So the fellas on the Men’s Rights subreddit are kicking up a shine about a post one of them found on the internet that treats them like the joke that they are.
You see, a blogger on real estate site Estately.com decided, out of sheer boredom, I imagine, to assemble a list of Each State’s Most Embarrassing Google Searches.
As you can see from the map above, the searches range from terrible music (for some reason, Maine residents feel a need to track down Nickelback lyrics) to assorted penis-size related concerns.
In Colorado, the search term that made Estately’s Ryan Nickum giggle the most was “Men’s Rights.”
Nickum notes in his post that Coloradans were also interested in learning more about Vape pens and Crocs (the ugly shoes). He concludes from this that
If you’re a man in Colorado wearing crocs and puffing on your vape pen you deserve to have your rights taken away.
Actually, that’s not quite fair. It’s not right to lump vaping and Crocs with Men’s Rights. Vaping is much better for you than smoking, and Crocs, while atrociously ugly, are at least comfortable (or so I’ve heard).
Naturally, Men’s Rights Redditors were outraged by this assault on their basic human rights.
![[–]Clockw0rk 42 points 18 hours ago The "article" makes things worse. Analysis: If you’re a man in Colorado wearing crocs and puffing on your vape pen you deserve to have your rights taken away Oh really? Let's flip the details. If you're a woman in Wisconsin wearing open toed shoes and drinking flavored malt beverages, you deserve to have your rights taken away. Hmmm.. No, that still seems like a monstrous overreach that would have the writer fired before the end of the day. I mean, if we were talking about women's rights. permalinksavereportgive goldreply [–]baskandpurr 13 points 17 hours ago Easier than that. Searching for women's rights would be great and make you a wonderful person. Searching for men's right is embarrassing and makes you offensive. You consider the idea that 50% of humanity should maybe have better rights and that makes you evil.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/mensrightembarrassing.png?resize=482%2C445&ssl=1)
Poor babies.
Maybe the reason everyone sees you as a joke is because most people realize that men not only already have rights but also have innumerable privileges as a gender?
Or that they realize the Men’s Rights movement has accomplished literally nothing of value over the past five years of its existence? That MRAs in the US haven’t built a single shelter for men, or even set up a phone hotline?
That MRA’s virtually ignore the real issues facing young men of color in our country, from police shootings and gun violence to a misguided drug war that has left an unprecedented number of young black men behind bars.
That instead of actually doing anything about anything they would rather circle-jerk about spermjacking and friend-zoning and the alleged evils of assorted rape prevention campaigns.
Fellas: People treat you like a joke because you are a joke.
In the thread complaining about Nickum’s map, the only “accomplishment” any of the Men’s Rights redditors thought to mention was the fact that people are more aware of Men’s Rights activists than they were a few years ago. And I have to admit that this is true.
Congratulations, fellas, you’ve managed to successfully annoy the world with your stupid complaints, so much so that numerous sites are taking down their comments so they won’t have to deal with irritating abusive babies like you any more.
And you’ve given me an excuse to post this:
What’s wrong with Hotel California? That song’s awesome! XD
Scildfreja
Oh gosh I’m sorry I sent “And thanks for the hearts and caring, those girls who had bad encounters with creepy, misognist bronies need them more than I do.” to really friendly instead of you, my bad! ????
Louisiana got off pretty dang easy if this is their most embarrassing Google search:
http://alpinedogcoats.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Buy-Cheap-Cute-Dog-Clothes-Wholesale.jpg
http://www.blinkydog.com/housesforsale/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dog_clothing_.jpg
No problem, Fruitloopsie 🙂 that’s how I read it
Geesh. My husband is a brony, and he likes it because it’s *cute*. The same way he likes watching kittencams because he likes cute things, he’s secure in his masculinity, and he doesn’t give a flying rotating fuck whether people think it’s beta or not. Deviant elitist fucksticks are why the rest of us can’t have nice things or nice reputations.
*bashes head into the wall, infinite times*
Erhem. I should uh, note that by ‘deviant’ I didn’t mean alternative sexualities, I meant more along the line of the knuckledraggers who try to make *everything* about/ into porn, even MLP. I’m…. going to shut up before I dig myself deeper. *headdesk*
This is something you should know yourself, Maryland.
