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.
@WWTH
That makes a lot of sense. I’m just disappointed that the stereotype of every Asian man being a kick-ass kung-fu fighter hasn’t taken off to the same degree as other stereotypes. Oh well, I guess you can’t have it all.
It might be, but there’s not any compelling evidence that it is. (And we must keep in mind that ‘efficient’ does not mean the same thing as ‘effective’. Efficiecy means getting something done with a minimum expenditue of resources e.g. dropping a cinderblock on a mosquito is certainly effective in getting rid of it, but using your thumb is a lot more efficient . The only area where capitalism is efficient is in funneling money to the top (and often not that either). Claims that it produces goods and services efficiently rely on ignoring negative externalities.
@ dreadnought
You may be pleased to know that that stereotype does appear to have caught on in London’s criminal community.
There was some research into how street robbers selected targets. One of the factors that reduced your likelihood was looking Asian (in the US sense of the word) and it seems to arise from an unconscious stereotyping along those grounds. You do have to ensure that the robbers have been exposed to lots of action movies and video games utilising that trope though.
(For additional security, be attentive, wear black and look like you’re familiar with the neighbourhood)
WWTH: It sounds like you’re talking about this:
https://medium.com/basic-income/unconditional-basic-income-a-hand-out-or-a-hand-in-c096ee1d6a64#.2yeb3jdhs
I’ve been reading up on this and starting to like the idea, even though I’m not certain it’s something that would work here.
That could also be because they fetishize Asian women as well. So degrading Asian men would mean that they could suffer the consequences of having less Asian women put up with their bullshit. (Not that many of them are lining up for THAT lovely idea.)
Also just going to mention that holy shit CL is glorious. I first heard of her in 2NE1 a while back because a girl I was going to college with mentioned them to me (I have a fleeting familiarity with KPop and such), and she released a rap single called “Hello Bitches” and I love it so much that I’ve been listening to it on repeat.
Though, admittedly, I am aware that Japan and South Korea do have a bit of a racism problem when it comes to appropriating black culture.
@ Alan
Omg, that totally explains why Cameron contracted the Chinese to build nuclear power stations in the UK. Fear us neo-nazis of the world for we have cucked the British PM! Bwahaha!
@Lkeke35:
The whole “basic income” concept has been around for a very long time. People have been predicting since the late 19th century that the time would one day come when most people would not have to work, and most people couldn’t get work anyway even if they wanted to. There have been endless debates on how to keep people fed and sheltered. And also occupied enough that there wouldn’t be a plague of vandals and troublemakers. A guaranteed minimum income was the most common solution to many issues.
But given that having a job is apparently a necessary part of many people’s self-esteems (thanks mainly to cultural factors), and there is considerable resistance to wealth redistribution out of “moral” reasons, plus making it much harder to achieve multi-billionaire status… it’s going to be a really tough sell in countries which don’t already have a fairly socialistic governments. Regardless of whether the “limited-work utopia” ever comes to pass.
EVERYONE STOP POSTING AND LOOK AT THIS CUTE BIRB:
http://36.media.tumblr.com/5d1ae0e450212f162373765b983e9fbd/tumblr_o0r0y8j3R41sq04bjo1_500.jpg
Okay, carry on.
@Paradoxical Intention
Your tiny-bird friend is adorably self-confident.
***
Mr. Feminist Hypocrisy, I’m confused.
You’ve got a photo of a women with two children clinging to her back. Feminists want this woman to “miss out on this.”
You have another photo of a woman hugging a child. You say this child is a “ball of flesh that eats money, destroys dreams, and shits stress.”
So which is it?
Are children something a woman shouldn’t miss out on?
Or balls of flesh that eat money, destroy dreams, and shit stress?
Now, what were you saying about feminists being hypocrites?
@WWTH
There is something about ‘handouts’ keeping people in poverty… but it’s not the handouts themselves so much, but the loss of benefit when you start earning money again. I think it’s particularly pernicious in the UK. There are both cash benefits and non-cash benefits that cease or diminish rapidly when you start earning above a VERY LOW threshold. When I was very low income (but not entitled to benefits because I’m foreign, fair enough) I was given a leaflet entitled “Better off working” but I ran the math and you weren’t – you really weren’t! And you really weren’t better off if you consider leisure time as having any value whatsoever. Under the then system it was entirely sensible to not work if your earning potential was very low particularly if you had caring duties for children, etc.
For me, I was better off working because I already had a bachelors and a masters and a middle class, quasi-intellectual upbringing, so my earning potential was there, even if as a newcomer to a country I had to grub at the bottom for a while. And of course, my grubbing was white collar temping – not great, but not exactly horrible and I temped at places like the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive*.
____
*As a temp I once got really looked down on when I ‘mispronounced’ subsidence. Dude got all uppity on me as a lowly temp. But I was just saying it the American way – I mean I’ve got a degree in Geology – I know how to say subsidence. One way then – two ways now!
