Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men has a long history of fat shaming: apparently, like Roosh V and assorted other Red Pill douchebags, the good folks at AVFM consider the existence of fat women to be an assault on manhood, and possibly civilization itself.
Because that’s just the sort of human rights activists they are.
But even by AVFM’s low standards for logic, their latest little meme campaign against the evil fatties is a bit puzzling. Take the meme at the top of the page, found on AVFM’s Facebook page.
As an assault on “double standards” it’s a little odd, assuming that people find male employment and female thinness to be similarly sexually attractive. As an antifeminist “gotcha” — as I imagine its creator intended it to be — it makes even less sense. Feminists aren’t the ones telling men to “man up” and provide for women like the patriarchs of some imaginary golden age.
And if MRAs don’t want women to look to men for financial support, well, they could stop handwaving away the very real gender wage gap. And give up their endless attacks on child support as well as their fantasy of “financial abortions.” It’s hard to blame single mothers trying to raise kids on their own, often with inadequate or even non-existent support from the fathers in question, for thinking twice about dating guys who could end up demanding financial support themselves.
What makes the meme even weirder is that AVFMers don’t really want to give up fat shaming. So the overall effect of this meme is to … justify throwing shade at men who fail to live up to the traditional provider role that AVFM ostensibly opposes.
The meme below is an even more ironic variation on the theme.
Why is it more ironic? Because there actually are men out there interested in “dating” homeless women — and by “dating” I mean exploiting the desperation of young women living on the streets who are willing to trade sex for food, shelter, or drugs.
How do I know this? Well, aside from having heard stories from several women who were themselves exploited in this way, I know because guys aspiring to exploit homeless women keep showing up on this blog.
Several years ago, you see, I wrote about an incredibly skeevy post on Matt Forney’s old blog In Mala Fide touting homeless girls as a frugal alternative to pricey prostitutes. The author of the post, calling himself Advocatus Diaboli, suggested focusing on “freshly homeless young girls” with hippie inclinations, reporting that
a decent round of drinks, snacks, money for pot, a small necessary item of clothing, decent dinner with booze will almost guarantee you a good lay (or at least a couple of BJs).
Ever since I wrote that post, my blog has gotten a small but steady trickle of visitors who’ve found the site through Google searches for things like “homeless girl paid to have sex,” “homeless prostitutes,” and “how to get the homeless to have sex eith [sic] you.” These are all real examples from the past week; I see a handful of queries like this every time I take a look at my stats.
So congratulations, skeezy dudes, you’ve managed to overcome the prejudice against homeless people, with your boners.
Meanwhile, back on Facebook, AVFM is expanding its fat shaming crusade to include men as well.
In the United States, we should note, more than two-thirds of men (70%) are classified as “overweight” or “obese” — a rate even higher than that for women (57.6%). Apparently AVFM’s much vaunted “compassion for men and boys” only applies to 30% of them.
I don’t mean to be rude, but there are a number of AVFM staffers — male and female — who are themselves, well, “overweight” or “obese.” I wonder how they feel about volunteering for a site that regularly portrays people like them as little more than walking punchlines for unfunny memes.
http://i.imgur.com/Leu5O2y.png
@ryohji
I think everyone’s worked more than Elam in the last 5 years, even if they’re unemployed.
@sunnysombrera
I included my unemployement time and my last years as a student in those 5 years.
@brooked
ARE YOU SHITTING ME. No wonder they keep getting upset when their “it’s satire!” line doesn’t fly around here. Back in AVFM they eat it up without question.
Even at AVFM, no one can tell what’s supposed to be satire.
I think that you’re one of the only people, outside of survivors directly, who acknowledge this form of economic exploitation (that of ‘dating’ underhoused women).
So thank you for that.
Even many survivor-resources are completely overwhelmed by this sort of sexual crime. Sometimes survivors are turned away from crisis centres because there’s no one there who can cope with both the economic and sexual exploitation. It’s definitely worth having a discussion about, one day.
