By David Futrelle
I found the meme above on the front page of the Men’s Rights subreddit today, with 82 upvotes (and counting). It’s a pretty good illustration of the standard story MRAs tell themselves about feminism: Once upon a time there was Good Feminism, it was modest and polite and didn’t ask for much. But then along came Tumblr feminists with their purple hair and they ruined everything!
While some MRAs in the Men’s Rights subreddit thread do take issue with the blatant historical inaccuracies of this meme, the enormous popularity in MRA circles of this narrative about feminism — which bears about as much resemblance to actual feminist history as the Men’s Rights movement does to a legitimate civil rights movement, which is to say none — reveals how little the typical MRAs actually know about the movement they pretty much devote all their time to denouncing. Not that their complete ignorance of feminism keeps them from having many very strong opinions about it, which they would like to tell you about at length.
Of all the dumb things in the above meme, their weird sanitized fantasy version of 2nd wave feminism amuses me the most. Hey MRAs, go take a look at Sisterhood is Powerful or the Redstockings online archive, or something.
I don’t mind explaining something, I legitimately have expressive issues. It’s why I don’t post much. But I’m honestly fine with explaining something. I can be confusing at times.
@Fujimoto
Yeah, I’ve seen this before (sans the last bit) too–specifically on RationalWiki, where it was treated as the bullshit it is. (RW can be a bit dodgy, but it certainly got it right there.)
@Dan Kasteray:
“Power does not concede without a demand.”
@Miss Edgy Nation:
Not to mention tats.
@Freemage:
Conservatism always behaves this way. They play “king of the hill”: get to the top, then defend it from anyone else joining them up there. Liberals meanwhile try to enlarge the hill itself, to make room for more people on it, though often at the cost of making the very highest part not quite as high as before.
One worry for the future: fast growth favors liberalism, as it’s easy to grow the hill entire. But slow/no growth, let alone contraction, makes conservative strategies tend toward greater success: get a perch high up and then defend it vigorously against upstarts.
The issue being sustainability. The long term future is necessarily going to be one of, at best, punctuated equilibrium, with occasional big-enough tech advances or new frontiers to create (often local) bursts of growth, alternating with long periods of an approximately steady state. (Even loads and loads of space travel doesn’t alter this. Long term, our resource base and real estate grows cubically — even just quadratically, once we’re talking a good-sized piece of the galaxy or larger. That won’t support exponential growth that’s steady rather than bursty.)
There are two alternatives, then, as near as I can figure, during those long periods when the hill cannot be grown: one makes the hill a lower but very broad plateau, with everyone on it; the other has a few privileged people on the top pulling out all the stops to keep everyone else off.
Our choices, in the long term, seem to be feudalism vs. socialism. Liberalism/capitalism is a temporary phase made possible by frontiers and episodes of major technological advance and must eventually give way to one of the other two.
Comparing, say, medieval Rome and modern Norway, I think I know which one I’d pick.
More of that “Muslim takeover” BS again? The facts beg to disagree. Studies in the US show that Muslims are becoming more liberal….FAST. (Probably because the political right keeps vilifying them).
So _IF_ Muslims do come anywhere close to being a plurality, they’ll likely end up being feminist, blue-haired, tattooed, rainbow-hijab-wearing nu-Muslims. Sadly, the alt-right would still hate them, just for different reasons.
A Post-It note would do. And have margins.
I think a Post-It with just the word “Assfax” scrawled in crayon would work.
WWTH: How ’bout a “Complete And Utter Bullshit” stamp?
@Miss Edgy Nation: I have always considered getting mermaid highlights–this is just another reason. I like my natural hair color too well to dye my *whole* hair an unusual color but streaks could look cool.
So the vote was actually taken AWAY from (White) women in 1777 in what was to become the U.S.A. They had it at first. They also could own property until 1700-sumpin. Kinda like how Black folks were most often free at first in the same states. Every bit of injustice, cruelty and human evil that this country enacted back then was legislated. Deliberately, brick-by-heartbreakingly-preventable-brick.
I can’t recall who said it, but that quote about social counter-movements first endeavoring to undermine a social movement’s validity and power by actively attempting to erase its history? Yeahhhhhh, that.