As a former stress sh*tting ball of flesh myself, I don’t think these memes are going to convert me to the cause. But of course it’s too late since I already squandered my hard earned wealth helping grow my wife’s fleshballs into horrible western women who are no doubt even now plotting to cuck the Western world. High five to the gynocracy!
Re poor people daring not to live in Dickensian squalor:
Here in Europe “refugees with iPhones, gasp!” is a thing, because people can’t grasp that many of the people had a decent standard of living before the current conflict.
Ugh, fuck their memes about how it’s all fun times and free cash to be a single mum.
My son’s dad walked out when I wouldn’t get an abortion. He said it was my choice to keep the baby and he shouldn’t have to have anything to do with it. I internalised this and tried really hard to get by without child support. After just 6 months I was struggling so much I had to admit defeat and went to the child support agency. He then denied the baby was his, we had to get a DNA test to prove it.
He paid for a few months but then quit his job so he wouldn’t have to give me money. Then for a few years, any time the child support agency caught up with him he would quit his job again and work cash-in-hand for a while. It was only when he got a partner and had a baby with her that he didn’t have the luxury of being able to cut and run because he needs a steady income.
He pays £30 a week. I can assure you that this doesn’t cover even 10% of my bills. I am not living in luxury. I work full time and the child support I get means that I’m able to buy school uniforms and things like that.
And yes, sometimes being a single parent is amazing. You get all the fun bits of parenting. You get to be there for them. But also, it can be heartbreaking. Last night my son, who is now 6, gave me a letter he’d written and asked if I can send it to his dad. It said,
“To dad I want to meet you. I hope you reeding theis dad. From Cody. Xxx to dad”
After he went to bed I cried into my pillow because my baby is hurting and I can’t fix it. And that’s the fucking reality of what these useless, absent dads leave behind.
The fact that MRAs would even begrudge my son that measly £30 a week just shows how much they lack empathy.
@Dr.NicolaLuna:
Holy shit, I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I really feel for your son, having been in a similar situation myself when I was a kid.
I remember being told as a five-year-old by my then step-father: “I’m not your dad! Your dad didn’t love you and he left!”
I’ve internalized that shit for a long time. Thank the Goddess that both these fuckers are out of my life.
Still hurts sometimes though, and I still think sometimes about why I wasn’t good enough for him and why he didn’t love me or my mom enough to stay, even though I know the answer pretty damn well.
So, yeah, I’m crying a bit now. I’m gonna go play Oblivion until people stop chopping onions or something.
Please give Cody a hug from me? And take one for yourself. You both need one. I promise you, this will get better. I know things are hard now, and they’ll never be easy, but you’re doing a hell of a job raising that sweet kid.
@PI
thank you so much for your kind words, and I’m sorry I brought up horrible memories for you. I can’t imagine someone saying that to my son and how hurtful it must have been to hear that.
I think tonight I’ll order some pizza (cody’s favourite food) and have a movie night with him.
As someone who has been through his situation, do you think I should send his letter? I’m thinking I should, at least then I’ve done what I can.
I’ve yet to see a child support payment that was unfair to the parent required to pay it. Child support is proportional to earnings. If you make little, you pay little. What you pay isn’t determined by your money grubbing ex who can’t wait to spend it on shoes and household cleaning products.
I’m seeing a dude who (uses poor judgement sometimes…..) gets nothing from either ex and the cost of full-time childcare significantly outweighs what he’s capable of earning while his kids are small and need minding around the clock. Millions of single moms don’t see anything from their kids’ dads either. No one considers it cute when it happens to men. Why is single parenthood supposedly so adorable when women get the kids?
Even when the parent with custody (assuming situations where one parent has primary custody) they aren’t receiving more than the courts agree is a reasonable proportion of the other parent’s income to contribute to their child. Very rarely does that parent make enough money for the other to be able to stretch it so thin they’re able to get their damn nails painted with it much less buy fancy cars or go on swank vacations after they’ve covered their child’s living costs.
I actually am one of those kids whose mother supposedly had it made. Her ex-husband with whom she had two kids made HUGE money and she had custody (although, contrary to popular mythology, no one stole her kids from their father. As is the case in the overwhelming majority of them, my dad didn’t want custody of us and agreed to child support payments.) The whole time she was single, receiving child support payments she worked full-time as a hospital administrator, owned an old car and a shitty little house in small town. Not exactly glamourous.
And I’ll wager my mother’s experience of single parenting was actually a lot smoother than most because we’re white and she had a good job and owned a home when she and my dad split.
I’m just waiting to encounter a single parent who lives in the lap of luxury while their ex suffers. Even in situations where one parent doesn’t contribute, the non-contributing parent usually has a pretty rough go! My guy friend’s ex with whom he has one child doesn’t financially contribute or often see the kid and her life is a train wreck. Nothing to envy there. The only reason the other one’s life is less of a disaster is within weeks of separating from her kids’ dad she found a boyfriend who welcomed her with open arms into his family and provides for her. Finding someone else to take care of you isn’t gender specific. My sister’s kept a boyfriend who doesn’t work around for six or seven years. She doesn’t even make decent money. She just can’t fathom being alone.
