It’s not news to anyone that some of the most popular antifeminist “arguments” are in fact logical fallacies.
For example, here’s the fallacy of relative privation, suggesting that women in first world countries aren’t allowed to complain about sexism so long as anyone in the world is worse off than them.
And here’s the good old straw man, in the form of a meme accusing feminists of believing all sorts of things they don’t believe (as well as a few things they do believe, but for perfectly good reasons).
MRAs: in case you’re wondering which of these statements are straw men and why, I’ve attached a helpful footnote below.
So, yeah, those are some logical fallacies on display. But looking through the memes on display on the Male Lives Matter Facebook page today — which is where the memes above came from — I began to realize that MRAs have invented a whole bunch of brand-new logical fallacies of their own.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Argumentum ad Picard Facepalm
This “argument” might make a little more sense were it not for the fact that Patrick Stewart — you know, the dude who played Picard — weren’t in fact an outspoken feminist who has literally worn a “this is what a feminist looks like” shirt in public.
I should note that using a Picard facepalm pic isn’t always a fallacy For example, if you are Ian McKellen, a personal friend of Stewart who famously carried a Picard facepalm sign at the London Women’s March this January.
Argumentum ad Ha Ha You’ll Never Get Laid
Granted, “white knighting” is not the same as feminism; it’s a rather patronizing form of “chivalry.” And that last post on the right up there is a little cringey.
But this meme is aimed at male feminists. And while there are some ostentatiously “feminist” dudes who profess a shallow facsimile of feminism in hopes of scoring with the ladies, genuinely feminist dudes are feminists because, you know, they actually believe in equality and shit. As much as this might shock MRAs and others obsessed with classifying men according to simplistic schemes using Greek letters, feminism doesn’t actually render men unfuckable.
Hell, I have actual photographic proof that one of the guys in this very meme has had sex with at least one woman at least once. Here’s the guy in the middle up there — Nev Schulman of the show Catfish — posing recently with his very pregnant wife.
IN YOUR FACE MRAS!!!11!
In case you’re wondering, she has since given birth to a baby girl.
Argumentum ad WTF-um
Wat
Argumentum ad You’re Not a Fireman
Apparently if you’re a female feminist you’re not entitled to emergency services? Even if you pay taxes just like everybody else? Does that apply to male feminists too? I need to know before I light my apartment on fire.
It’s true that there are not a lot of female firefighters. It’s also true that women have been largely kept out of the profession. But not by feminists — the only people I ever see arguing against women firefighters are MRAs and other antifeminists.
Argumentum ad You’re Not a Coal Miner
A kind of mash-up of the Fallacy of Relative Privation and Argumentum ad You’re Not a Fireman. It’s worth pointing out that none of the MRAs I’ve ever seen making this “argument” has themselves been a coal miner.
Argumentum ad Women Sometimes Get Drunk
It’s true that women sometimes get really, really drunk. I’m not quite sure how exactly this is a rebuttal of feminism.
Or is this about the hats? Are you suggesting that women need to start wearing 1956-style hats again?
It’s all very confusing. I think I need a drink.
FOOTNOTE:
Here are the straw men in that straw man meme above:
On drunk women: feminists DO believe drunk women should be responsible for their behavior. Just not the behavior of others. If a woman drives drunk, feminists have no problem with her charged with drunk driving. If a woman is raped while she is drunk, by contrast, feminists don’t think she should be charged with “drunk being raped.”
On alimony, etc: Women do pay alimony and child support when a court rules that it’s appropriate, and no feminist I’ve ever seen has argued that they shouldn’t.
On the draft: Feminists have long argued that women should be allowed to serve in combat and the National Organization for Women has in fact taken legal action to try to extend selective service registration to women,
As for the other ones? I’m not quite sure how exactly the “false accusers should be charged” crowd defines a “false accuser,” but, yes, it’s true feminists don’t want rape accusers charged if they lose a rape case any more than they want murder accusers to be prosecuted for losing a murder case. Accusers of all sorts can be prosecuted for filing a false police report, but this is relatively rare.
Meanwhile, 50-50 custody can be crappy for kids, so it makes little sense to make it the default setting. As for the one about “unwed fathers,” is that really saying what it looks like it’s saying? If so, no, feminists don’t think fathers should be allowed to force women to get an abortion (or to not get an abortion).
EDIT: I reworked the paragraph on feminist dudes and sex to make myself clearer.
@MGTOWDEVOLUTIONARY
You want all men dead
Instead of them being here.
You are misandrist.
As a man myself
I must ask this one question?
What is wrong with you?
Brings up Arabia
Never does a thing to help
And aid said women.
@ MGTOWRevolutionary
Hey, speak for yourself. This man is quite happy sticking around, thank you very much.
