When feminist author Jessica Valenti posted a picture of herself wearing an “I bathe in male tears” sweatshirt, Men’s Rights activists reacted as though she had literally called for the violent murder of every man on planet earth.
Though Valenti made clear the sentiment on the shirt was aimed at the obnoxious Men’s Rights types who routinely flood the comments on her articles, MRAs chose to believe that she was mocking homeless men, battered men, male suicide victims, and other men suffering very real pain.
A Voice for Men led the charge, with AVFM’s “social media director” Andrea “JudgyBitch” Hardie, one of Valenti’s most persistent and dishonest harassers, proclaiming that Valenti “hates all men and thinks their pain is funny, no matter what the source of it,” an assertion that is as demonstrably false as a flat earther’s contention that gravity doesn’t exist.
Valenti wasn’t the only “ironic misandrist” vilified by MRAs at AVFM and elsewhere; some were so upset by the trope they launched a campaign to try to convince the world that “male tears” was slang for semen.
I bring all this up because, as I perused the meme repository on A Voice for Men’s Facebook page recently, in preparation for the Memeday celebrations here on WHTM today, I noticed a couple newly posted memes that centered on female tears.
And it struck me how many of the very same Men’s Rights Activists who’ve thrown the biggest tantrums over the ironic misandry of the “male tears” trope love to joke about female and/or feminist tears.
I decided to scroll back through the AVFM archives to see how many more I could find. The short answer: a lot, many of them not only reveling in (imaginary) female tears but taking a certain pleasure in the notion that their own antifeminist activism was causing them. I had originally planned to go through the archives of several other antifeminist Facebook pages, but I found so many on AVFM’s Facebook page I didn’t bother. All but one of the memes below come from AVFM’s Facebook page or from Hardie’s JudgyBitch site.
Let’s start with AVFM’s favorite stock image of a crying woman:
These are all lovely, each in their unique way, but the last one may be my favorite, as it reveals the almost proud ignorance of feminism that underlies so many MRA attacks on feminism. What “radical feminist” magazines is this crying feminist supposed to be subscribing to? Beyond Ms magazine, hardly a bastion of radical feminism these days, I doubt the meme-maker or any of those who’ve passed along this meme could name any feminist magazines at all.
But this crying woman isn’t the only one to make it into MRA memes. There’s this theatrically crying gal — the same one who’s in the meme at the top of the page.
There’s this artfully photographed black and white lady:
This cartoon stereotype:
This crying girl:
And her friends:
There are crying celebrities:
And ordinary women who’ve been turned into memes against their will:
Not all of the sad women in MRA memes have literal tears running down their cheeks. Some just look like they’re about to burst into tears.
And let’s not forget the image that AVFM’s Andrea Hardie used to append to so many of her Tweets.
What’s striking to me about all these memes, beyond all the tears, is how little any of these memes have to do with any aspect of real-world feminism. Or real-world women, for that matter.
Many of the memes are, of course, little more than meanspirited “nyah-nyahs” aimed at feminists: “I don’t wike it/I’m a feminist” is not what you’d call a sophisticated rebuttal to feminist arguments.
But then again, none of the other memes offer real rebuttals either, largely because the feminism they attack is made almost entirely of straw. Neither feminists, nor women in general, have ever demanded “total control over men.” Women aren’t buying pearl necklaces with child support money. Virtually all of the “privileges” or “special treatment” that MRAs accuse feminists of demanding aren’t either, and in many cases apply equally to men. Virtually the only obligation that men have and women don’t is that men have to sign a largely meaningless registration card for a non-existent and politically impossible draft.
And of course there is no such thing as french-fry rape.
Cry harder, MRAs.
EDIT: Added the link to Hardie’s comment on Valenti.
Here’s the thing about redpillers and MRA’s that really grinds my gears, they seem to be mostly right wingers. I used to be a fan of the Amazing Atheist (back when he was mostly about atheism) and I was fucking FLOORED when he revealed he votes for the party of ignorant religious “moral majority” crap. This is what gets me:
They rage against the draft and men dying in war, yet they vote for the party of militarism and Chickenhawks.
They rage about men dying in dangerous jobs, and they vote for the party of anti-unions and deregulations.
They rage about lack of social resources for homeless men, and they vote for the party that hates handouts and tells them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
They rage against supporting children when they don’t want to, yet they vote for the party of abstinence-only education and attacking birth control and abortion.
They rage against supporting women, yet they vote for the party of “family values” and traditionalism that outright tells women their place is in the home.
The way I see it, they support everything they claim to hate and will vote for policies that hurt men as long as it’s a vote against the liberal feminist agenda.
Man, I remember playing VVVVVV and getting to that trinket with the twelve room long flip sequence and one of the rooms was called “Your tears: Delicious” or something like that. I was so offended that I cried into a bottle and sent it to Terry Cavanagh’s P.O. box just to teach him a lesson.
Oh, wait, no, I didn’t because I can take a joke.
What banananana dakry said:
Also, the world is the manosphere’s sanctuary. Donkeys don’t have too many sanctuaries within that larger sanctuary.
And yet they remain the gentle, helpful, pettable creatures that they are.
Can’t say that about the privileged manospherians!