And I just heard my dude’s nine-year-old accidentally smashed someone’s lighting equipment which his dad is, naturally, now on the hook for. Goodness knows his dad won’t accept help from me either.
Oh, that charmed life of the single parent!
Oh my word, I clicked on the link to the Feminist Hypocrisy page, and now I hate everyone.
Dah!
Top post today, for those who are wiser than to look, is to wish a horrible death on Katie Hopkins, claiming that she’s a feminist. She’s an extreme right wing racist and possible troll who calls refugees “cockroaches”. Donald Trump calls her “respected journalist”.
She also has well-documented health issues and said in an interview that she lives in fear of dying before her children are grown.
She’s a single parent – maybe that’s why the dudes as FH hate her? Or because she’s visibly female and says stuff. Loathsome stuff, generally.
I’m going out to look at the almond blossom.
I used to manage a small insurance office in the US which dealt largely with lower income seniors. We’d try to help people qualify for various forms of aid but we often ran into an issue where, if someone was qualified for X benefit, they’d be disqualified for Y benefit they already received if they accepted it.
For example, if you’re on Medicare in the US, you typically pay a monthly fee which basically covers doctor visits. This is normally deducted directly from people’s social security income. If your income is under a certain threshold, you can be exempted from this fee. That, however, counts as an increase in income and often puts people in a situation where, if they took this exemption, they’d be disqualified for food stamps or some other unrelated benefit.
I wonder if there’s a statistic somewhere that estimates how many benefit dollars go unclaimed because of overlaps like this.
@paradoxical
This is a late reply, but anywho… I’ve seen those EBT photos you’re talking about and I think even some of those are phony. I’ve seen stories where people were using gift visas and people mistook them for EBT cards. I think sometimes people don’t really know what the person in front of them is doing.
Why are some people so obsessed with food stamp recipients that they spy on others in the grocery line? I mean, fraud is a thing but it is not rampant in food stamps.
On another topic, about these MRAs and their contradictory positions on children, they don’t seem to view others as human beings. I think Larry Wilmore said it best when he took a Fox News libertarian to task for minimizing slavery. Larry played clips of this guy saying that taxation was the worst thing ever (I think he compared taxation to rape – the wallet getting raped) and then how slavery wasn’t that bad. To end the segment, he said “you know how you feel about your wallet? Some people feel that way about people”
WWTH
So. Much. This.
Demonising and beating down the poor is so counter-productive and self-defeating … you’d think these people don’t actually want a healthier economy, they just want to make people beg and suffer because they enjoy it and it makes them feel superior.
And who am I kidding, my generation – or rather, a subset of my generation – went to uni for free and had grants and then brought in university fees and loans.
Dr. NicolaLuna, respect and wishes from a random internet stranger ain’t worth much I know. But {{{virtual hugs}} to you and Cody if I may.
Having gone through the parenting side of it, I would say send the letter but prepare yourself for what comes next. Chances are that even if things go well for your son, it’s going to take a toll on you.
A few years ago, my daughter contacted her biological father and they’ve been trying to establish a relationship. She is fortunately old enough to notice some of the problems, but we’ve had to deal with lies about her mother and the reasons he hasn’t been around, conflicts over parenting decisions, and him essentially telling her that he was only spending time with her because it was convenient (she fortunately didn’t pick up that little tidbit).
As a parent, you’ll be in the unenviable position of attempting to protect your son from the emotional harm that might be caused while allowing him space to heal.
Hugs to you and your son.
And hugs to you as well, PI.
Also, to the extent that fraud happens, a lot of it is in the form of people selling food stamps so they can buy other necessities like toilet paper or soap.
I think for some of them, that’s exactly what it is. They can’t enjoy what they have unless there are others who don’t have it. That and the American ideal of macho rugged individualism which says that those who need help are undeserving of it solely by virtue of needing it in the first place.
For other people, especially baby boomers and older, I think they just have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that some items once classified as luxuries – cell phones and to an extent personal computers – are now functional necessities. Cell phones especially – I think too many people are still stuck in the early Nineties when they were not just luxury items, but high status markers. They don’t realize that cell phone ownership is not just widespread but expected, by everyone from prospective employers to social workers…or that a cell phone plan can be cheaper than a landline phone service.
But seriously, there is something really wrong with you if you refer to a kid (or indeed any other human being) as “ball of flesh that eats money, destroys dreams and sh*ts stress”. WTF that is totally disgusting.
Hugs to DrNicolaLuna, Paradoxy and Cody. He sounds like a great guy and I can’t see why any decent human being wouldn’t want to be his father.
His father doesn’t sound like a decent human being though, so fuck him.
My very best wishes go out to him and if he ever expresses an interest in maths or astronomy, I can be available on very short notice.