I suspect that a lot of men don’t want to be genocided. There’s certainly no evidence that guys generally are anxious to be put out of their ‘misery’. That might suggest that it’s your view that’s the skewed one. As others here have pointed out, it’s your perception that doesn’t tally with the demonstrable facts.
If things are that bad for you though why don’t you, as your name suggests, actually go your own way. I don’t think anyone here is forcing you to stay.
Thing is men build the world and women have always ruled it, millions of men have been killed by gynocentric regime of women throughout thousands of years. What I’m trying to say is that the Nazis and Stalin were better than the gynocentric rule of women that has lasted from the beginning since mankind existed, the oppression of men is so horrible. So many of our lives are shortened by you women, in the natural concentration camp you have created for us to work and die in without being able to keep any of our money. This is 100X WORSE, than the holocaust. Having a holocaust happen to men is mercy compared to this genocide the gynocracy has been perpetrating. I would rather we live under the holocaust than this, right now it feels like us men are sitting helpless in concentration camps. The MGTOW Revolution that is happening will liberate us from you.
We already live in a matriarchal society and its not the Beta Male who is benefiting. Feminism is the same gynocentric structure as gender roles for men, its completely ok for a woman to not be confident, beta or not make the first move. But when a male does it, that’s “GOD FORBID”.
I laugh and feel no remorse for any “stay at home mum” woman especially who has helped perpetrate the gynocracy dead from domestic violence, they DESERVED IT. THEY DON’T EVEN DESERVE A FUCKING HEADSTONE. I hope when one day we mgtows are organized enough we can start urinating and taking a dump on their headstones or graves. Everytime one dies from domestic violence I laugh, we will laugh at the death of one of our exploiters and parasite.
Point of order?
Three men have objected to your use of the words “we” and “us” here. One of those people was me.
Am I a beta?
(Also: fuck you for what you said about domestic violence victims. I hope you live for fucking ever.)
Biologically, Miggie has painted himself into a corner.
If the alpha/beta genes are sex-linked, then the alpha gene should take over the population extremely quickly if women are biologically driven to sexually select for it. So Miggie posits that some kind of unspecified social control prevented the cucking of beta men (which is his entire premise: that beta men are routinely cucked because alpha offspring are more fit than beta offspring) in the past.
It’s not clear what social control prevented women from going behind their beta providers’ backs, but if one existed and beta offspring have exactly as much reproductive success as alpha offspring, then the biological need for women to cuck their beta providers disappears. Beta offspring are exactly as likely to succeed as alpha offspring, so why would a woman ever need to risk the penalty of the social control to cuck her beta husband in order to have fit children? That course of action would actually lower her own reproductive success, so the biological drive that Miggie posits women to have would be selected against, and would disappear.
So either the beta gene is suppressed, or the cuck gene is suppressed. There is no magic middle ground where both the beta and the cuck genes continue in the population in large numbers.
Just because you would rather die than continue your current sexless state doesn’t mean that other men would also rather die, or that other men share your sexlessness. As always, there is no kind of misandrist than a misogynist. You wish millions of perfectly happy men to death in order to relieve yourself of your misery, rather than put in a tiny amount of work and stop hating women.
Someone remind me: wasn’t Miggie the one who first came here claiming to be a super-successful 329-year-old alpha engineer who wasn’t a PUA but appreciated PUAs for making it even easier than usual for him to get laid? Or am I thinking of someone else?
If that’s the case, why is there, and why was there ever, a social control preventing women from openly fucking all the alphas they want? If it’s in a woman’s best reproductive interests to have alpha children, and women rule the world, why bother with the effort of giving betas the fig leaf of empty promises? It would be much more in women’s interests to have a world of men who are all alphas, as big manly men are much better at the warmongering and difficult-job-doing that women use men to do in your model.
If women are oppressively ruling men to the extent that it’s comparable to a concentration camp, why are so many men allowed by to society to commit domestic violence with such impunity that it’s common for them to decide they might as well just kill their partners? Why aren’t men who hit their female partners or men who rape women publicly burned at the stake or something? Why aren’t sexual harassers sent to re-education camps?
It’s almost like MGTOW Revolutionary has no idea what an oppressive regime actually does.
I’m also starting to think that he’s not the same person as Miggs the seagull eater and we just assumed by the name. Other than the whole men built everything story, they don’t really have similar styles.
@miggy
Reply~
Reply~
Reply~
Stop spamming shiiiiiiiit~
I’m pretty sure MGTOWR’s comments are slipping through the tear in reality that leads to Earth 2’s bizarro-feminist blog, “You Will Hunt The Mammoth For Us (Or Else) – Relishing The Matriarchy”. Anything he says that appears to reply to our comments is coincidence; he just thinks he’s stuck in the moderation queue there.
I do pity the men on Earth 2; sounds like they have it pretty bad.
