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
We were just discussing a version of this: Angel Soft Toilet paper did a “Happy Father’s Day, Single Moms!” commercial on You Tube. Apparently they’re not effective at absorbing man-tears about the destruction of men.
Looking up from his newspaper, which he gets to read at breakfast while the wife makes him toast or whatever in a Leave it to Beaver 1950s fantasy?
I mean, that is supposed to be the image, right?
Tell me this man is puffing a pipe at the same time.
Yeah let’s have a long hard think about what category this threat is in ya clown.
As someone who has only recently (during the last three months) lost the final trappings of extreme financial hardship due to prolonged unemployment (for the first time since approximately 2002, my bank account is in the black and remaining there), I find those “live below the line for $PERIOD_LESS_THAN_1_MONTH” challenges to be downright insulting.
For a start, the things which are crippling when you’re on a low income aren’t necessarily the regular costs, like food, or even the regular bills like water, power, gas and so on. All of those can be budgeted for, and after a while you get a sense for how much you need to put aside each month to cover costs, and where you’re going to have to cut back and so on. What’s financially crippling are the occasional unexpected large expenses – things like a major appliance (fridge, washing machine) breaking down; or the car needing to be serviced; or the landlord deciding they’d rather get a different caretaker for their asset, thanks, here’s two month’s notice, bye! A one-week challenge isn’t going to see one of those crop up. A one-month challenge isn’t going to see one of them crop up. So when people are doing these poverty-camp-outs or holiday visits to Povertyland, they’re really only getting the “exotic cuisine at expensive restaurants” version of the area. They’re not seeing the genuine sights and lowlights the locals are familiar with.
If you’re wanting to do one of these sorts of things, here’s a suggestion: set your duration to be a minimum of 6+1d6 months; get someone else to set the start and end dates of your “tour”, and spring the start date on you with a notice period of anything from four weeks down to one hour (typical notice periods for a job). During your “tour”, you’ll be required to keep up the standard routine of visits to the unemployment bureaucracy in your country, complying with all their requirements, and looking for work and attending job interviews. You won’t know when your “tour” is going to end, or how long it’s going to be. You will thus get a far more genuine taste of what it’s like to live in Povertyland, and how damn wearing it gets to be after about the first month or so.
Charity galas seriously piss me off and they’re one of the reasons I quit a charity donation coordinator job last year. I wanted to help people who needed help, not be a party planner for selfish asshole rich people.
I noticed that several people posted about porn and I wanted to get this off of my chest because it’s been bothering me for some time, but I’m really afraid of how mainstream porn is becoming. I’m afraid that pornographic sex acts will become so normalized that girls will be pressured to conform to them much like they are pressured to shave. Sure, a woman can “choose” not to shave but in reality there is no choice if she wants to be accepted.
Everyone on this site sounds old so I don’t know if anyone will have similar experiences as me, but people including my friends think porn is how sex is because that’s all they know about it and that’s all they see. If a girl can’t conform to it she’s seen as sexually inadequate. There’s so much pressure on teenage girls to do certain things in bed or at least try it if she doesn’t want to be seen as lame.
I’m sorry if I’m off-topic but I just feel so saddened by the normalization of porn sometimes. I talk to my friends about it, but they are teen girls like me and they are subjected to the same pressures even though they agree with me.
Exactly.
rubyyogi,
I’m so sorry. Things sound very rough for you and your son.
Pandapool,
Oh, I’m ready. Lay it on me.
@Lea
Be prepared.
It’s available on YouTube. I saw the first 10-12 minutes of it. It’s pretty much just The Honeymooners/I Love Lucy but…yeah…If you guys are interested, I can post the episode.
No violent threats. Jeez.
Being an asshole is not a death penalty offense.
@EJ
Yay, I was a dwarf! Aw, but I died.
Well, I’ll just assume that dwarf!Catalpa was the lynchpin holding the whole fortress together and since I died, all was lost.
Do these guys even realise that there are men out there that actively champion a matriarchy?
Honestly, these guy are so confused they don’t know what they want. Or perhaps that it’s basically just a case of, they want what they want when they want it and when they don’t want it, it has to stop…and women need to be able to read all of these wants and needs and respond accordingly.
…and you know what? Eventually even that wouldn’t make them happy.
