Apparently the Men’s Rightsers of the world think that they can defeat the forces of feminism by overwhelming them with incomprehensible memes.
I found the puzzling meme above on A Voice for Men’s Facebook page. I think it’s safe to say that it will not be winning any awards for logic.
But AVFM’s meme-makers manage to top themselves in incomprehensibility with this followup meme:
How exactly these grocery shopping women play “a stronger role than men” in getting men elected I’m not sure.
Can you buy extra votes at the grocery store, or something? Or are men afraid that their wives/girlfriends/mothers will go on a grocery shopping strike and cause them to starve to death, because men can’t grocery or something?
I’m not sure — and the AVFM meme maker isn’t giving out any hints — but apparently the power wielded by these grocery ladies is awesome indeed:
Men! Save yourselves! You don’t have to eat your own children!
YOU CAN GO TO GROCERY STORES YOURSELVES.
I mean, it’s kind of boring, and eats up time you might otherwise spend sitting on the couch. But if you think about it, swinging by the grocery store on your way home from work and picking up a nice rotisserie chicken and some sides at the deli counter is probably less of a hassle than cooking an eating your own children, what with all the cleanup involved.
@ Qubrick
You’ve inspired me to start doing MRA memes.
The caption for this one is: “Men, if you don’t rhubarb salad then you’ve only yourselves to blame when women calcify geraniums”
http://psnt.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/daliatomicus1.jpg
David Futrelle
I guess men need women now to buy food for them and without food the men in power would starve? What ever happened to the claim that men “hunted the mammoth?”
Also, don’t those two contradict each other as well? The first one says the guys in government don’t really have any power, then the second one says actually they do, but it’s just women that put them there. That doesn’t add up.
OK I got it. The meme maker misquotes Kammer *facepalm*.
Kammer (some 1990s MRA) writes “Looking at men in business and government and saying WE have all the power is like looking at women in the supermarket and saying they have all the food”
Kammer then elaborates that powerful men (meme deliberately omits business) work to please their loved ones, while ignoring ordinary men. Just like women in the supermarket shop to please their husband and children instead of themselves.
…okay, that still sounds stupid and confusing.
First meme suffers from simple analog mismatch. Grocery shopping is nowhere like running a government. Also neglecting the obvious that grocery shopping is super easy to equalize in society – men just need to grocery shop more often. No obstacles other than laziness getting in the way. Women getting enough political influence to be electable is a whole other problem that is not as easy to resolve. Way to oversimplify the issue.
Second meme suffers from utter stupidity. Either they do not understand how the voting system works (grocery shops don’t run an extra ballot box for shoppers) or they are implying that the wives of politicians are somehow in charge of their husbands? That seems to be the idea that the commentator was getting at. Gross generalization and bizarre logic… you mean men in governments are beta males who are the slaves of their spouses? I thought the drive and ambition required to become a public figure would place them in the alpha category – of course, since I didn’t consume their ‘red pill’ I must be seeing things wrong.
Last statement has no relation to ‘idea’ being discussed above and should have been excluded on grounds of irrelevancy. But I guess it would not be complete if they didn’t stick their middle finger up at all their ‘oppressors’.
They should create their own version of ‘Les Miserables’. Editing the original to fit their perceptions shouldn’t be too hard. It already has everything they love!
– slut-shaming
– protecting/saving the beautiful damsel
– OPPRESSION
– a righteous revolution
– much bromance
– the law is after me!
– a heroic (male) self-sacrifice (look at the woman cry! Oh, the tragedy!)
Only thing that is missing that is really important is the main character getting laid at some point, but there isn’t a shortage of targets in the musical. For sanity’s sake, I won’t get into the possibilities – DON’T THINK IT PEOPLE! If you did, I’m sorry 8p
My takeaway from this meme is that we need to start thumping politicians on the head to see if they’re ripe.
@lkeke35
Larry is my cat, or Feminist High Council Liaison, 😉 take your pick.
I cringe to even hazard a guess of what racist, women-hating, illogical clustercluck would be the result of one of these @$$hats coming up with a WOC meme. Just, ah!
@Qubrik & @Alan
Here’s my contribution.
Hazmat gondolas with creaking clouds, make pine needle hot dish float on paragraphs.
(Trying something new, apologies if img link doesn’t work.)
Wouldn’t the first meme make more sense to compare the leaders in the government who have a ton of power because they can pass laws to the leaders in the agricultural industry who have a ton of power because they control the food supply to a decent extent? You get the bonus of those sometimes having been the same group in some countries in the past!
This meme was definitely written by a 17-year-old who never visits the grocery store himself, and thus got the weird idea that only women do groceries. (because he only sees his mum doing it?)
And he’s bitter that he never has enough biscuits/cheetos/mountain dew, to last him one day, and thus thinks his dear mummy mum and all other women have the power to starve men, if they so wanted. Oh cruel world. I’m surely not going to leave my basement and -actually- go get food myself! The world’s gone mad!