The words “MGTOW” and “Revolutionary” do not belong together.
Unless you’re being extremely literal yet flexible with your understanding of the word, since it’s true that the entire definition of “MGTOW” is basically “one big circle-jerk”.
Well, you heard it from the mouth of a MGTOW, he wants to kill all men. Who’s the misandrist now? /s
But, for real, maybe lay off the “give me liberty or give me death” spiel. Not really helping you out here.
Then don’t date any women and stay away from them? Stay away from all the women here, in fact. Every click to this website gives ad revenue, you know. You’re giving money to beta magina cuck who gives it to at least three pussies daily. Fly, you fool!
Wow. This MGTOW is SO EDGY YOU GUYS! Did you see how he “triggered” all of us? Man, I’m so mad at him right now!
(As a man who is a rape and domestic abuse survivor you’d think I’d agree with him about the “Gynocracy” we live in. Unfortunately for him I have a brain in my head. )
Also I love how hitler and stalin are better than what we live in, but the “Gynocracy” we live in had existed since the beginning of time. And how beta”s were protected by the patriarchy that used to exist except that again, according to him the Gynocracy has existed since the beginning of time!
Look, folks I know I’m just a lurker, but this guy is clearly a sad, desperate person whose only sense of validation comes from being able to get a rise or of people he imagines are his enemies. He reminds me of a skinhead, who is in a neo nazi gang because they’re the only people who have ever shown him a scrap of affection and who gave him an easy answer to the question “why didn’t my life turn out how I want? “
@Filth
*aloof, manly nod of sympathies and support*
You’d think the gynocracy woulda implemented voting and and property before last century if women controlled everything. I mean, they eventually did. So were they just lazy (not sure how you rule the world effectively by lolligagging) until 1919 in Murica or what?
@Filth
*support if you want any
Gasp, the women-hater is also a raging anti-Semite. Manservants, fetch me my fainting couch.
[Fetches fainting-couch]
I know women who self-identify as misandrists* who don’t hate men anywhere near this much. I thought MRAs/MIGTOWs were supposed to be the ones who actually cared about men, unlike us eeeeeeeevil feminists.
*The ones I’ve met usually self-identify that way due to wariness around men because of being raped/otherwise abused by men.
I think that a MGTOWRevolutionary thread is a fine place for me to dump a copy paste of my attempt at “going all out” on a Facebook bigot. It’s just the basic exchange, no commentary but this and a short intro.
Given the seriousness of the material I do not have expectations with respect to replies. There can be none. A general feeling about something can be as useful as something specific as you collect experiences.
Producing something clean for other people is a thing that requires practice to estimate accurately in a time scale. I was too cavalier about when I would finish, that’s a habit that I am working on preventing. This text contains some extra organization that I realized would be necessary (comprehensive trigger warning, removing identities for privacy respect) and useful (organization into original post, numbered responses (arguments). That was a useful thing to crate and contrasts well with bigoted trolls in a comment section.
I hope that it is useful, effective and entertaining and would welcome efforts to improve. Since I am taking actions that will result in some people simply taking “that asshole!” or “SJW” from the encounter I assume I will be finding ways to make that work better my whole life.
Bad wording in that last paragraph. “would welcome efforts to improve”. is awful. I’m looking to improve.
It’s been one of those days. Turning 40 today has me, differently introspective and I’m still getting used to “nurse-middle school teacher-prison guard”. (Wasn’t there another birthday mentioned here today?)
@Brony: I’ve found a few references to your troll without it being ‘troll philip’, but rather Philip something else. (I don’t want to post it here in case you need to edit this out, and I won’t be able to edit this post.)
It’s on page 13.
There are also a whole bunch of pages at the end with nothing on them. Or maybe it’s just not displaying?
I also couldn’t read any of those overly-text-ful memes, they were too small. Perhaps a link that you could click, to see them full sized?
Also, the ‘coal miner’ in that photo is DICK VAN DYKE, in character for ‘Mary Poppins!’
I have little else to add, because the commentariat is so great here. I just wanted to add that little tidbit^.^
Also, kitties are good, MRAs are baaad.
Ack, I should read the comments completely before commenting. Thaat poster is right, those don’t look like Dick van Dyke’s eerily perfect teeth.
I also forgot about the edit time window. I throw myself on the mercy of the court!
@AbominableSnowPickle
http://i.imgur.com/Kjz7Q2j.jpg
The prosecution will let it slide, this time.
(jk you’re fine)
EDIT: While this thread is necro’d, who wants me to do a dramatic reading of MGTOWRevolutionary’s contributions to this thread?
I always enjoy your readings!
Abominable Snow Pickle,
I, Chief Manatee sentence you to a kitten or puppy. Whichever strikes more terror in your heart
That was a really transparent excuse to look up cute animal pictures, wasn’t it?