In today’s episode of Memeday, we look at some antifeminist memes that, well, just aren’t very convincing. Is this really the best you guys can offer?
All the memes here, except for the first one, come from a Facebook page called Math 3 Feminists.
I’m sorry, Math 4 Feminists. What can I say? I’m a feminist; numbers confuse me.
So let’s look at some of these unconvincing arguments, shall we?
Feminism is bad because … Lena Dunham is ugly and has no skills:
We’re off to a bad start here. Say what you will about Lena Dunham, and people have said all sorts of things, some fair, some not so much, but … really? Shes got “no discernible skills?”
Dunham wrote, directed and starred in an award-winning feature film by the time she was 24. She created (and produces and writes and stars in) an HBO series that just finished its fifth season. She’s a bestselling author.
Meanwhile, MRAs stick captions on pictures they find on the internet and call it activism.
Feminism is bad because … sometimes young women get really drunk;
Uh, dudes, I see your “young woman in rainbow stockings passing out drunk in the street” and raise you one “drunk dude in cape leaping through a window.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VKNBrQdoQo
… and one “drunk dancing dude jumping off a boat.”
Feminism is bad because … if being a woman is so terrible why is there Caitlyn Jenner?
Yeah, that’s not how any of this works, you transphobic asshats.
Feminism is bad because … feminists hate stay-at-home mothers:
Weird, Math 4 Feminists dudes, because the only people I see attacking stay-at-home mothers on a regular basis are, well, MRAs and MGTOWs and assorted other internet misogynists. Like in the meme below, which I found … drum roll .. on the Math 4 Feminists Facebook page.
Feminism is bad because … women didn’t serve in the military equally in a war that ended two decades before feminism as we know it began:
Also, fellas, just FYI, Tom Hanks didn’t actually serve in the army in World War II. He was in a movie about it.
Feminism is bad because … Detroit:
Er, what? Are you just putting up pictures of random things and blaming feminists for them?
All I can say to that is … THANKS OBAMA!
@Shiriki: Just saw it, and just replied. :3 Forgive me for not seeing it sooner, I slept HARD last night and didn’t wake up until after noon. : P
Yep, nothing wins you arguments like criticising all women everywhere for not serving in combat positions when they were explicitly prevented from doing so by governments composed almost exclusively of men.
@JennyWren
I’m also offended by the commentary on the contributions of women in WWII. My mother served in British headquarters as the personal secretary/aide to Col Llewellyn until she met and married my American father serving as a courier for the American Headquarters. Then she worked writing for the Stars and Stripes, the military paper. She was sent to Paris in August 1944 because she spoke french and to help set up for the Paris edition of the paper to be published beginning in September. I call her noncombat role an important one, helping the allied military function.
Her role was less flashy than her brothers, who were also noncombatants for the RAF, but she lived through through London’s bombing then entered Paris when the Germans were still leaving so her group could hear the artillery accompanying the retreating Germans.
Her service entailed risk as do many noncombat roles in service; she survived being bombed out of her flats twice during the Blitz. She even survived a WWI childhood in Bristol and later Leeds with her parents, a minister and soldier for the Salvation Army working for poor relief.
I guess that makes me a second generation SJW.
Completely OT, but if any of you fine folks are in the vicinity of Ypsilanti, I have a friend there in a bit of a pckle and needing a place to stay. .I know it’s a lot to ask, but it’s literally the only thing I can do to try to help, because frankly all I have in the worl right now isa few networks of good hearted people I flatter myself i can consider my friends,.
@Paradoxy, re: the donation tier gift dooblie-doo. Do not feel obliged to make me anything! If you do want to, or feel obliged, or whatnot, then I have been looking hither and yon for a good looking meditative Fluttershy, or -in-a-labcoat, or -doing-maths. Editing a frame from the show would be fine also. Your choice! And thank you very much!
EDIT: I would help if I could, Dalillama, but I am nowhere near there. And I think you are my friend <3
Yes, I know that term. No, unlike the other terms, it isn’t official, which is why I didn’t mention it.
God, when did this comment section get so splainy?
@sunnysombrera
Thanks! Specifically I think about people that act predatory and aggressive because I’ve had to spend my whole life controlling those instincts. I’m glad that the effort includes the ability to make them more sensible to other people.
I’m not so good at other people. Kind of awkward actually. But still, thanks.
@Cupcakes 4 Hitler
That is entirely possible, and I tried to make my dissection compatible with that. I tend to act like other people are being completely honest with what they present, like all the parts actually mean something and are relevant. Any sloppiness I encounter ends up being, convenient.
Women in combat positions, they say? Some armies do have them. One of those armies did quite well historically. You may have heard of them: they stopped the Nazis before Moscow in 1941, then won the critical battles of Stalingrad in 1942 and Kursk in 1943 before taking Berlin in 1945 and ending the largest war humanity has ever fought.