Homeless IS sexy. Especially if you live in New York:
http://elitedaily.com/news/world/cardboard-star-meet-millennial-homeless-man-survives-picking-women-every-night-week-video/754950/
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDVxWSQ7wLU&w=560&h=315%5D
Funny to see the thing claiming women are all awful for universally disliking overweight men while being fat and therefore unloveable or whatever come out the same week as “dadbod” pops up as a thing!
Anyway: is it just me or has fat hatred kind of grown with the phenomenon of everybody in the Western world getting fat? You see jokes and patronising comments aimed at fat people in older (20th century) stuff but I feel you’d have to do quite a bit of searching to get anywhere near the standard level of vitriol much of the internet has for fat people even when you consider the fact that any ninny can broadcast their views to the world now. Reactionary types seem way more into it too – perhaps a highly heroic indvidually-minded philosophy that’s not massive keen on the massive world sees a decadent age where everyone’s less disciplined when they see fat people instead of looking further into any other factors? I mean, sure, many fat people are fat because of knowingly overeating or failing to exercise (not that that makes it any more legitimate to hate on them!), but does it really seem that likely that that many people have just all got lazy and awful or whatever else fat people are supposed to be?
@lowquacks
it could also be due to the fact that being “fat” wasn’t always seen as something bad, or as “ugly”. In fact, being fat was seen as a sign of success and wealth, in that you could AFFORD to eat so much. I have heard that, for example, in Germany after the war, being fat was seen as desirable (at least in men) after the years of hunger. Gout was the pain of the rich.
Still the case in quite a few places, I hear! Are there any other generally anti-fat societies now or historically quite as dedicated to it as this current Western thing, though?
I haven’t, and searches on both Google and DDG reveal nothing. Where did you see this?
Could the comment be a reference to the “real women have curves”/”only dogs go for bones” sloganeering that ends up attached to some of this stuff by some people?
I just can’t fathom these people. I can only think that they don’t really see actual human beings of any gender. And for the record, my spouse of 45 years has what I think of as a teddy bear body, which I have always found quite attractive and cuddly. WTF is it with these MRA guys? Seems they don’t know anything at all about how mutual attraction works.
@estravan
Mutual attraction would imply that a) women have a choice and b) women have feelings. So that’s right out for MRAs.
My take on it twofold. They object to Fat is a Feminist Issue/ Healthy at Any Size because its activist and they are against activism in women. They believe that women are passive, by nature, and should stay passive because they are a kind of prey, hunted by men. So they react angrily to suggestions that women should actively seek acceptance, sexual pleasure, and admiration for themselves (regardless of body size). As the King says in the King and I “A flower should never fly from bee, to bee, to bee.” They see the entire Fat acceptance movement as a form of aggression and that is one of their biggest fears: that women will, as they see it, become as agressive to men, as demanding of men, as they know they are of women.
But the Memes–that’s a different story. The memes relate to the MRA/PUA belief that women will reject them if they are lessthan alpha males, or if they lose what precarious hold they have on money and stability. So to them, when they see images relating to homelessness or male fat or pattern baldness or unemployment these are things that they believe cause women to reject men and they are (as they see it) fighting back by demanding the right, even the duty, to pre-reject fat women, to judge fat women, on behalf of all the men they see as unfairly rejected by women for being unemployed or bald or beta or whatever.
OF course they agree, culturally speaking, that fat, unemployed, depressed, short, bald men are “unattractive” and they spend a lot of time discussing just how unfair it is that women, inconceivably, sometimes find these guys attractive or calculating on some microscopic scale how much money it takes (beta bux) for an unattractive male to “get” a woman who would rather date (they think) their idealized alpha male.
You would think these parts of their experience would contradict each other–the part where they sympathize with unemployed or homeless men (which they believe arises from divorce, naturally, as women reject them for their “failures” and divorce them if they become unemployed) but they compartamentalize and push their rage onto women and especially fat women. Of course it makes no logical sense but it does once you realize that they believe that happy women who make their own choices as to sexual partner are a reproach to them, to their whole way of life. They believe as a matter of faith that happy women who can choose who they have sex with will reject them sooner or later when they become unemployed, unhappy, bald, fat, so they choose the fantasy power of prerejecting them through slut and fat shaming.
