It’s Memeday again!
Anyone who’s seen a lot of antifeminist memes online has surely noticed them: the angry women yelling at men through bullhorns.
Constructed, for the most part, from pilfered stock images accompanied by vaguely histrionic text, these women are supposed to represent the evil feminists of the world with their abusive behavior and their impossible demands.
Naturally, these women bear only the loosest resemblance to any real feminists any of us have ever met.
Here are a few of these bullhorn-wielding women I’ve run across recently.
Ok, now, that’s just a terrible idea for a chant. Seriously, go for something a little more classic, like “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Patriarchy Has to Go,” or “Men’s Rights Reddit, You Can’t Hide. We Charge You With Gendercide.” I just made those up on the spot here; you could probably come up with something better if you worked at it.
Remember: Rhyming is good!
Ok, that doesn’t rhyme either. And I’m having a little trouble understanding exactly what is so terribly outrageous about it.
Fellas, if you feel there is something wrong in the world that no one else is addressing, and you sincerely want to do something about it, here’s a suggestion: get together with some other people who feel the same way and, well, do something about it. That’s literally what every other activist in the world does. Don’t get mad at feminists for not doing your work for you.
I don’t think this one was a meme, per se; I think it was used to illustrate a post on A Voice for Men at some point, (though my Google-fu failed me when I tried to track it down).
Ironically, one of AVFMs favored forms of internet activism is to send its flying monkey squad to pester and harass its enemies on Twitter and to fill up the comment sections of articles they don’t like with invective and accusations and abuse. That’s pretty much the internet equivalent of shouting someone down with a megaphone.
Some women — like this extremely angry straw feminist — apparently don’t need a bullhorn in order to yell louder than one of those cars that go boom.
The angry-woman-with-a-bullhorn trope has proven irresistable to the angry woman-haters of Gamergate as well. The cartoon below serves it up with a side order of anti-Semitism, incorporating a version of that Anita-Sarkeesian-as-the-Happy-Merchant caricature so popular with Gamergaters.
Again, this is a terrible chant. “Privilege, Privilege, Misogyny” not only doesn’t rhyme; it doesn’t make any sense.
Also, why is the giant Sarkeesian monster carrying a wad of cash in her fist? With all that money, she can’t afford a purse?
Meme harder, dudes.
EDIT: It’s been pointed out (thanks, Tessa!) that this isn’t a real Ben Garrison cartoon. The original featured Hillary Clinton; some Sarkeesian-hater pasted that anti-Semitic caricature over Hillary’s head, changed a lot of the wording, etc. Garrison’s cartoons are regularly modified like this, for the lulz, but his cartoons are generally pretty awful/ridiculous to begin with.
Oh, and on a somewhat unrelated note: While poking around looking for bullhorn-wielding women online I ran across … well, this thing. For some unknown reason, someone has taken a bizarre animated gif and turned it into a strange tribute to the “eternal friendship” of Portugal and Brazil by adding captions and the relevant flags.
If anyone can explain the logic here, please let me know. I’m pretty sure there’s no place in either country (or any country) that looks like this. At least in this reality.
Also, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to put flags in the ocean. Or whatever that is.
I don’t know why I’m so disappointed in Ben Garrison for using the Happy Sarkeesian caricature. But I am. Even though I know better.
@ EJ & sff9
It should be obvious but even with your help we’ve been going:
“Yeah, there’s 100 two digit numbers so there’ll be the same number of reversed ones”
“So there’s 1,000 of them”
“Yeah. Hang on, no. There can only be 100 duplicates. So it’s 200”
“Also there’ll be some where all four are the same so you have to discount those”
“Right. Oh wait”
(It’s Friday and there’s wine)
But Alan, wine makes people better at maths. It’s a known fact.
@ EJ
At my rifle club you’re not allowed to drink wine (or any alcohol) before competitions as it can improve your shooting!
(Also no spliff or beta blockers)
@Alan
MISANDRY
Kind of hilarious coming from a group of people who spend their ‘activism’ time yelling at feminists on the internet for not doing their activism for them.
