Today’s Memeday Special: Angry blonde ladies. Strike that: Angry blonde lady.
Men’s Rights Activists and other antifeminists, as many of you have no doubt noticed, have a deep and abiding love for stock photos of hysterical women, which they use as illustrations for blog posts and YouTube videos as well as free-floating memes.
In a previous Memeday post, we examined the MRA obsession with stock photos of women with bullhorns. Here’s one more bullhorn-lady meme to add to the pile.
Apparently the supply of hysterical women stock photos can’t quite match the demand, and so MRAs tend to fall back on a few favorites. You’ve probably met this gal several times already:
But the all-time favorite stock-photo feminist — you might even consider her a sort of muse to MRA meme-makers — is a certain special blonde lady with a wagging finger and a comically furious face.
Because what better way to defeat feminism than by putting words in the mouth of a woman posing for a stock-photographer while pulling the most over-the-top angry face she can manage?
Sometimes the MRA mememakers contrast the hysteria of finger-pointy blonde lady with the cool rationality of some stock-photo dude.
And sometimes, for even greater impact, they replace her pointy finger with a gun.
It’s funny, but I don’t know of any feminist who much resembles this caricature. Indeed, the only real-world woman that finger/gun-pointy blonde lady reminds me of is this one, and she’s definitely not a feminist.
If she ever emerges from her underground bunker, she might be able to get some work as a stock photo model.
Horror? I thought it was comedy for a second. I mean, sure, the pedophilia thing is horrible, but thats exactly what makes the rest funny. I definitely laughed at the way she psychologically tortured him, considering what he did. Such misandry.
I guess she will just have to become the fourth one in the “famous women id definitely marry” list. (Being the other three angelina Jolie, Beyoncé and Laverne Cox.)
Sadly, the way property rights on these stock photos usually work, the model is not being paid anything regardless of whether the MRAs are using the photo legally or not. Models in stock photos have generally signed away all rights to the image, and whatever payment they received at the time of shoot is all they get (which is occasionally literally nothing). I would be surprised to learn that the arrangement with this model is any different.
At least the MRAs aren’t taking any paychecks away from her by stealing her image, if you can call that a plus?
If the FDA ever does approve a male pill, MRAs will protest it until the end of their angry, angry days, just like they’ve protested every other time they’ve been at risk of losing one of their beatsticks.
And then turn around and blame it on imaginary feminists.
i can see it now: “women trying to dodge all responsibility for contraception! equal rights means equal responsibility!”
I have a question. What the hell does the first one mean? I’ve read it multiple times and I can’t work out what the hell it’s trying to say. What lying? Is lying physical assault? Is the second sentence written in weird code?
The argument that men wouldn’t be willing to use a contraceptive pill analogous to the hormonal pills that women can take is based on the reality that very few men would be willing to put up with the negative side effects. The only reason women put up with the side effects is because they’re usually preferable to becoming pregnant. Being pregnant, whether you choose to abort or carry to term (if you even have the choice) carries with it far more risks and responsibilities than simply impregnating someone else.
It’s not that men couldn’t be ‘trusted’ to take a pill with the kind of miserable side-effects of female hormonal birth control, but rather that, given how successful too many men are with avoiding the financial or physical responsibility for the children they help create, the cost-benefit analysis wouldn’t make it an attractive option for them.
@Jamesworkshop A pill for men is being worked on. My girlfriend who works in the biotech industry was involved in developing one in her old job. (She tells me it worked perfectly well on monkeys but had some undesirable side-effects.)
Literally the only people I’ve ever heard object to male birth control are people who simply object to *any* birth control–and as a rule, those people aren’t feminists.
“But we’d have to trust men to take it”–I mean, yeah we would, but it’s not like women’s birth control would go away. And two people each taking birth control that has a low failure rate would result in even fewer unwanted pregnancies, so win/win. Seems to me like any adult interested in not becoming a parent should be responsible for their own birth control, whatever their partner is or is not doing, to cover for them forgetting, or (worst case) lying, or the BC simply having a flukey failure.
My *only* concern with male BC is that some dudebros may try to pressure their partners into not using a condom, because they’re on the ManPill (I’m willing to bet money it will be colloquially known as something goofy like that). But I’ma guess that most of those dudebros would find excuses to pressure their partners regardless.
I’m bemused by the idea that the existence of a male pill would suddenly have women relying entirely on men taking it for their contraception. Would the female pill cease to exist? Would using more than one form of contraception at once be illegal? Also, dude, in the here and now, you don’t have to rely entirely on your female partner taking her pill to prevent pregnancy. Condoms are a thing.
@Ashara Payne
Yeah, if he were to leave she could be independent. But not so independent that she finds someone else. And if he shows up again, she’d better take him back on his terms.
Also, an MRA wants his girlfriend or wife to be independently wealthy and turn all her money over to him. ‘Cause he doesn’t want to work, unless you call cranking out woman-hating graphics work.
