Every Friday is Memeday here at We Hunted the Mammoth, but this week I’m going to start the celebration a day early, with a collection of “told you so!” memes I found, mostly, on Men’s Rights and other antifeminist Facebook pages.
Now, most of us human beings enjoy a bit of Schadenfreude now and then; it’s not the most noble of emotions, but it’s kind of hard to resist laughing a little when some horrible person gets their comeuppance.
Men’s Rights Activists are a pretty bitter and immature bunch, so it’s hardly a shock to see them giggling away at other people’s misfortunes. But it’s still a bit surprising to see just how many of the memes they create and/or pass along are little more than meanspirited “told you sos.”
Even more striking is how many of them offer up a sort of future-tense Schadenfreude. They’re not laughing because some feminist they hate has gotten their comeuppance; they’re laughing at the possibility that this feminist will get their comeuppance some time in the future. And I don’t think I’m wrong to see a sort of anxious desperation underlying these memes; I think on some level most MRAs know their Schadenfreudy fantasies aren’t going to come true.
The meme posted at the top of the page — I posted it before in a roundup of memes from A Voice for Men — is a visual representation of the rather tired claim, repeated endlessly by MRAs, that feminist women will end up dying alone surrounded by a small army of cats.
It’s not clear to me exactly why MRAs find this prediction quite so hilarious. Women tend to live longer than men, which means that even the most staunchly antifeminist women are likely to outlive their partners, giving them pretty much the same chance of ending up “alone” late in their lives, at least if they have no family or friends outside of their late husbands.
But for some reason there aren’t a lot of feminists sitting around cackling at the thought of GirlWritesWhat dying alone at some date in the not-so-near future. Because that’s petty, and tacky, and mean.
In addition to being a stony-hearted bunch, MRAs also tend to be a bit impatient, and like to imagine their sworn feminist enemies having their Waterloos long before they get to the age of seventy.
And so MRAs fantasize about feminists having a sudden realization that they were wrong and the MRAs were right — shortly after hitting age 30 or whenever it is that modern misogynists like to imagine that women magically turn into pumpkin-faced uggos.
Dudes, only MRAs, misogynists and pedophiles think that a woman’s “best years” are in her teens and early 20s.
By why wait for these imaginary feminists to have some sort of drastically premature mid-life crisis when you can just pretend that they’ll all be miserable just as soon as they graduate from college with their women’s studies degrees.
Whoever made this meme picked an awfully cheerful-looking woman to represent a young feminist brokenhearted over having to work at Subway.
But women don’t have to work in food service to be miserable, the mememakers insist. Having to work ANY job at all is going to make them regret their feminism. Because apparently, before feminism came along, women were pampered creatures who slept all day on silk sheets, surrounded by bon-bon wrappers and an assortment of tiny dogs, while their husbands worked 25-hour-days in the salt mines.
Huh. Somehow I missed the part where feminism told women that working in an office was the closest thing to paradise on earth
Then there’s this tired trope, a lovely example of misogynoir turned into a meme by a black MRA cartoonist I first noticed on DeviantArt a couple of years ago.
And let’s end this survey of future-tense schadenfreude with a meme that somehow manages to work in two historical cartoons I really like and that I think I’ve posted here before.
I’m going to say, “yes,” except perhaps the portion of her life she spent married to a dickhead.
And because the first two cartoons there deserve better than to be shoved into a dopey antifeminist meme, let’s look at them in all their full-sized glory.
We love you, kickass suffragette girl!
This cartoon was originally intended as anti-suffragette propaganda, but, seriously, that girl is AWESOME.
Looking through the collection of anti-sufragette cartoons featured on the post I linked to above, I noticed another one that shows pretty clearly just how ancient and utterly unoriginal the “you feminists will all die alone” trope really is.
See, wanting the vote makes women UGLY!
Is is even necessary to point out the obvious: that despite all the mean cartoons they inspired, the suffragettes WON.
And here’s that other cartoon, of more recent vintage:
Wait, is that redhaired gal dating Carl Sagan?
Aaand that weird “no flake the snakes” thing only jumps back to…here.
It’s not two words, but it’s googlewhacky enough for me.
@ WWTH: Good luck with your dental emergencies. I just came back from the dentist, actually, and am sitting here with a mostly thawed face from having more cavities filled… Aaaah so much money. Why are teeth so expensive?
