Every Friday is Memeday here at We Hunted the Mammoth, and today we’ll be looking at some memes I found on a Facebook page called Feminist Hypocrisy.
At first glance, this page looks like any number of other Men’s Rightsy Facebook pages.
There are the requisite jokey memes mocking feminists. (“What do you call a basement full of feminists?” one caption asks, over the picture of a donkey. “A whine cellar!”) There is a post about Anjali Ramkissoon, the Uber-driver-attacking (female) doctor who’s become something of an obsession amongst MRAs in recent days. There are memes on such Men’s Rights hobbyhorses as the evils of child support — like the one above, which the folks at Feminist Hypocrisy borrowed from A Voice for Men.
Indeed, the admin of the page seems a bit preoccupied with this last issue, in particular with the specter of men being forced to pay for children fathered by other dudes.
Yep, it looks like some Men’s Rights Activists are as obsessed with cuckolding — or, more crudely, “cucking” — as any internet Nazi. Or maybe even more so:
(I had to censor that one a little.)
Now, when the internet Nazis talk about “cucking” there is almost always a racist angle to it — the cuck-er invariably being black or brown and the cuck-ee white. Sometimes this “cucking” is meant literally, other times figuratively — with the internet Nazi squad especially pissed at white “race traitors” who support immigrants said to be “cucking” Western Civilization by, well, not being white.
Guess what? It just so happens that Mr.Feminist Hypocrisy is also racist as hell.
Look how seamlessly the Men’s Rights activism slides into this blatantly racist meme. Bigotries flock together, after all.
Poking around amongst the rest of the memes up on the page, it quickly becomes evident that Mr. Feminist Hypocrisy shares quite a few of the preoccupations of your standard issue internet Nazi — from the terrible oppressions faced by white Christian dudes …
… to, uh, whatever it is we’ve got going on here.
Huh. I thought Obama was supposed to be a secret Muslim, not a secret gay Jew.
There are many more racist memes on the page, including a number too crude and violent to repost here.
And then there are a few memes that seem utterly inexplicable, at least to me; if anyone can decipher the meaning of this thing, I would greatly appreciate it. (The readers of the Feminist Hypocrisy page seem to have been as baffled by it as I am; apparently that’s former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s head photoshopped onto someone else’s body.)
It would be nice if we could just dismiss the Feminist Hypocrisy page as a weird outlier in the world of Men’s Rights Activism. But it’s not. The page has nearly 20,000 “likes” on Facebook. Its posts draw comments and shares.
And the way I found it in the first place? I was looking through a list of Facebook pages “liked” by A Voice for Men, and there it was.
On a less depressing note: My headline today was inspired by the classic commercials for Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups which some readers here will remember from their childhoods. Here’s one of them:
Turns out that chocolate and peanut butter do indeed taste great together. Racism and Men’s Rights Activism, not so much.
@dlouwe
the photographing skin over nipples to make it look like women don’t have nipples has always freaked me out
You know, working outside the home doesn’t preclude cuddle time on the bed with the kids. I myself have done both within the past 24 hours.
That meme is just such a blatant, black-and-white appeal to emotion (from the supposedly uber-logical manosphere). You could just as easily have chosen photos from the other side to represent work and motherhood. Instead of a cockeyed, stressed-out manager giving a boardroom presentation, how about a happy, fulfilled female doctor or scientist? Instead of a contented, well-coiffed mom lying on fluffy white bedsheets in a clean house with adorable kids, how about a stressed-out, unshowered mom with a sinkful of dishes, Play Doh embedded into every porous surface in the house, lipstick on the dog, a clogged toilet, Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing the doorbell, and 4 crying, bickering kids under the age of 5, one of whom has a double ear infection? Parenthood isn’t all rosy greeting card moments. Work isn’t all dreary, pointless meetings in corporate boardrooms.
I really dislike the way women are constant targets of the “You Can Have It All…Or Can You?” dilemma/guilt trip. Men get a free pass on that, it seems. They want to work? Great, have at it! They want to contribute more as fathers? Heroic! When it comes to the life/work balance, it seems like women’s choices get a lot more scrutiny. Whatever women don’t choose gets elevated in importance, because everyone is so focused on the opportunity costs. If you work, you’re selfish and a bad mother for putting your kids in daycare and not staying home with them. Every minute you spend at work is time you could have spent bonding with your children, helping them with homework, and so on. On the other hand, if you stay home, then you’re brainwashed, you lack motivation, you’re not a team player, we’ll hire someone who’s not going to get pregnant and quit, etc. No matter what you do, it’s never the right balance.
As for the idiotic racism in that meme: 1) Working men also support welfare recipients, but I don’t see any criticism being leveled at them by Mister Hypocrisy Expert and 2) the welfare recipient is black and has 9 children because of course.
(Sees the “Jews are conspiring to turn Americans gay” meme)
What? That doesn’t even make sense, except from the standpoint of “I made all of these misogynistic and racist memes today, but I haven’t filled up my quota of anti Semitic and homophobic memes!”
What is this, I don’t even know.
Thank you PI, Drezden and EJ.
Cody really is an amazing little kid. And he looks like a clone of me which is pretty cool.
And EJ, he’s also obsessed with maths. From when he was about 3 years old he’s been asking maths questions relentlessly, it’s improved my mental arithmetic! ?
He’s also been coming with me on political marches since before he could walk. Obviously I only take him to ones that aren’t likely to kick off but so far he’s marched for equal marriage and a few anti-austerity demos. He even occasionally watches parliament TV, he cheered when equal marriage was passed. I’m so proud of him and I’m proud that I’ve managed to raise such an awesome human.