And, and, and . . . his girlfriend or wife had better make damned sure that he never suffers a moment of discomfort ever. No itchy wool sweaters. No burned toast. No car that won’t start. That would be misandry!
There are plenty of denizens of the manosphere who have spent a very long time whining about things like ‘financial abortion’ and ‘spermjacking’. Surely these people will be first in the queue at the pharmacy when a male pill is approved, precisely because they’ve been hallucinating exactly the right sort of cost/benefit analyses for years.
Also, they want both of those with no help from the government, because welfare is communism (unless it’s taking money from women, PoC and LGBT+ people and giving it to cishet white men, of course – then it’s just the natural and rightful order of things!).
Well, they think women’s rights would stop men’s rights from existing and the occasional female gaming protagonist would stop Shooty-Shooty Bang-Bang 19384: Brown-Skinned Nazi Zombies From Space from existing… At least they’re being consistent for once? =P
@ reimalbario
Ooh, did the monkeys develop super powers and start plotting against us?
Ha ha!! That is SO true about Bloomfield!! Good one!! 🙂
Is it just me, or the “any penis” phrase doesn’t make any sense, both from a logical and grammatical point of view?
@ reggie, the neighbour’s cat
There are quite a lot of studies about domestic violence that manage to conclude that women are at least as likely as men to engage in it. They do this by using a metric called the Conflict Tactics Scale which is utter bullshit because it simply counts acts of violence/injuries with no regard for context, intentions, who is the aggressor, among a variety of other criticisms. For example, it counts kicking and punching to get away from someone assaulting you as acts of violence. It counts bruises on an abuser’s knuckles the same as the victim’s split lip. Then it concludes that the violence was mutual.
MRAs love these studies for obvious reasons. So, I’m guessing that’s what’s being referenced here. The premise is that women are actually lying about men being more prone to violence and, because people believe that lie, are able to get away with being violent themselves.
@sevenofmine
When I first read that one, I couldn’t figure out how one could rely on their own lying in order to assault people, but I think it’s starting to make sense now. What they mean to say is that she’s relying on both the fact that society views men as more violent than women and the “fact” that men are actually completely docile creatures to get away with abusing men with impunity. That was worded extremely poorly, even for an MRA meme.
Oh. Is that what that is? I thought it was trying to say that women falsely accuse innocent men of violence in order to get white knights to beat them up for her. Because women are just evil like that.
@Chiomara
Well, it all depends on the man and the relationship. I mean, I would love it if my husband and I could decide who would be responsible for the birth control. And since we’re not really ready financially for kids yet, he’s got almost as much motivation as I have.
And that’s the thing, of course. The more choices we had, the more awesome it would be. And if you don’t trust your partner (either in terms of honesty or in terms of just being responsible enough), you have options of your own.
Although, lol. Regarding their complaint about not trusting their partner: There IS male birth control. It’s called condoms. No, it’s not perfect, but I love how they’re like “I DON’T HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER MY REPRODUCTION!!!”
Right now my husband is the one responsible for the birth control but that’s because I don’t like the side effects of depo or the pill, and we were already using condoms anyway.
@Serendipity
Well, if using condoms he buys is trusting him with this, then yes, I do. And I don’t even check for holes or anything! (Kidding, i would never check, im not THAT “misandric”. I’d never even be with a partner if I thought he could ever do such a horrible thing. But some men do that, did you know? Its sickening).
But I would never trust my partner with a pill. Hell, I am TERRIFIED of pregnancy and not even like that I can be responsible with the pill xD
While he is like ” well, i’m not PLANNING on it and I hope it doesnt happen yet, but I would still be happy if it happened.”
That’s definitely something to mistrust. Even if having a kid would make one partner happy, the fact that they know the other partner doesn’t want it should make it an unhappy thing if it does happen. If I wanted a kid but my husband didn’t, it would make me unhappy if I accidentally got pregnant, because that’s not something you force on people. Hell, I wouldn’t dare surprise him with a pet dog even though I know he loves dogs because responsibility for another life isn’t a situation you should choose for someone else, ever.
@weirwoodtreehugger
I’m reading the meme as saying the woman herself is committing assault but then it’s always kind of a hazard to assume that an anti-feminist meme-maker’s words match the meaning they were trying to convey. xD
@Venice
What Pie said makes the most sense.
I think that it reinforces the paranoia about getting taken advantage of through child support. To me it’s more evidence that these are people that angry about having to take care of the responsibilities they create, or receptive to the message in some other fashion.
I’ve argued with people supposedly on the political left who were obsessed with controlling female bodies because of of some whining about the “unfairness” of how there was this chance of having to care for a child they did not want. They are the other side of that particular coin from the political right and wanting control for their reasons. The fact that they could spend time dating to get to know a person and their views, or just not have sex if they did not like that possibility just seemed to be outrageous to them.