@ IP
Ha, of course, 🙂
(there’s an irony that the people here can come up with better MRA stuff than your actual MRAs)
The eternal friendship thing… It comes from a very ugly blogspot called “lindalva’ s Island”, from a woman called lindalva. It has the looks like it was made in 1999 but it has posts from 2015, so it’s still active. The owner is Lindalva, and she seems to descend from Portugal, so she posts about how she loves Brazil and Portugal and how they are bffs all the time. I think the flags are in the ocean cause that’s where Portugal is, across the ocean… Also the woman may represent her? At the shore of “Lindalva’s Island”, looking at the see and imagining Portugal across it?
I don’t want to make fun of it cause I am sure my mother would make blogs and gifs like this if she knew how to make a blog and gifs.
sff9:
I think it’s 7 on the official Beaufort wind force scale: “Whole trees in motion. Geese stationary in flight. Portuguese women looking grumpy”.
Wait, you didn’t know? These are not geese. These are rare Patos Parados do Pantanal, a rare endemic bird. They fly like this because they are waiting for fish.
And Brazilian women do go to the beach dressed like that. I give the gif 9/10 in realism. I thought it was a video at first!
Is that what the beaches in Brazil look like? Cidade de Deus lied to me. I thought they would be made of, I don’t know, beach; not flowers and stuff.
The third one is probably supposed to look like the woman is subjugating the man. But to me it looks like she got him trying to peek up her skirt.
I want to write “sea” but I write “see” because they sound the same, then I read the comment 4 times before deciding it needs to more editing, and decide it’s good as it is. Damn you, dyslexia. You get me every freaking time.
All that math talk has gotten me feeling a bit faint…and tingly. I’d swoon but I’m not near my fainting couch at the moment. Might need bonbons to feel better.
@WWTH
Oh he couldn’t possibly be doing that without a cell phone strategically positioned! What would be the use of trying to peek up a lady’s skirt if not to record an upskirt video to share with other creeps who have boundary-respecting deficiencies on the internet! /s/
@ msexception
If it makes you feel any better just remember I’m someone who had difficulty understanding the concept that you could use two digits to count to 100.
Chiomara: Oh, you meant “very ugly blogspot” in aesthetic sense? I was intuitively expecting, in this context, that “ugly” would refer to some horrible bigotry 🙂
The Portugual one makes perfect sense.
I’m Portuguese, and two things we love are hideous tacky garbage, and the fact that in a rare moment of colonial lucidity, we gave Brasil (a sort of) independence.
We then proceeded to fight an absurd, bloody mercenary war over Angola and Moçambique, but Portugees love to brag about Brasil.
Apparently not, if misdeeds by soldiers and police officers are anything to go by.
What’s up with the guy in the third picture? Is he doing push ups? Where are his legs?
He’s a double-leg amputee. Also, his penis and testes are missing, because misandry.
I never got that whole, “Open the door for me,” stupidity. Simple rule about doors, whoever gets there first, opens it for the rest. If someone opens the door for you, you say thank you and step through.
The rule doesn’t say anything about gender.
Oh, he’s Johnny Eck.
I’m always amused by how obsessed MRA and MGTOWs are with holding the door open for women. They can’t make up their minds whether we’re evil because we insist on them being held for us or evil because we yell at men who hold them open. They just know it’s a very serious issue and they are very oppressed.
Among the rest of the human race, it’s a subject that almost never comes up. I love how rape culture is a first world problem feminists made up, but men holding doors open for evil wimmenz? THE STRUGGLE IS REAL!!!
I had to look up Johnny Eck. Doesn’t seem a likely candidate for menzers to scream about. He lived to a pretty ripe old age. And he was a (fraternal) twin, who walked on his hands before his brother figured out how to do it on his feet, too. Seems to have had a pretty positive growing-up, and a good general attitude. I’m guessing he’d have told these guys to grow a spine.
OMG, just noticed something disturbing in that ugly Anita ‘toon…that footprint of hers across the Fruited Plain looks like a snapped-in-two penis. Doesn’t it?