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!
Yeah, good point MRAs, why DIDN’T feminists fight in a war during a time when they weren’t allowed in the military? They were off doing foolish things like “fighting for equality”, which would have allowed them to be in the military, when they should have been in the military they weren’t allowed to be in, fighting alongside men…so we could then mock and criticize them for not being as good at war as men.
After all, you never hear about female war heroes, in fact I hear possibly the greatest war hero of all time was some dude named Lyudmila Pavlichenko, which is an oddly feminine sounding name for what I’m assuming is a man.
I’m… not sure if feminists are in charge of Detroit? Where are they getting that from?
Detroit isn’t a bad place, really. I go to college there. I’m tired of people, mostly other white people, acting like there is nothing but ruins. They’re ignoring the culture that has always been there and never left, and the growth that is happening. (for better or worse)
I want to play a game.
In this game I challenge the idea I have encountered that you can’t discern a person’s motives in a conflict from what they post on the internet. I’m of the opinion that what a person posts naturally contains the information that makes their motives clear.
There are a few assumptions that go into this game.
*A bigot speaks in a way that refers to all members of a group, but since they can’t have met every member of a group they are bigoted against they are really talking about only the ones they have met, or the things they learned from other bigots. So this has to do with feminist women (or just women) they know, or things they believe about feminist women.
*Each individual emotion is associated with an instinctual action or experience that suggests and action (Table 3 of link). This helps in interpreting motivations and goals.
*Attacks always present as anger, but contain fear somewhere in the details. We fear the lack of removal of obstacles (anger is fear’s opposite), fear the effects of things we are disgusted by (delayed damage), and fear a surprise contains a threat.
*Sometimes considering inverses or opposites is useful because part of social conflict involves directing attention. To look for distractions from a negative associated with the attacker (or their group), hypothetically consider how the negative might be associated with them. For example obsession with the characteristics of victims displaces attention from the characteristics of victimizers.
In the first meme the actress Lena Dunham is presented and the text “Feminism: A movement designed for unattractive women with no discernible skills”.
1. The author feels negatively about feminism. Given the reality of emotions there are only four possible general categories: anger, disgust, surprise and fear. The rest of the image macro does not contain information about feminism’s design so the general form of this attack is an irrelevant personal attack on a possible (to me, I don’t know if she is one) feminist. This is a discriminatory attack designed to be accepted as applying to all feminists. The author fears feminism.
2. Since attractiveness is relative the author wants to force their tastes, or reinforce socially useful attractiveness standards for reasons that are useful in social conflict. Things considered unattractive are generally associated with the emotion of disgust so the author is using the social tool: irrelevant disgust at a woman’s appearance. Since disgust is connected to the instinct of expelling something threatening, the author is trying to evoke the feeling of feminist women needing to be socially expelled and fears long term damage.
3. Since acting is a skill the author is revealing that they feel negatively about Lena Dunham’s acting, perhaps a specific show. It is also possible that they don’t like something that Lena has done outside of acting and they are irrelevantly attacking her skills in a fashion similar to the attack on her appearance. Avoiding things that exist like skills is a fear behavior. So the author fears the behavior of skilled feminists, or the attention that skills bring to women in general.
*Thus the author is motivated to engage in irrelevant personal attacks in order to reinforce disgust at feminism and women’s appearance as a social tool, and disguise fear at skilled feminists and women who do things they do not like. The goal is for appearance to be maintained as a means of dismissing threatening feminists and women despite the individually subjective nature of attractiveness.
And I can’t even see how she is unattractive by conventional standards.
Shall we do more?
Awww….
It didn’t embed the Discord as Jigsaw image that I found.
My grandmother joined the Army in WWII. She continued to serve after the war ended because she enjoyed it so much. Like a lot of working-class people of the era, she found military life more comfortable than what she had come from.
I guess she didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy, but neither did my grandfather, or Tom Hanks.
Can someone explain to me what David means when he claims that feminism as we know it began after 1965? (Re the Saving Private Ryan image) Obviously Feminism has evolved, but that seems a grand claim.
@Jo
David is referring to the Second Wave of feminism. The First Wave was mostly about getting the vote.
The Second Wave was about, among other burning issues, reproductive rights; the option to not marry or have children; daycare; the right to live openly as a lesbian; keeping one’s own name after marriage; equal access to credit; equal admission to government-supported coeducational schools; equal access to work and equal pay for equal work; and identifying and working to eliminate sexual harassment, date rape, domestic violence, and child abuse.
I’d say first wave (in the UK, anyway) was about
– education.
– parental rights (a divorced woman became able to take sole custody of their child, but only if the Lord Chancellor agreed and if she was “of good character” in 1839. This was a step forwards).
– rights to divorce.
– employment rights.
– property rights after marriage (Married Women’s Property Act 1882).
– the vote.
The vote is best known because it’s an outright victory that coincides with other huge changes, whereas a lot of other achievements were bit by bit and little by little.