Good luck saving up money to get out of the house, I’m sorry things keep popping up to delay that.
@Freemage and @dreemr: So nice to hear about more awesome people being awesome!
Dammit, the MRAs are right, I feel cheated by feminism!
I don’t have an axe!
WHERE IS MY AXE??!!
Ow, WWTH!
Wisdom teeth stink. They have no wisdom. They are jerk teeth. I ended up having all of mine taken out in one whack, because I didn’t want to have to deal with it more than once, and we were pretty sure they all would end up impacted…
Smoothies are your friend.
I’m sorry that it’s messing up other life plans, too.
@Jarnsaxa
Where were you when they were handing out axes? It was a party. There was this lovely double axe that I had to turn down… Maybe check in the nearest feminist secret bunker? They might have an axe or two buried under the kitty kibble stockpiles.
The passcode for the bunker door should have been communicated in Katie’s last State of the Matriarchy address.
Why does 70 & lonely only apply to women, and not MGTOWs?
@ WWTH – Hugs to you. Feel free to grumble – wisdom teeth are vile. It’s one of the few times when the words “better off without them” is unqualified.
True also of MGTOWs, of course.
I can’t think of many grimmer futures than reaching your 70s, still believing you deserve a partner who is in their 20s or so (or, if you adjust your expectations, nursing a resentment for the fact that people do get old and that your partner might have loved someone before they met you) while at the same time having learnt nothing at all about relationships in all the time you’ve been on the planet.
Thanks for the sympathy everyone! And yeah, wisdom teeth probably are a pretty good analogy for MGTOW. They’re useless, annoying, and do nothing but cause trouble and pain.
I probably shouldn’t drink too much more because I don’t want to get oral surgery with a hangover, but I just had a glass of pinot noir and am now drinking a mug of cocoa with Fireball whiskey and that’s numbing the pain better than the otc painkillers are.
Also, welcome to the new posters that just got out of moderation.
Do none of these pouty little boychildren have mothers? Whose basement do they live in?
And they NEVER LEAVE ON THEIR OWN. Maybe we should surgically extract all the MGTOWs.
I hope it goes swimmingly and I wish you minimal swelling. IME that’s the nicest thing you can say to someone getting oral surgery.
@wwth
Feel better! Be sure to drink plenty of water; you don’t want to go into any surgery dehydrated.
So, this guy has to be an AVFM commenter. Right?
http://jezebel.com/man-creates-revenge-website-to-destroy-ex-wife-says-he-1759871187
I don’t understand Patrick Fox. I don’t understand why he would even subject his son to that…
It sounds to me like he hates his ex more than he loves his son. Vile in every sense of the word.
Or at least a naginata or something! I need something with some reach!
OT
This is new newz 2 me.
It turns out that most of the artists in prehistoric times, the ones who did cave paintings, were women!
That is, if such notoriously irresponsible radical feminist rags as the Christian Science Monitor can be believed.
And what does it mean that 75 percent of the cave paintings were created by women?
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1016/Were-most-cave-painters-women-Their-hand-prints-say-yes
There was a discussion here at WHTM a month or so ago about how some scholars believe that early women were hunters, perhaps just as much as early men.
So not only did we women birth babies and raise them and do the gathering and cleaning and cooking and garment-making and doctoring (and maybe a lot of the hunting too), we were (most of) the artists! (Not incidentally, this sounds like my own mother, who lived in the 20th and 21st centuries.)
And the manosphere–at least one of whom believes they “hunted the mammoth for [women]”–repay us with derision and fury and possibly much, much worse.
Manosphere, please reexamine everything you thought you knew.
Now would be a good time.
Haha, it’s so funny how scientists (probably male), or at least people who report on scientists’ work, just assume that men did the hunting and built civilization just because that’s the most obvious idea. I mean, if women are pregnant, breastfeeding and raising children it’s obviously much harder to do things that require hard physical labour or a long time away from the tribe. So they just assume that’s the way things were. No-one actually knows. Aren’t there theories that Abrahamic religions invented marriage and patriarchy precisely to control and subjugate women? Was Dan Brown even right in the DaVinci code? Haha, I doubt that. I love that the authors of ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ sued him and lost, because it’s only plagiarism if it’s fiction, and they claimed it was fact.
