rules” (nor do I plan to), but I reject the idea that there is some magical formula that will get you the perfect relationship. “Follow these rules and you’ll live happily ever after.” BULLSHIT. Relationships are work. If you want one, you have to be willing to work at it. It’s not just going to magically happen because you followed some guidelines you saw on the internet. I despise all the articles out there that tell you the “three things people in happy marriages do” or “seven ways to strengthen your relationship.” NO. People and relationships are unique. There is no one-size-fits-all here.
These things also fall scarily close to things like PUA techniques to get women to sleep with them. “Follow these steps and you’ll get laid.” EW EW EW EW.
There is a ton of repetition in this thing. C5-R11 (The “feminists applaud women who commit stat rape”) is pretty similar to C3-R7:
But that’s entirely redundant given C1-R11 (The “pussy pass” one), which is then repeated in C2-R14:
Note that none of these redundant items are close to each other on the poster. Most people will not read any of these – they’ll take in the sheer number of points (about 100 here) and assume that the person who made it knows what he was doing. The ones who do read aren’t going to go through the whole list, they’ll pick part of one column (probably at the beginning) and ignore the rest. As long as you don’t pack all the repeats right next to each other, no one’s going to notice. The guy who did this was a bit more clever than most of the people who try the “argument by list” thing.
So we can add the definition of “Sexual empowerment” to the Möbius strip of things that MRAs don’t understand. The idea is that a woman owns her sexuality for herself, not for men, and that she‘s in charge of it, not men. That’s the opposite of sexual empowerment. That’s sexual objectification.
Hey, there are some contradictions here too. For example, C1-R14:
…And C3-R1:
Well, which is it? Do feminists want women to be timid, passive wallflowers or sexually aggressive lust monsters?
That’s just the way they were in the thesaurus.
Saying that “The Rules” was the female equivalent to PUA “game” is not entirely wrong. To some extent “The Rules” was a form of “game”.
@KSRay: You pre-ninja’s me.
@Andrew Johnston:
Sadly, since this is supposed to be a list of Feminist hypocrisy, any contradictions you find will be explained as yet another hypocritical thing about feminism. They can justify constructing an obviously straw feminist that makes no sense because they think real feminism is just as confusing.
It’s not like they care about their model matching up with reality.
They’re still bringing this up? Wow. I believe this was one town in Europe where a city official (male) wanted to remove the urinals from the city hall building because the men kept pissing all over the floor. I can’t seem to find the original story now though, my google-fu fails me. I think David might have talked about it before.
The only actual case of removing urinals that I know of involves some green/low-flush urinals that were installed in some places at non-trivial expense and have now all been ripped out because urine sitting in copper pipes for extended periods of time results in corroded, leaky pipes. And it was cheaper to replace the urinals than to replace all the copper pipe running through the walls.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19998_the-6-most-insane-ways-going-green-can-backfire.html
This reminds me of one of the first Pride Day parades I marched in, back in the long ago. We saw a group of the ‘Turn or Burn’ counterdemonstrators up ahead, and prepared. As we marched past, we all faced them and chanted, “Our graphic designs are better than your graphic designs!” They were dumbfounded.
The fact that we have to identify which bit of nonsense and vitriol we’re referring to by column and number is evidence that this was not well made.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. This feminist loves “The Great Escape” and there was nary a female within 50 miles of Stalag Luft III.
Regarding the first bullet point highlighted in the OP: I should hope everyone would know that abuse is, by definition, non-consensual.
Re: That thing about urinals, somewhere…
It actually has nothing to do with feminism! It’s environmentalism, gone somewhat wonky. You see, traditional urinals use one to five gallons per flush, which, if you only donated like a thimble full of urine is kind of wasteful.
So, then they developed no flush urinals, only then the urine started eating the pipes because it was just sitting there in all its uric acid glory because water wasn’t forcing it out, and people were like “GRARGH! WHY IS THERE URINE LEAKING OUT OF MY WALLS”.
So, the choices are either just get rid of the urinals altogether, go back to the five gallon flushers, or replace all your copper pipes with PVC that the urine won’t eat through.
Most people just go with the flushers.
…so, yeah, not really a feminist thing. More a frustrated building manager who wanted to be eco-friendly and then nope thing.
…ninja’d because I’m slow at work. Jenora Feuer, I salute you.
But once again this demonstrates the total paranoia of the manosphere. Anything that exists, is by definition ABOUT THEM.
We only know women don’t pee.
Should be “We all know …” but I’m not readjusting well from blogs where you have six minutes to “revise and extend your remarks.”
Funny thing about that alimony statement is the fact that my Mother (who just so happens to be female) had to pay her ex husband alimony who was a man! The person who makes more money is the one who ends up paying alimony……it is not a gender biased thing. That whole statement declaring that the man pays even if he makes less money is false. The reason that probably happened is she ended up with custody of kids and had more expenses then that man because of needed larger living space, because of kids, and higher utility bills because of kids and child support is specifically for food and clothes.
It’s been ages since I skimmed “The Rules” at the bookstore but it seemed to me like one of those complicated “tons of rules!” kinds of thing that basically “works” (at least, for a while) because in the course of carrying out the complicated outlined rituals out you wind up doing something that’s actually relatively simple as a by-product.
Like those crazy diet books that I’m convinced “work” for people because they make it impossible to grab fast food or crap from the vending machine or even just junk from the grocery store– if you have to cook something very specific that’s “on the plan” any time you have an urge to nosh, then at least half the time you’re just going to let the noshing urge pass.
Similarly, The Rules (like “game”) could, though their elaborate sets of rules, probably force people to reduce the number and/or severity of instances in which they slobber down potential dates’ necks begging for sex or love or a purpose in life. I’ve seen that kind of thing from men and women alike, and it’s truly cringe-inducing to behold from the outside… and totally revolting if you’re the one being slobbered ON…
though I do understand the urge on the part of the slobberer. lol
A relationship book that just says, “omg, get a grip and stop making an ass of yourself! No one decent really likes that kind of thing!” is never going to make any money, though
kind of like a book that says, “look, let’s be real– your 12PM ice-cream habit is probably not doing your waistline any favors” isn’t a hot seller either.
ikanreed:
Now that’s an interesting notion. I used to think this MRA poster boom is just because they want to imitate classic political propaganda posters and modern popular internet memes, without really understanding how it should be done or why it would be worthwhile. The end result is political screeds crammed into a poster with random graphics as background filler.