Quote: In my lifetime I’ve seen a small number of women who believe that fat acceptance/fighting against body shaming is all about converting men’s boners by admonishing men into finding fat women attractive (and by this, I mean these women say this to support the idea not to discredit or make fun of it).
Quote:I haven’t, and searches on both Google and DDG reveal nothing. Where did you see this?
I’ve seen comments to that effect on sites like reddit and tumblr.
@Lynne: So a few outliers and not like the entirety, or even a significant portion of, the FA movement.
@lowquacks
No, I’ve noticed that too. It’s part and parcel of a general upswing in the last couple of decades of hyper-individuality, celebrity worship, 1%-ism, and behavior-and-appearance policing (despite more visible efforts to reduce bullying in schools). Thanks to Photoshop and social media, kids are even more saturated with images of unattainable perfection and popularity than before. Schools have gotten a lot more competitive, with anxious, economically insecure parents pushing kids into activities and academics at an earlier age. There’s pressure to perform, both academically and socially.
In the U.S. at least, a Darwinian winner-take-all mentality has taken hold (I blame Ayn Rand and Reaganism for turning public sentiment against poverty and “welfare cheats”). The top 1% succeed spectacularly and are held up as examples for everyone else. If you’re one of the 99%, it’s because you’re defective in some way. That doesn’t just apply to money, but looks too. The most insidious thing, IMO, is the way people discount luck and genetics when it comes to life outcome. For a lot of women and men, being fat isn’t a choice, but these retrograde bullies are acting as if it is.
And frankly, the approval of misogynists isn’t a big enough carrot – in fact, it’s really more of a stick. A stick with rusty, diseased nails sticking out of it.
How were these memes satire? What is the concept they’re satirizing? It would appear that they’re trying to highlight how ridiculous fat acceptance is by comparing it to how ridiculous it would be for women to value men for something other than money or a high status job. But isn’t that what they want? They’d come off better if they were saying it’s serious and they’re pointing out feminist hypocrisy for holding double standards (even though I’ve never actually seen feminists argue that all women should judge men by their bank accounts).
By claiming it’s satire they just appear to be mocking their own stated goals. Can’t they see that? It’s like “it’s satire” is just something they say reflexively without thinking it through.
And flowers don’t fly, by golly, but the same ambisexual flower may be visited by any number of bees (who, in any case, are always female). Clearly the King (and those who think like him) has never seen a sunflower or the inner workings of a beehive.
So funny how all these “rational males” fail dismally at any science which doesn’t support their sexist world-view. And even that which does…they STILL fail, because they only select the skinny little slice of it that seems to support them, and discard the rest.
Bingo.
And of course, the idea of sex-as-collaborative-act doesn’t sit well with them either, for that same reason. Two people of different genders, interacting as equals? HERESY!!!
If anything, fat men are an assault on manhood. It is so much easier for men to be fit it’s kind of ridiculous.
“It’s SATIRE!” = AVFMspeak for “I dunno what I’m really saying, so I’ll save my foolish face by saying THIS.”
@Lord Crowstaff – “Gout! One of the favourite ailments of the upper classes!” (Hyacinth Bucket)
Pelagic, please don’t go there. I get enough shit about my assault on manhood for being a feminist ally, being an involved father (!), enjoying stereotypically “female” activities, etc. along with taking a ton of shit for my body type. I tore a strip off the last guy who joked I needed to turn in my Man Card because it’s harmful sexist bullshit. I know you’re snarking, but honestly >we get told shit like that<, from men, women, our families, helpful strangers, the list goes on. My standard go to now is: "I'm sorry, what makes you think you get to define masculinity for me? Do I look like I care about your opinion?"
How come Pelagic is not banned yet? Sorry if I’m overstepping, but wtf.