While they’re not technically MRAs, the Unique and Supreme Lodge of the Elucidated Brethren from Guards! Guards! are at least spiritually MRAs. They’d be a part of the manosphere if they were modern-day dudes, I’d be willing to bet.
They’re a group of surly, entitled dudes who think that the world owes them everything, and that everyone is out to get them, and they’re being led by a grifter who is taking advantage of them for entirely his own benefit. Here, a quote:
“Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He’d take the whining resentful ones, the ones will a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could ake it big if only they’d been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were damned up behind thin walls of ineptitude and lowgrade paranoia.”
Sound like anyone we know?
Gah, this is what I get for typing from the book and not proofreading before I hit submit
*with, not will
**make, not ake.
Hey now, I’m holding a wake. Pretty soon I’m going to wander into the wine cellar and continue drinking in there, as the weregiraffes close in.
And then, when they’re good and truly inside the room, that’s when I blow us all to hell.
I almost went to download this game, but then read on the wiki about the various methods to prevent/deal with a catsplosion, and I can’t even. I would never be able to have fun with that game.
This is my problem with it, too. That, and the fact that quasi-kinky details (like sudden, out of the blue butt-slaps, hair-pulls, rough pounding, etc., all mainly directed by men at women) keep appearing in non-BDSM porn, unasked for and very jarring. Even the home-made sex tape stuff is full of it. It’s gotten to the point where it’s too upsetting for me to even watch, because you never know when some numbskull is gonna throw that in there just to “spice things up”. If some guy did that to me in the middle of sex, I think I’d have to stop and ask him what he did that for. And I’d definitely not feel like continuing.
And no, I’m not a prude…this sort of thing just seems a totally unnecessary interruption of the mood to me, not “hot” as it’s currently being promoted/purported to be. I can’t help wondering if this is the sort of thing that gave Jian Ghomeshi the mistaken idea that “all women like it when you dominate them”, or if he’s just a born asshole using that (very false) idea as an excuse to act out his ugly, hateful side.
(PS: Lea’s definition of jackhammering is exactly what I meant, too. Ugh, HIGHLY uncomfortable even just to watch.)
(PPS: I’m a farmer! Yay!)
@Bina
Of course you’re not a prude. It’s a violation of trust, consent and waaay too presumptuous to just do something to someone during sex. You should always ask if you can do something in bed that isn’t vanilla…well, I guess people wouldn’t know slapping isn’t vanilla if they watch mainstream porn, so maybe things should probably be talked about before hand, regardless.
Yeah, that’s not prudish. That’s completely reasonable. I’d be done. That sort of thing is bullshit. I think I’d be all:
http://media3.giphy.com/media/KJ6evAwpTjexi/giphy.gif
http://99gifs.com/-img/534277811605fb76be000003.gif
http://37.media.tumblr.com/c7f961a5eb65055250bffc92028509d8/tumblr_mv6tt2VuTg1qffiy2o4_500.gif
@Bina:
I don’t think it’s prudishness and I definitely agree with you. The bit that makes me uncomfortable is that as Jackie says, people don’t realise that it isn’t vanilla. For example, I’ve had someone apologise profusely to me because she disliked anal sex and wanted to not have it; but she saw that as something wrong with her because of the extent to which it’s become normalised.
You *were* a farmer. Note the tense.
You are all making me wanna read Terry Pratchett again. I sadly didn’t get very far into Discworld but he’s as imaginative as he is funny.
@Tracy: It’ll run fine on an XP machine. The limiting factor is going to be the CPU. If it’s an older computer then I would reduce the size of the embark area and the world, and reduce the maximum population.
@PolicyOfMadness:
Catsplosions are mostly a thing of the past now, since the feature of neutering animals has been added. Still, it is not a game for those who do not like maddening complexity and who are not patient with horrendously bad UI.
@EJ
Cats exploded…if you didn’t neuter them? Did they explode because too many babies? O.o
@the other EJ
If neutering cats is an option, then maybe I will play it. Need to think about that first. I already have a couple of things going and may not want to get sucked into something new.
Gamergaters are tantruming over Apple removing Confederate flags. What a shock!
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/25/gamergate_attacks_racegender_baiters_like_apple_for_pulling_confederate_themed_games_from_app_store/