That makes more sense than this lazy attempt at making a “meme”.
Okay, one more time, the picture (Dada artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vertical-horizontal Composition 1916)
Caption: “Hazmat gondolas with creaking clouds, make pine needle hot dish float on paragraphs.”
Well, the meaning of the first one seems obvious. A common “thought” is that everything men do is in order to impress/provide for women, so the reason so many men are in power is because they’re motivated by women (further, there’s probably some idea that the women in men’s life can – even if they do not – influence them to wield their manly power to their women’s design). That’s supposed to be compared to women grocery shopping, who according to these guys mostly shop to feed their men and children (also catering to their taste). The second meme kind of supports that, but it’s even more poorly worded. Still, as blatantly wrong as it is, I can’t say it’s message is at all incomprehensible.
Ah, makes sense. You see slightly more women than men in grocery stores, so that’s why men make up 70% of politicians in the USA even though women make up 51% of the population. It’s just basic math.
“I guess men need women now to buy food for them and without food the men in power would starve? What ever happened to the claim that men “hunted the mammoth?””
Unfortunately, we were too good at it, we hunted mammoths into extinction, so now we need someone to make us a sammich.
I actually think @mola the ocean sunfish got this right – that is, their point is that women have “more power” because they make up a tiny majority of the population. I’ve heard this argument from many different MRAs before. I’ve also often asked in response: So, if the choice is between Man A and Man B, how many women voters will it take to elect a woman in this situation? They never get back to me about that. :/
I get what they think.
What they think is that men have literally no control of themselves with respect to their sexuality.
This is a widely accepted MRA perception with literally no basis whatsoever in reality. And it underlies so much of their bullshit. They just take that as a given proposition and start deriving crazy things from it with iffy logic.
They think that women shopping for food to cook for dinner is equivalent to women having economic power.
The greater number of moms who take care of home and family to a greater extent than dads pushes the numbers towards women making choices on how the money is spent, but that’s really only about who is there when the purchases are made rather than any power grab by women.
For example, when choosing a house, saying, this school district is better than that one and I like this neighborhood better, is just the person most involved in the ramifications of that decision having more of a say in that decision.
Women choose the kids’ clothing more, because they are more likely to be involved in the use of the clothing — washing it, making sure it fits, making sure it’s where it needs to be when they get dressed, helping put it on. Not because they are tyrants about kids’ clothing.
It’d be like saying Donald Trump’s personal assistant is a bigger social butterfly than he is, because s/he makes all the arrangements for his social life. They’re actions made on behalf of someone else, or a group.
I agree with Michael Brew. This is basically “Yeah, it might seem like there are more men in power but all they do is legislate to make women happy” (maybe there’s something alpha going on too, like politicians are the alphas and so on). and “Women do most of the shopping, but they cook for their menfolk, so you can’t make an assumption that more men in politics means more men in control”. Of course, one of the ridiculous things is that there are other ways to feed yourself too: restaurants, convenience stores, pubs.
The second meme tries to make the claim that there are no women doing anything beyond complaining. Women do not deserve any positions of power even though they could totally slide right in, and if they would just get some qualifications and be willing to work instead of play victim, they could do what the men are doing. Because of course, society favors women and there are no biases against women, etc.
And I second Ikeke35: PoC don’t even exist to take part in the politics and shopping fun that is modern power.
I think what he is trying to say ties into the whole “behind every successful man is a strong woman” quote. In other words, if women have the smarts and capability to assist, encourage and support a man into being a success, the we an get out there and become successful ourselves. And if we have our own money, we can stop whining and we won’t need to leech off of a man.
Even if the first meme were true, he’d have to either admit that the idea that women have the power because they spend more money is a myth, or admit that male politicians really do hold all the power.
@mewfington catmouth iii:
Is that you?
http://cache.desktopnexus.com/thumbseg/1102/1102609-bigthumbnail.jpg
You know, it’s very tempting to generate a completely nonsense meme using a few of the MRA buzzwords and post it to one of their sites as an experiment.
I wonder how many “You nailed it bro!” comments it would attract.
I will not weild power in an ovaltine office, for Sammy Sammich I Am dunked in the nesquik. Feminazi did the shopping, Am I a Sammy Samwich?
They’re probably referring to the fact that since the 1980s, women have been making up 64% of the voter turnout in US national elections. The civics and politics knowledge, it is most scant.
My picture didn’t work. Oh well. It was this one http://f.tqn.com/y/arthistory/1/L/N/O/dada_newyork_07.jpg
“I mean, it’s kind of boring, and eats up time you might otherwise spend sitting on the couch. But if you think about it, swinging by the grocery store on your way home from work and picking up a nice rotisserie chicken and some sides at the deli counter is probably less of a hassle than cooking an eating your own children, what with all the cleanup involved.”
Naw. Real men eat the babies raw. What do you think — a true Alpha Dude’s going to cook and clean house on the same day? What are you, nuts?