@Bananananana dakry
Your meaning was clear enough. But yeah, I think the show is perfectly fine, great for its target audience. I just don’t like how Bronies have decided that this show is actually for them and should cater to their desires. Fallout Equestria was not something that needed to exist.
I actually wrote a fanfic crossing over Teen Titans and Friendship is Magic as an April Fools Day joke several years ago. It was mostly taking the piss out of bronies that insisted on making MLP darker and edgier
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6859170/1/I-Shall-Crush-Them-Beneath-an-Iron-Hoof
Long rant ahead.
I’m generally a fan of MLP: FiM, I think it’s a cute, funny show with some great characters. But yeah, Bronies… I used to identify as one, mostly. Oh sure there was the occasional story of bad behavior at a con, but that’s the exception! It’s just the bad apples that all fandoms have! I actually bought into all that.
Overtime, I learned that there is a LOT, ans I mean a LOT, of gross shit in brony fandom to be honest. Not all, of course, and probably not a majority (more on that in a minute), but there really is a LOT of bad shit that gets swept under the fandom rug. For a time, I’d regularly read EQD (Equestria Daily) posts, and once I began really delving into the comments sections of posts, I started to notice a pattern, and when I paid better attention to the comment threads, I was a bit shocked to find out how many of them were, quite explicitly, anti-feminist, “tumblr egalitarian”, “don’t bring your politics into MLP!” types. I paid more attention and looked back through some older posts and etc; the admins who write the posts themselves have made “anti-political correctness” jokes and comments in those posts. The reaction to the idea that the show is inherently feminist, or someone making art about same, is punishing blowback against “politicizing” ponies with “feminist bullshit”. Yet ANY criticism of all the porn and rape-flavored humor and gore stuff is met with “you can’t criticize our ART if you don’t like it don’t look at it!”
There’s been a lot of bullying and ostracizing people they don’t like, for example a young girl who they erroneously blamed for the “Molestia” comic being shut down, since she had criticized it heavily (and rightly so, it was gross), even though she had nothing to do with it being shut down. No mention of that on EQD of course, not even a “we don’t like her but we should not be bullying people okay?” admonishment or ANYTHING, even though they’ll run a dozen stories on someone being bullied for liking the show. Which, don’t get me wrong, is completely absolutely wrong and shouldn’t happen, but bronies act like this makes them a persecuted minority whose struggles are on par with those of LGBTQ+ people or racial minorities, all while ignoring the bullying that goes on from bronies.
And then the creepy shit at cons, which someone upthread already mentioned…
And this ALL gets swept under the rug. That’s one of the biggest problems: As I said, not all bronies are awful, and I’m pretty sure it’s not even a large majority. But I have literally only encountered three types of people when it comes to bronies:
1) awful, gross assholes
2) people who don’t want to hear about the awful shit and help to sweep it under the rug
3) people who USED to identify as bronies but don’t anymore, because of 1 and 2.
“brony fandom”, as a whole, willfully ignores all these issues. They’re not dealt with, they’re pretended to be nonexistent. Bronies who are themselves not gross anti-feminist douchebags hand wave, defend it as “all fandoms have shit!”, and refuse to acknowledge that it’s more serious than that.
yeah this is a big problem too. The fact that this is still a show for little girls gets buried beneath all the porn and really violent fanfics and just… this general attitude that of course a “show for little girls” can’t actually be GOOD, so it’s “really” for bronies since they are so into it. They’ve just kind of moved in and taken over, not just creating their own space to enjoy the show but DISPLACING the core audience in their own fandom by making stuff from the show impossible to google search without finding porn, and going on youtube rants criticizing Hasbro because too much of the merchandise is clearly aimed at little kids, instead of being aimed at “their REAL audience, the one who made this show a smash hit”, that being bronies. And just… generally being horrible.
So yeah. Sorry about the long rant. And for anyone in here who has identified as a “brony” or has friends who do: I am not saying you or your friends are terrible. It’s really quite similar to the whole “hashtag notallmen” situation: it is by no means ALL bronies, but this has been my experience with brony’dom: the terrible shit is PART of the fandom, in a way that is much more serious than what can be covered by “all fandoms have shit”, especially considering what this show is and who its original target audience is.
@Saitonexus
I know exactly what you mean! I was never really a Brony myself, but he was really into it, to the point that I had to ask him politely to stop linking me to everything Pony-related because I’m just not that into it. But then he started complaining about the porn and stuff and had basically the same experience you described, where you can’t criticize TRUE ART even if that TRUE ART is Pinkie Pie horribly mutilating her friends for laughs.