@bluecat
You make a good point. I know that women in the United States fought for those other gains as well — but what I’ve read about the First Wave here focuses mostly on the vote.
That photo of Detroit? It resembles photos of the bombed-out cities of Germany and Japan after World War II. AFAIK, the furher, the emperor, presidents, prime ministers, generals, and other high mucky-mucks in that effort were ALL MEN. And of course World War II was an outcome of World War I, in which the high mucky-mucks were ALL MEN.
Naturally, the lower mucky-mucks included many men and women. But the higher ones were ALL MEN.
Then the lower mucky-mucks got to clean up the mess that the higher mucky-mucks had caused. As usual.
1. That picture of Detroit looks a little like Magnitogorsk- either the post-Soviet economy is a feminist conspiracy, or pollution is. My distressingly feminine brain can’t figure it out.
Ow, ow, ow!
I grew up in a steel town with open-hearth furnaces. The air pollution was an issue when I lived there, but it was much worse even just five years before I was born. And sixty years before I was born, the streetlights might be on at 10 a.m.
All that said, Magnitogorsk is brand new to me, but already it strikes me as so much worse than anything I’ve heard of in a steel town. So sorry, people of Magnitogorsk! My thoughts and intentions are with you.
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/12/story-of-cities-20-the-secret-history-of-magnitogorsk-russias-steel-city
I’m guessing MRAs have never heard of the Spanish Civil War? Enough women served with the Republican militias against the Falangists that it was used as propaganda AGAINST the Republicans at the time (‘Look at these people who have to resort to using women as soldiers!’). Not to mention other women soldiers such as Agustina de Aragón, Deborah Sampson, Joan of Arc…
Not to mention that women were kept out of active fighting roles due to patriarchal sentiment, yet still served vital support roles that put them directly in danger. My grandmother was a nurse and a POW during WWII. How is she less worthy?
I consider myself deeply anti-war, but the truth matters more than my personal ideology. MRAs obviously don’t see things that way.
Brony, you’re my kind of person – you think a lot about how other people think. High five!
@Paradoxical Intention: I dropped you a note at DeviantArt, have you had a chance to check it? 🙂
Does anyone know if that’s an actual picture of Detroit, instead of a random destroyed street that’s been labeled ‘Detroit’ by the meme maker? Anyone here from that city care to say one way or the other on that?
Redsilk: I honestly don’t know but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did that. Reverse image search? I’m on mobile.
@brony
I doubt that the author of the meme even knows that’s Lena Dunham, he’s just picked a short haired Tom boy he doesn’t fancy. Her identity is irrelevant to him.
Man, that WWII one pisses me off. Women weren’t allowed to serve in combat. But still, still, they found ways of helping. Despite the restrictions and the barriers, they did whatever they could, and they are ALL OVER the history of the war. They could have just said, “Fine, you don’t want our help” and sat back, but they tried so hard and risked so much to do their bit. And because they were so determined, one of them managed to get through and be there on D-Day anyway:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27677889
katz
You’ve never heard the term BAMs? It stands for “Broad Ass Marine” and was common parlance in the 1980s but I was given to understand that it originated at the same time as the other terms, even if it was never official.
The catchphrase of the Kermit sipping tea was “But that’s none of my business” which maybe explains why it’s attracted more than its fair share of obnoxious ignorance. Because it’s being made by people that acknowledge something is none of their business, but seem to think everyone needs to hear their opinion on it anyway.
Don’t forget dress reform as a goal of early feminism. 🙂 Nothing like wearing 80 pounds of fabric and metal, girls! The GOOD OLD DAYS.
Redsilkphoenix:
It’s from the cover of Seph Lawless’s photo book Autopsy of America, and it is indeed Detroit.
There’s a short interview here, and if you look at the filename of the similar image, you’ll see that it’s a factory in Detroit.
Not that I want to minimise Detroit’s situation, but you can find abandoned industrial sites looking much like that all over the developed world – sometimes even in properous cities.
I am trying to ascertain whether or not these people would be up for doing something that helps boys and men in their area.
I created a non-obvious game. It’s based on my female-supremacist dominatrix character and was announced as a concept in a gaming magazine in 2009. Not all of the content is public yet. One of the tasks to level up is doing homework or “Working for the woman”. Most of the homework will be to fetch stats and do nerdy tasks. Did I mention it is non-obvious?
My name links to Masculine Topics. The first Summer Term Paper is kind of a huge deal. I mean anybody can complete it and it is sure at least one person will benefit from it.
I will sincerely ask people in the MRA space to publicize this (I do have personal protection services.)
There are people here who work in social work or in academia. I would love your feedback on the assignment.
yeah mras i’m p sure WOMEN WERE WORKING IN FUCKING FACTORIES DURING WW2 MAKING SURE YOU HAD ENOUGH ARTILLERY TO MURDER THE NAZIS
also they were DELIVERING MILITARY AIRCRAFT TO WHERE THEY WERE NEEDED
crack a goddamn fucking history book once in a while you ridiculous fools