On Fathers Day, somewhere on the internet, the following meme was posted:
The Men’s Rights subreddit reacted, as it so often does, with manly indignation: how dare these women take our Fathers Day from us! Even by normal Men’s Rights standards for empty outrage this seems a bit much. After all, it’s not exactly news that a lot of women raise their kids by themselves, when the fathers of their children, refuse to act as, well, fathers to their children. Indeed, “financial abortions” — that is, consequence-free child abandonment for men — is one of the central demands of the Men’s Rights movement.
But to one anonymous commenter on the Men’s Rights subreddit, this meme could well be the final insult that transforms the men of the world into angry panda impersonators destroying everything within reach.
According to this anonymous observer,
this really scares me, enough that I wake up at night thinking about it.
Wait. You wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking about … a meme?
No one could deny that there is open warfare on men all throughout western society. Whether or not it is deserved is somewhat irrelevant (you’ll see why in a second). There’s a minority of men who are alarmed but the vast majority just doesn’t have this on their radar…yet. This is mostly because it doesn’t affect them directly.
How can there be “open warfare” on men if most men haven’t even noticed it? Has there ever been a war in which the majority of those ostensibly affected by it don’t even know that it exists?
But never mind, because “[t]hat’s all going to change soon.”
Mixing his metaphors with wild abandon, this anonymous Men’s Rights Nostradamus predicts that
It won’t be long until the inroads that feminism has blazed start to butt up against the everyday Joe that’s just living his life.
Ah, the ever-reliable “everyday Joe,” beloved icon of reactionary grumblers since pretty much forever. In 2008, he took the form of a plumber (well, sort of). In 1970, they made a movie about him.
It appears that feminism doesn’t know when to quit and I clearly see the movement doing something that causes ‘Joe’ to not only look up from his newspaper but also impact him in a negative way.
You wouldn’t like me when I look up from my newspaper!
This lights the fuse.
Throughout history the one thing men are good at is responding to threats, whether they are real or not. I’m reminded of a video of a robbery at a convenience store I saw. The robber had a knife pointed at the clerk, demanding the contents of the register. Two random men were behind him, watching it all go down. One guy looked at the other and did the “upward head nod”. The other guy responded with the same discreet movement and they launched at the robber, taking him down. These two guys didn’t know each other at all but they, like most all men, are given to cohesive bonding when a threat is present.
Men also make up the vast majority of those robbing convenience stores, but never mind.
Feminism gives a perfect storm for this response and it’s going to be really ugly. When men get pissed, especially when they feel disenfranchised or morally wronged, they start breaking things.
Are you sure you haven’t confused men with toddlers having tantrums?
If this starts to steamroll it will make Ferguson look like a dress rehearsal.
That escalated quickly. Good old everyday Joe was just sitting there reading his newspaper, when all of a sudden he caught sight of a feminist meme on the internet. Next stop, literal rioting in the streets.
Those cops that will be asked to stop it? Those are overwhelmingly men too. Many will be sympathetic and I see lines being crossed.
A Man/Cop Alliance of Rioting Manbabies?
Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if this doesn’t get dealt with that it could be something on par with a major social upheaval. It’s going to be expensive, bloody, and it’s going to change everything for several generations. Once men start hammering, it ALL looks like a nail.
Yeah this bothers me a lot. I hope I’m badly wrong.
No you don’t. MRAs and other reactionary misogynists are forever airing these kinds of apocalyptic fantasies, in which the evil feminists “push men too far” and the men “finally explode” like some kind of “male bomb.” Civilization crumbles, and those evil complainy women get their final comeuppance.
Some of the men profess their deep “concern” that the women they want to shut up won’t shut up until it’s “too late.” Others can barely conceal their glee at the prospect of a bloody Manpocalypse that will put women back in their place.
Because this isn’t a warning. It’s a threat. It’s what every wife-batterer does when he “reminds” his wife that she won’t like him when he’s angry. It’s a way to control women through fear. Or at least an attempt to.
The only difference now is that the dude doing the “reminding” isn’t threatening his wife at home; he’s playing to the crowd in the Men’s Rights subreddit, and getting upvotes for it.
All over a meme.
So which gender is supposed to be the emotional one again?
H/T — r/againstmensrights
@Dvärghundspossen
Reminds me of House MD’s Dr. Wilson (paraphrased because I can’t remember the exact line)
“I’m an Oncologist, show me any MRI scan and I’ll tell you there’s a tumor”
@EJ (The Other One):
I should have been clearer in my reply, I’m sorry. I agree that there’s lots of degrading and misogynistic stuff in porn and the fact that it’s becoming normalized is a problem. Men should definitely make sure to talk to their partners about such things and, you know, make sure that everybody is comfortable and truly consenting to whatever is happening. And yes, I agree with you that the fact that we as men (I hope that I’m not misgendering you) benefit from it is very disturbing and not something I feel comfortable with.