^d’oh editing I removed an important detail: the ‘he’ in question was a friend of mine by the handle of Bobcat.
So that Bob’s Burger episode is pretty accurate.
I’m another person who was (and still is) a big fan of MLP: FiM, and was involved in the brony fandom back in during the first two seasons of the show. I ignored a LOT of the shit that went on in that fandom, trying to discount it as just a few (vocal) bad apples. But having stepped back from it now, and being able to look at it with more perspective, yeah, most of the brony community seems to be a big seething mass of toxic, entitled assholes. And that makes me sad, because it’s tainting the show for me now. There was a more recent episode “Slice of Life”, that focused on a bunch of the background characters, like Doctor Whooves, and it was cute and zany but all it made me think about how the bronies must be incredibly full of themselves over this one and going “LOOK LOOK THEY’RE PANDERING TO US THEY USED FANDOM MATERIAL AND IDEAS IN THE SHOW THIS IS A SHOW FOR -US-“.
I could be wrong about their reactions, I haven’t ventured into the brony fandom in years, but I can’t see them changing that much from before.
@Bittersweet
B-b-b-but which state googled cat clothes the most? We need to know!
http://www.learnsomething.tips/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/e3ers.jpg
http://images.sodahead.com/polls/003964289/4342112091_cat_prin_the_tailor_of_a_cat_cat_clothes_3_xlarge.jpeg
I don’t know what fantasy bowling is, but I know I want it to be a tabletop RPG where you resolve combat by bowling.
The “a few bad apples” line needs to stop being misused. It gets used in the sense that “the good name of the group is tarnished by the misbehaviour of a few of its members”, but that isn’t either the original meaning or how it should be applied now.
When apples start to decay they give off a hormone called ethylene. When ethylene gets onto other apples it suppresses their defences against decay, meaning that bacteria and oxygen get in and they start to rot too, which releases yet more ethylene. This means that a single decaying apple will set off a chain reaction which will make every apple in the vicinity rot.
This is why we say that a single bad apple spoils the batch: pretty soon you’ll have to throw that whole lot out, even the ones that look fine, because they’ll contaminate any other apples you put them with. That batch simply has to be written off.
It’s actually a pretty cool experiment (that you can do at home if you have some apples that you don’t mind turning into compost. Remember to use a two bowls of apples: the one with a single rotting apple, and a control group of apples kept in similar conditions in a different room to show what would happen if there wasn’t any ethylene around.)
What does this mean for fandoms? Humans are like apples in a way; we don’t release ethylene but we release something just like it, called “a feeling that dickish behaviour is acceptable.” Once that start getting released then the whole community is infected and has to be quarantined. Reddit shows us what happens if you don’t do this: the rot spreads, causing entire communities to turn septic. If this is the case then the right thing for us to do is the same as with apples: throw it out and don’t allow the refugees to go elsewhere lest they spread their decay, even the refugees who look superficially unaffected.
Unlike apples, however, humans are conscious. When we spot our community being overtaken by decaying people spouting ethylene, we have three things we can do to fight back before our community has to be quarantined and written off:
1) We can aggressively cast out the infected apples before the ethylene spreads, in the manner of zombie survivors locking up people who’ve been bitten. A good example of a community doing this is movement atheism.
2) We can try to prevent ethylene from being spread, thus stopping the decaying apples from setting off the chain reaction. In human terms this means being merciless in clamping down on dickish communication and on the perception that people are getting away with dickishness. A good example of a community doing this is the video games community post #GG.
3) We can try to innoculate apples against ethylene, so that even if others decay they will not do so themselves. In human terms this means raising self-awareness and helping people become aware of their own latent tendencies towards dickishness so they can resist it. A good example of a community doing this is the Church of England. I’m told that the Australian armed forces are also admirable in doing this.
Note that you may well disapprove of the three groups mentioned, for any number of reasons. However, all three are faced with a certain number of members who are decaying, ethylene-spreading apples: they are not only assholes but are infectuous assholes.
All three approaches, or any mixture of them, have one thing in common: they require the community to be honest with itself and to admit that they have a problem; and until that problem is dealt with then they will not be able to behave as freely and irresponsibly as they would be comfortable with. Like with a lot of problems, the hardest part is admitting it.