It reminds me of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, which has since been debunked, which claimed that just because CO2 levels were higher when temperatures were higher, doesn’t mean it caused them. Correlation does not mean causation. Like an unhealthy lifestyle causes disease, not obesity, etc. I’ve always thought ideal weights and BMI are based more on appearance than health. Most health advice is based on studies on men, not men and women. Is there a male equivalent of a gynaecologist? Sorry, rambling…
WWTH – I hope that goes alright! Definitely an excuse to eat mostly ice cream, etc for a while.
Part of me wants to unblock FlakeSnake and play along with his nonsense. My dad did that with scam artists on eBay when he was helping me buy a car, it was pretty funny. But, eh, seems slightly risky/not worth my time.
I’m glad to hear all these great stories about people’s female relatives and families and such.
Here’s a feel-good story of sorts, I had a guy on the train masturbating in front of me the other day (wait for it). He had a newspaper held awkwardly in one hand so I couldn’t see his face, but the jerking off was clearly meant for me to see. I wasn’t sure he was doing that for a while (that feeling of, am I really seeing this?), but when I was, I yelled “Hey you creep, want me to take your picture? I’ll put you on Instagram. Hey everybody, this guy is jerking off” etc etc. He scuttled away and off the train, and I explained to the people around me what had happened. Yes, I wish I could unsee it, but I think that turned out pretty well, considering.
My favorite speculation about cave paintings is that the caves were nurseries and the paintings were put there to amuse the children.
(This theory seems to be wrong in that prehistoric people didn’t seem to segregate children from adults like we do now, so there wouldn’t have been a particular place for the children, but as far as the purpose of the art goes, who knows?)
Yaaasss! I love ice cream so much that I kind of lack self control around it. So I rarely allow myself to buy it. A carton is only allowed when I’m ill. A pint is allowed if I’m particularly stressed or sad. I will be partaking of the ice creams this weekend for sure.
I’m a few months from 60 — when is this loneliness thing supposed to start? Exactly at 70? Does someone come and kidnap all your friends and family on your birthday, or what?
Enquiring minds want to know!
– the hatchet comes from old skool feminist and prohibitonist Carrie Nation, who legendarily threatened bar owners with an axe. Part of the reason women supported prohibition at the time was due to domestic violence and the linked issue of financial dependence due, of course, to oppression. Nation died in 1911.
– the cartoon of the black nerd vs. the black jock is pretty damn racist. The stereotype of the thug, misogynoir that paints black women as sex objects, etc… its just really clearly some pretty sad internalized racism.
– MRAs & their ilk seem to really think all women care about and exist for is men. They actually seem to think that feminism is some sort of plot intertwined with men’s sex lives, because that’s all we’re there for, apparently. Because lesbians dont exist, asexual women, trans people, intersex ppl etc dont exist, (assigned) women cant possibly find meaning in careers or art or our families and friends or just the pleasures of living? They want us to depend on men and they want to be angry at us for it. They can fuck off and go their own way with theie bullshit, we areng interested.
My mom is 70 living alone in a fabulous new eco-friendly house in an “active living” 55+ community where she walks with her friends 4 miles a day and they take turns hosting dinner parties. Every Friday there’s a dinner or party or gathering in the community club house. She has all sorts of hobbies and a crazy busy social life. She’s also friends with both of her ex husbands and an ARDENT feminist.
I can’t wait to be 70 and without a whiney-ass MRA style manbaby in my life.
my US history is really rusty but as for the axe thing, i’m pretty sure it’s a reference to an incident that happened way back when prohibition was gaining momentum. the anti-alcohol movement was tied to the feminist movement by the idea that alcohol ended up causing a lot of spousal abuse, so at one point one woman smashed up a bar with an axe, in protest.
Ahhh, MGTOW, I hate to break this to you but if You refuse to go out with the Feminist I’m polyamorous Practice a Form that allows them to see Other men and I would be MORE Than happy take ALL of the feminist that YOU don’t want. But what I find so Delightable about this is I get to rain on your Parade by making being a Feminst NOT HAVE CONSEQUENCES and NOT COOPERATING with your little cult! and THAT is PRICELESS.
Defiance!
Because it only applies if you have cats? (No self-respecting cat would stay with a MGTOW.)
Public Service Announcement: Warning, Ladies, you may indeed be missing out on decades spent clearing up after bastards who hate you.
Sure that’ll be effective.