Let’s talk about one particular woman in that army.
http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1422361/lyudmila-pavlichenko.jpg
This is Major Lyudmila Pavlichenko, or to give her the nickname people bestowed upon her, Lady Death.
You may have come across the cultural archetype of the female sniper. It’s an especially common concept in the ex-Soviet bloc: woman are said to be good snipers, patient and not interested in hand-to-hand combat. This may be true but the reason why it’s a common cultural concept is mostly because of Pavlichenko. She was one of the highest-scoring snipers in history, beating even Simo Häyhä (albeit over a longer period.) If you consider ending human lives cold-bloodedly to be admirable then Pavlichenko is the gold standard, regardless of gender.
The Soviets loved to make celebrities out of snipers; if you’ve seen Enemy at the Gates then that bit, at least, is not exaggerated. Pavlichenko was the first of those, and was charismatic and witty enough to spin her celebrity status into a minor cult of personality which outlasted the war.
(She’s probably also responsible for the archetype of the dryly witty sniper, come to think about it.)
Because of her celebrity status, Pavlichenko wasn’t allowed back into combat in the second half of the war. Rather than just have photos taken of her, she opened a sniper school. Here’s a picture of her students in a reunion after the war.
http://laststandonzombieisland.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/dozen-female-soviet-snipers-mosin-91-30-pu.jpg
Notice the medals. Notice the guns. These people got those medals for using those guns to end other human lives. Go on, make a misogynistic joke. I dare you.
Pavlichenko was briefly sent to America with a diplomatic group, to try to encourage them to enter the war. Here’s her meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the few human beings alive at the time unafraid to be in the presence of Lady Death.
http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com/legacy_blog/pavil2-500×413.jpg
There’s a story that when Pavlichenko was interviewed by American reporters at the White House, they didn’t know how to behave with a female war hero. Instead of asking about how many human beings are in the ground because of her, they asked about her uniform skirt, about how much leg it showed and whether it made her look fat. She demurely batted her eyelids at them and then mentioned it in her next letter to her mother. Her mother forwarded the letter to Joseph Stalin, who found it funny as hell.
That’s right: decades before tumblr even existed, Pavlichenko was forwarding misogyny in order to mock it. If she were alive today she would totally write for Jezebel.
In Canada, by contrast, she was fêted and given the gift of a Canadian-made hunting rifle. In the UK she spent most of her tour raising funds for Soviet medical charities.
Prior to the war, Pavlichenko had been a nursing student in Kiev. After the war she went back to university and finished her course, but never practised medicine. She later became an activist for veterans’ affairs.
@Moggie:
Interesting article. I’ll have to track that book down sometime and give it a read. Sounds fascinating.
So the meme maker decided to take a photo of an abandoned factory and pass it off as a street in a ‘hood with abandoned tenement housing? Or did I read too much into that meme?
ASSuming that’s the same photo there as on the interview page you linked to (I’m on a phone and can’t do a full comparison real easy) I find it interesting that the edits the meme maker did to it not only included cropping and making a color pic black and white, but erasing the lone human figure in it. That’s something the original photographer would have an issue with, if he ever found out about it.
At least, in my opinion…
Paradoxical Intention:
No probs, sleep is the best. 😀
Redsilkphoenix:
I think there are two versions of that photo, and the original photographer is responsible for both. Here’s the book’s promo picture, without the figure:
http://1vfu8ac4ogj10xzgc49u49al.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/f6b71ceb43fb8215-photo-26.jpg
“Urban explorers” often work in pairs, because of the dangers involved, so their photos often include their fellow explorer. But when you want to emphasise the desolation, it makes sense to get out of the frame.
katz – Sorry, didn’t mean to be ‘splainy. It was just a term I heard bandied about with the same frequency as WAC and WAVE by the “brown shoe” era men I served in the AF with. I had no idea you had intentionally omitted it.
This photo reminds me of a spooky zombie movie ‘the Chernobyl Diaries’.
I think the feminism=Detroit thing is, like so many other MRA things, racist on top of sexist. I bet the thinking is something like this. “Detroit has black people living in it. Black people are a feminist matriarchy run by single mothers (in MRA world). The city is broken in some ways, ergo, the matriarchs must have messed it all up by, like, not taking care of it or something.” You know, as if wimmenz could just tidy up decades of economic decline and racism if they just had enough gumption and elbow grease.
I feel gross even typing that.
I want to see some MRA heads combust when they read this:
http://neurosciencenews.com/gender-equality-mating-preferences-3654/
“Also, fellas, just FYI, Tom Hanks didn’t actually serve in the army in World War II. He was in a movie about it.”
What?!? I have been deceived!
K, thank you, thank you!