I’m only at the end of page 2, but here goes!
WWTH et al:
I’m gonna take a stab at this from another direction. There are too many single mothers according to these guys because the awful feminists keep telling women that they don’t have to stay in bad marriages or get into them in the first place! If women with children would just stay with their baby daddies, things would be hunky-dory. /mra lolgic
Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
I remember reading something, somewhere many years ago about the unsustainability of capitalism. It was online and I never found it again but it has been a thing that haunts me ever since!
I see a lot of this in debate over whether the minimum wage in the US should be raised to $15. There’s a lot of people who say that they have a college degree and make $15, so why should a fast food worker with a high school education or less make the same money?
It’s a bad argument for so many reasons. Why should people live in poverty so you can feel okay about your own wage? How does someone else making the same money as you diminish your own standard of living?
Plus, it makes no sense even from a purely self centered perspective. If the minimum wage was raised to $15, employers who pay that already would eventually have to raise wages in order to attract the most qualified applicants and keep morale up.
I think you should. At least show his father that he wants to see him. I know it’d be hurtful for you, but this is what Cody wants. And you’re right, that’ll mean you’ve at least done what you can to make Cody happy.
If his father doesn’t show up or respond though, well, it’ll break his heart. But perhaps he’ll understand why when he’s older.
Oh, I certainly don’t doubt that some of those photos are just as phony because of assumptions made by other people.
I’ve also pointed out that they can still be considered “phony” in a sense because of other external reasons. (It’s not fraud if it’s a knock off purse, ect)
Some people really need to learn how to mind their own fucking business, to be totally honest.
Would this help?
It’s applied like this!
http://rack.2.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDE1LzA3LzA3L2E4L25pcHMuNDJjYjYuanBnCnAJdGh1bWIJOTUweDUzNCMKZQlqcGc/88824dfc/564/nips.jpg
Yeah, I think it’s simply because men are just considered more valuable wherever they go.
@ WWTH
Very true. The problem then can be that such actions drive inflation (essentially, everyone gets salary bump to “maintain a differential”) then, in real terms, the minimum wage just has the same purchasing power as before so people are still stuck at the bottom.
I think a big problem (in the UK at least) is where a Government subsidises big companies by things like tax credits or in work benefits. I’m very happy for the employees but I think it’s wrong in principle for a company that makes huge profits to rely on the state to pay their employees for them.
I have nothing against capitalism in principle but that’s not what we have in a lot of cases. Profits are private, debt is public. In true capitalism a business absorbs the cost of production itself, and that includes wages.
(And of course if you pay your employees properly they have surplus income to buy stuff which means there’s a bigger market, which means more things have to be produced, which means more jobs….and so on. Paying people a decent wage isn’t just morally right, it’s in business’s own interests)
Alan Robertshaw:
The inflation is happening anyway. The money supply continues to rise, and prices with it. Wages are the only thing that isn’t rising.
@Paradoxical Intention
I need to steal that male nipple. :p
Australian here, delurking to add something to what others have said about Julia Gillard. I think mostly what Gillard did as PM and the sort of sexism she faced has been covered, but I just wanted to also mention that she’s now working heading up the global partnership for education, which is heavily involved in education in developing countries, particularly but not exclusively for vulnerable girls. Of course, for misogynist MRAs that’s another reason to hate her, but for anyone without their head up their hate-filled arse, that’s a pretty damn commendable thing to be doing.
@Fabe
I’ve seen that picture a million times and I’ve never realized it was a UNH sweatshirt. The “live free or die” motto always bothered me because they put it on the license plates that they make in the prisons. UNH is weird because the state is really conservative but the school is more liberalish–there was a kerfuffle a while back where some part of the university published a list of ever day words and phrases that are exclusionary and possible alternatives to get people to think about the language they used and people freaked out about how it was political correctness run amuck
This is for Cody:
http://0.thumbs.scribol.com/10/sites/default/files/images/sloth5.jpg?v=1
(I hope it embeds right.)
This is for Cody.
http://0.thumbs.scribol.com/10/sites/default/files/images/sloth5.jpg?v=1
Aww, that’s adorable ^_^
Hello.
Maybe they rant because floppy vaginas are not compatible with USB penis ? Maybe they should stick to their dreamed sexbots…
Have a nice day.
That UNH photo is about 9 years old. The phone he’s holding is a T-Mobile Sidekick 3, which I worked on the system software for (Bluetooth and telephony). It shipped in mid-2006.
It supposedly raises the cost of goods and services, reducing the purchasing power of those it’s meant to benefit while costing jobs and opportunities, since owners can’t afford to employ as many people. There’s a few things wrong with those arguments:
We have to accept on faith the word of those with vested interests in keeping labour costs low regardless of whether those costs get passed on to consumers.
Secondly, much of cost of living remains unaffected by the minimum wage. For example rents, goods produced overseas, services that don’t utilize semi-skilled labour.
Lastly, people living from week to week have less bargaining power than they should have, even by ‘market’ standards because of their situations: no savings to live off while looking for another job; less time to look for another job or up-skill because of the long hours necessary to meet basic living costs. Business operators know this and it’s why bottom tier wages tend not to rise on their own, even during periods of high economic growth.
Add to that the fact that employer advocate associations have historically stood against any government mandated protection for workers, no matter how basic, such as lunch breaks or health and safety requirements and there’s the impression that the concern for the poor’s interests aren’t particularly genuine.