I am going to whale in on the food for poor people issue – I feel strongly about it and it has affected me directly for most of my adult life.
I get great deals on loads of close to date stuff on Amazon, and at my local market. I buy in bulk as much as possible. As a result storage is my main problem, and I have a staircase covered in buckets and sacks of staples. I am time rich, but have no desire to spends ages cooking – tiny kitchen, stuffed full of more buckets, and only a tiny cooker ( I have had to buy an extra hob it is so small). I usually only buy fruit and veg from local shops that have put the getting old stuff in a bowl for £1. This time of year is great for cheap fruit and veg though – I bought 16 excellent avocados for £2 this week.
The patronising shit has been around forever. Poor people have always been told to eat porridge for example. Until microwaves that was a messy and time consuming business – most poor people did not have the cookware. I have a microwave, and the cookware, but I only rarely eat it, even though I like it perfectly well – but what if you don’t even like it?!
But there are other, quite bizarre forces at play too – when my son was 8 he was teased about having the cheapest crisps in his lunchbox! I am sure there are lots and lots of those micro pressures to not eat the cheapest all the time.
Personally I NEVER eat takeaways – I am a vegetarian, and even if I wasn’t I still couldn’t afford it – maybe takeaways are cheaper in the US, because in the UK it is definitely not the cheapest option. Here poor people are likely to spend a lot at Iceland – a cheap shop that emphasises frozen junk food.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/24/as-women-keep-on-washing-up-dead-ohio-town-fears-a-serial-killer-is-on-the-loose/?tid=trending_strip_6
David, have you read this?
There is a significant possibility as to what sort of individual did it, isn´t there?
I may have posted this before, but I’ve found it so useful I may as well put it up again. I did this challenge for a charity I volunteer for, and found it simple with the recipes in these .pdfs:
https://www.livebelowtheline.com/uk/resources
And lots and lots of homefries. I love homefries.
The cookbook is actually a free download, and the author got some money on Kickstarter to print up copies to distribute (for free) to people who didn’t have computer access.
That’s better than I expected.
Yeah, lots of people do the “eat on a food-stamp budget for a week” challenges. It’s pretty easy to prepare and eat time-intensive, repetitive food for a week. Do it for a year. Then you’ll have a better idea of what it’s like to live that way. It’s far, far different to devote the time to making inexpensive recipes when it’s a “challenge” and you have an end date when you can stop doing it, versus making it a nonstop lifestyle. The fact that you stopped doing this challenge once the challenge was over should tell you that it’s not something you’d be okay with forever when you have other options.
@Bernardo Soares
I hadn’t known that. I like John Oliver. I like him less now. I hope he’s learned some stuff. He had a show a few weeks ago about how small fines for minor legal violations can be life-altering and and impossible weight if you just don’t have $35 in your pocket, so perhaps he’s grown.
@Bernardo Soares:
@PoM:
Are these the same person?
@Jackie
The woman who put together the cookbook is a well-meaning liberal who has worked with the poor and wants the best for them. The many people who pushed it when it came out were, all of them as far as I could tell, well-meaning liberal people who want the best for the poor.
Unfortunately the idea behind this cookbook is one shared with libertarians and conservatives: namely, that the poor are in some way defective. The defect in this case is a lack of knowledge, rather than the lack of ability or lack of proper morals or values or culture that libertarians/conservatives posit. The basic idea is still the same. The poor are defective, and the solution is to fill in the defect with putty and sand it smooth. If they remain poor after this solution has been applied, it’s their own damned fault.
Obviously, I have a problem with this paradigm.
Oh! Maybe not!
The reason I shared the recipes in the link I posted is that I still eat them–though of course I eat other things as well since I’m able to.
Jamie Oliver is a snooty British chef while john Oliver is a British-American pundit.
Here’s a video I’ve seen with him.
@Falconer:
Nooo! The weregiraffe returned and has just bitten the head off one of my veteran soldiers. Sadface!
@Morrizaurus:
You’re now a dwarf. Congratulations.
I have mixed feelings about Live Below The Line. It’s a good cause, and it might inspire empathy, but it seems a bit like poverty tourism? Trying on poverty for a week, and then being able to eat cake again…
Then again, that’s nothing compared to this thing my housemate did at uni. – A bunch of students slept out in sleeping bags in February to raise money & awareness for a homeless charity… And it was bitterly cold, and unpleasant, but they got to come back to the centrally-heated flat in the morning.