No, but asses do.
Ba doom boom. I’ll be here all week, folks.
Even 14 000 likes, despite not being much by FB standards, doesn’t mesh with their falling visitor count or endless failed fundraisers. I wonder if they bought them like they bought their Twitter followers.
Likes and follows can endure even when meaningful viewership disappears, since it takes active effort to unfollow something. We have no idea how many people muted it and forgot it existed, or just keep scrolling past it.
But yeah, even if those are all bona fide fans, it’s a hearteningly small number.
Hey everyone, WHTM had a little outage due (again, alas) to technical issues at the web host. They evidently got it straightened out, and here we are back again.
Yeah, yeah, manospherians, women are evil. These stock photos prove it.
But I guarantee you that if Kim Kardashian–yeah, she’s one of the crying models–were to give Paul Elam a wink (or even if she had something in her eye and he happened to be standing somewhere near her while she blinked a few times), he would be BRAGGING SO MUCH. We would never hear the end of how Kim Kardashian says he’s the most alpha male ever, yada, yada, yada.
And it’s not just Kim Kardashian. If any of those crying women ever hinted that any of you guys were slightly more attractive than a rabid squirrel, you too would be BRAGGING SO MUCH. A stock model said I was a 3 on a scale of 1 to 100! Take that, feminazis!
In no way am I implying that these women can turn you into good guys. Hey, they’re models–and one world-famous reality TV star–not miracle workers!
@Kit Fowley
[loud applause]
As for the MRAs, Heavy Weapons Guy has something to say to you
https://youtu.be/CZkIbKxFec8
I don’t know how to just paste vids here :s
GenJones, I think you put a great deal of valid observation in a nutshell.
Hooray! You mean MRAs want to be more emotionally open, respect women as people, do their share of housework and child rearing, stop treating human interaction as a zero-sum competition, stop using women’s genitalia and homosexuality as deadly put-downs, and base their self-worth on something other than bench presses, income, and number of 18 year olds coerced into bed? After all, that’s what they mean when they say “traditional roles”: women get back in the kitchen and keep quiet, men do whatever the hell they want with no consequences. It’s high time we kicked rigidly prescriptive “traditional roles” to the curb, for all genders.
That lady in the meme ought to be popping champagne.
That’s right Skullpants. It is “high time we kicked rigidly prescriptive “traditional roles” to the curb, for all genders.”
And I would even go further to say that the concept of gender itself is illusory. There is no such thing in reality as “male” and “female”. These are just misconceptions that have been held in a commonsense way but do not stand up to scrutiny.
The one about the “black man talked to me” thing is ironic as fuck considering how racist/associated with white supremacists a lot of MRAs are.
Also, the lack of self-awareness is painful since most of these memes could be changed to be talking about MRAs and describe them perfectly.
Why did I put my name as “Social Justice Atheists?” Just why? Ugh, too early…
It doesn’t matter Atheist. Just re-register (is that even a real word?) under a new name and post to your heart’s content. We will be none the wiser and nobody will mourn the demise of your old handle.
Who else guessed that
/pol/Pol was going to be a troll before even reading his posts?OK. Now for some reason SJA, the post about your name troubles appeared well before your previous one with the typo “Atheists” as a part of your name instead of “Atheist”. So, yeah….
Hi Hard Chairs. I am not a troll. Why do you think that? I like this site and visit it often. Is it something about my name?
@SJA:
I think the “a black man talked to me” thing is desperate wish-fulfillment on the part of the MRAs. They want to be the protectors of the virtue of white women. They feel very threatened by the thought that women might not want their protection.
@Pol:
SJA is an awesome person and if she disappeared then we would miss her.
OK, thanks EJ. I don’t want SJA to go away either. It was just one of those things where a previous post was delayed for some reason and so I offered some of my er, helpful advice in error. Nothing more than that.
Heh heh. I actually thought that she regreted the phrase SJA! I am quite amused by this. Anyway, as we were.
@Pol
You share a name with a hate-filled subreddit.
@EJ
I think Pol was saying that no one would mind if SJA changed her handle, not if she left.
@Pol
I always use the handle Social Justice Atheist, but I accidentally typed Atheists instead. I wasn’t trying to change my handle, it was just a mistake.
@EJ
Aww, thank you very much. 🙂 *kitty hugz if wanted*
And I agree about the protectors of white women thing. They always find a lovely way to combine their misogyny and racism in a nice, neat little package.
Oh dear…. Well thanks for the heads-up kupo. I don’t really pay attention to reddit and I certainly wasn’t going for “hate filled” when I chose my my name. I was thinking more like “power of love” amoungst other more arcane things. Ha ha!
Anyhoo, I have entered the wee hours of the morning here and my bed beckons. Goodnight all.
@GenJones: I noticed that too. My take is that so-called MRAs don’t actually want to improve the lives of men by fighting against those issues, they just want compensation for the potential to be in those positions.
They want to claim that because men in general have problems, women in general should shut up and fuck them specifically.
14 000 followers on fb? LOL
Somebody should inform them that Feminist Frequency (that devil Anita) has 4 times more likes than they do.
I bet that somewhere there on facebook is a site about farts that has more likes than Avfm.
Suck it up MRA losers!