I don’t see bronies making this admission as a community. This may be because they have too much of an overlap with *chan culture, or it may be because they’re inherently too diffuse and filled with misfits to have such a communal conversation. Or it may simply be because I’m not a member and thus am not privy to these discussions.
/rant.
It can be hard for fandoms to not affect your enjoyment of things, but I’m luckily able to keep them mostly separated. Still, sometimes you find somebody posting something vile somewhere and they have an avatar of a show you love and it just makes you cringe.
I just try not to interact with the fandoms directly, instead have friends or make online pals who are more inline with my own sensitivities and thoughts.
Even if a fandom isn’t necessarily toxic I find it’s also really hard to have a constructive conversation about the negative aspects of a show or simply criticizing elements you thought could need improvement. Most people seem really incapable and unwilling to critique things they like, and take offense when others engage in constructive criticism or just badmouthing an especially bad episode in an otherwise generally good series.
MLP was being discussed here pretty thoroughly and while I haven’t watched that show, pretty much everything said can apply to a ton of popular cartoons.
@Bittersweet- Funny you mention Louisiana as a good chunk of my visit involved trips to the ASPCA and walks with my hosts’ adorable pit bulls 🙂
@Spindrift- I think cat searching is just worldwide. How can it not? 🙂
What’s funny is how “a few bad apples” has come to mean “an aberration that we don’t need to do anything about” (eg, “police violence is just a few bad apples”).
This is the most bizarre part, honestly. Like, the entire point of the show is “Love and tolerate.” Its name is “Friendship is magic.” And yet, if you see a random pony avatar on a non-pony forum, that person will be spouting such horrible, slur-filled, violent bullshit that your average 4Chan Nazi would blush.
Ugh.
And that’s why I don’t use pony avatars anymore. =P
But with all due respect, Dave, vaping is not a healthy alternative to smoking. Indeed, available data suggest that vaping is leading an unprecedented number of youth to jump in to real cigarettes, sort of like a “gateway cig” of you will. So I think that puts vapingv on the same ground as MRAs who ate equally deleterious to the health of our nation because they so stridently harangue that half of our population which has experienced historical subjugation by suggesting they now have too many rights and ought to return to the “feminine mystique.”
Regarding British insults, as I’m from Britain but live in America – I actually like it here because so many of the words regarded as rude in Britain are just treated as adorably quaint here, it gives me a lot more freedom to say what I really think of people 😉
However, there are so many pitfalls as well – it had to be explained to me quietly when I first came to the US that “Chinaman” was in no way an acceptable term for someone from China – I had always thought it as natural as Scotsman, Irishman, Frenchman. The other way around, I was absolutely scandalized when someone first described someone as “spastic” here – it apparently meaning just high-energy and manic, rather than the shockingly crude term for a disabled person that it is in the UK.
Anyway. Furry/brony talk: here is a picture of a nice rabbit to take your mind off all of this. (My appearance as mascot at a local pet show!)
http://40.media.tumblr.com/c8221b8fb922b6b3036256104c03def7/tumblr_nu0sdpKrsR1s5hl0xo1_500.jpg
@katz:
Agreed entirely. I think, at core, the issue is that nobody wants to label their group with a big “UNCLEAN – DO NOT ENTER” sign; and would rather have people come in unwarily and get hurt than face the social consequences of putting that label up.
My college friend, who’s Japanese but spent her childhood in English boarding schools had to train herself not to call cigarettes f**s.
Regarding fandoms, are they all toxic? It seems so. The first and now probably only online fandom I’ve ever joined is ASOIAF and/or Game of Thrones. There’s a lot of cool, smart people to be found. A lot of really intelligent analyses and well thought out interesting fan theories. There’s also a lot of people who argue that Cersei deserved to be beaten and raped by Robert because she’s not a good person. There’s a lot of people calling Dany a slut because she had sex with Daario and whining about mean she is for not reciprocating Jorah’s affection because – you’ll have hear this one before – he’s a nice guy and so devoted. Plus there’s a lot of book purist vs. show fan contention that is incredibly annoying. It’s gotten so that I don’t participate anywhere near as much anymore.
@WWTH
“Can I bum a f*g?” is a common saying here for cadging a cigarette. As ‘bum’ is also slang for engaging in anal sex, you can imagine the hilarity that often ensues (obviously not really)