They were all in a large group, in a safe neighbourhood, where they wouldn’t be moved on, and they could all eat dinner before going to the sleep-out, and they wouldn’t get any sense of the despair, isolation, or any of the circumstances that cause people to be on the streets in the first place, or any of the long-term effects of homelessness…
It just kind of squicked me out that what they were doing was a jolly little camping trip compared to actual rough sleeping, y’know? Not that they should have to suffer that much to raise money, but that kind of feel-good charity kinds rubs me the wrong way.
UGH! And some 20-something douchecanoe on the street once asked me to donate to his fund to climb Kilamanjaro, as if A) I would fund his fucking holiday when I can’t even get as far as Dover; B) It wouldn’t just be more effective to donate to a charity to do actual good work in that region instead of his tourism indirectly contributing to their economy; C) I would want to give him something to put on his CV that will advantage his middle-class self even further over me, D) There is zero accountability for whether he makes the trip or just uses the funds for something else.
I think it exploits Vague Starving Brown People when rich kids fund their own personal fun-time using public donations like that. At a time when the majority of people he asks will be much poorer than him.
Long rant is a lot more bile-churning than it has any right to be, but I can’t articulate how problematic I find the previous 2 examples of poverty-related “charity”.
I think the Live Below The Line is probably a worthwhile thing to do, especially since it raises money for a very good cause. I just find these “let’s be disadvantaged for a fixed period of time, so it’s a challenge for us and not raw survival” things a bit… iffy for that reason.
Jack Munroe is apparently doing LBTL, though, and she’s lived it, so you’re in very good company. I have massive respect for her. And her blog is devoted to Not-just-“cheap”-but-REALLY-cheap-meals-for-when-you-really-have-no-money, to remedy what Ellesar was saying about patronising food advice.
http://agirlcalledjack.com/
This guy?
http://www.jamieoliverfoodfoundation.org.uk/
@EJ
I hope it wasn’t any of Us!Dwarves.
One of the things I’ve often noted about the consumption of porn, is that few people realise that it is a performance undertaken by people who are acting. It’s very much choreographed and then cut and edited and at that point we, the consumer, get to see it.
I do find it bothering that the gunk pumped out of screens is altering people’s worldview and its distorting and amplifying bad behaviours that ends up creating the undercurrent that allows MRA’s, PUA’s, White Supremacists to think it’s permissible to behave the way they do because they actually can see a representation of their internal mindset and it’s an easy buy in.
Sadly it was Mr. Seven. Dwarf!SevenOfMine turned out to be married, and since she was really hard, when her husband came to join her he joined the army too to be with her. Alas, she was downstairs when he decided to take on a weregiraffe single handedly. She is heading up with great speed. I do not envy that weregiraffe.
Morrizaurus, your dwarf just died too. He was heading out to pick up Mr. Seven’s equipment. Alas.
Dwarf!Morrizaurus II is a surgeon. Hopefully he won’t end up trying any heroics like that.
My first expedition leader encountered the first zombie mountain goat and promptly flipped her shit.
She tried to take it on bare-handedly. Unfortunately, the first news I had of her decision was when some other dwarf assumed the position of Expedition Leader and the game told me.
Feckin’ fisher dwarves go missing for two weeks, no one knows until they actually slap eyes on the corpse, but they know instantly when the Expedition Leader position becomes open.
Hah hah! I am happy to have been mistaken. Most male chefs seem to be snooty. Is that just my perception or is it reality?
@EJ
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/dracula.gif
My dwarf will carve the most beautiful memorial and epitaph:
SevenOfMind, a great fighter until the end. Then she sucked the worst.
@PoM: Gordon Ramsay’s kind of shouty, but I’ve seen a bit where he encouraged a young girl who’d just lost her dish in some kind of competition, helped her work around the problem, calmed her down and got her going again.
I actually really like that ‘meme’. It spoke to me. Technically I’m not a single mother, but I do ALL the activities – including the ones that mainly dads do. I was the only mother on his rugby tour. I take him to do all the ‘boy stuff’. Fishing and sport and whatever… I don’t mind doing these things – I like them – as well as all the other stuff. But it breaks my heart that his dad is largely disengaged with him unless it’s on his dad’s one special interest.
And I was on my own with my son on Father’s Day, too.
Male chefs always seem snotty to me too. Even the Top Chef contestants who aren’t famous yet. The culture must really encourage egotism and arrogance in men.
I really hate it when people address chefs as “Chef” instead of by their names. Like they’re a world leader or something. Please.