You know, the whining they do about how any day now White Civilization will collapse and we’ll all be sorry and beg to give them BJs and sandwiches is really just…like, enough already. Move on.
—
Penny Psmith, as a language lover myself, if you just wanna talk about Arabic for half a page I wouldn’t mind. Just puttin’ that out there.
Also, I don’t think they put any thought into it.
I’m gonna work on Persian (an order of magnitude easier than Arabic, ha!) after I get my second language up to speed.
Also, started watching People of Earth; fun show.
FFS, MRAs, you’re stupid about everything all the time.
Allow me to point out that the sweet little old lady of first-wave feminism depicted in your graphic would be long dead. Say, did you know that women won the vote in the USA in 1920?
The second-wave feminist appears to be about 15. I’m a second-wave feminist. I’m a lot older than 15. We second-wave feminists have always been absolutely clear that we’re fighting the patriarchy. (What else!) And second-wave feminism has never been seen by the right wing as commonsense corrections of earlier social and governmental mistakes — except in your imagination. We feminists have had to fight for every gain we’ve made.
In summary, you’re not interested in having sex with first- or second-wave feminists — we’re too old (or dead). It’s the third-wave feminists who disturb you because you want them and they don’t want you. Therefore you threaten them with the supposed aftermath of their allegedly short-sighted ideals.
Hey, why don’t you get your feels out of the way and read a book about feminism!
Or, you know, continue being stupid.
The other side of this is how they lie to themselves about how their intellectual predecessors reacted to women of those days. “We gave them the right to vote” is a common line. But it’s easy to see that first wave feminists, who are now seen as “reasonable” feminists to oppose “radical” feminists, were attacked just as viciously as today’s feminists:
http://theweek.com/articles/461455/12-cruel-antisuffragette-cartoons
It’s similar to how conservatives today love MLK and claim he would oppose things like BLM, when conservatives of the time hated him.
Do these bozos even realize that the “wave” model of feminism(s) is just a US media-manufactured artifact? That it’s not relevant to other countries and cultures, and their feminisms? That an awful lot of non-US feminists (myself included) don’t subscribe to it, because we find it divisive and US-centric, and that it erases the continuum between feminists of different ages, like myself, who happen to be situated between so-called waves? That the various feminist schools of thought are not all separate and distinct, but have a way of bleeding into and out of one another, and that they borrow from each other and influence each other all the fucking time?
(smacks forehead)
No, of course they don’t. If they did, they’d be smart, and if they were smart, they wouldn’t be menzers. (They might also come up with better graphics, because these are just shit all around.)
Also, they don’t mansplain how panel 3 leads to panel 4, in which women are supposedly too cowed to feminist anymore. How the fuck does opposing rape culture lead to a “post-western” world that’s nothing BUT rape culture? Menzers, you STOOOOOOPID.
@Bina
Simple: Opposing patriarchy means wanting to destroy Christianity. If you destroy Christianity there will be a great spiritual void, and the only thing that can fill it will be Islam, because there are no other religions of any significance on the planet, and every society must be based on a religion.
@Dalil
If they’d use Judaism in their graphic their bigotry would be too obvious.
@WWTH
The idea of the end goal of feminism being turned into Darth Vader is something I really shouldn’t have read, because laughing hurts right now.
(Short form: make sure you MISS the ground if you fall off your bike on the way to work, because hitting the ground hurts a lot and involves a CAT scan for the head bump.)
@ Missy Edgy Nation
This is the deepest desire of the MRA movement. It is this one belief that drives them.
@ bina
I’m no expert on feminism, but the wave model has always struck me as being akin to that “stone age, bronze age, iron age” thing. It’s a convenient and popular over simplification, but any archeologist will tell you it’s bollocks.
Also: I think instead of saying “X group was given X right” it’d make more sense sometimes to say “X group’s X right was returned.” Like “women were given the vote” would be more ACCURATE if we said, “After decades of political action and harsh and unrelenting pushback, voting rights were begrudgingly restored to (White American) women.” Just to remind ourselves that our rights ARE in fact our rights and if we don’t have them it’s cuz Kyriarchy jacked them.Words are powerful.
@bina
Thanks for saying that about the wave model of feminism. I first heard this “wave” language about a decade ago when a young anti-feminist woman called me a “second-waver”, quite dismissively. A what now? Is that somebody who waves after the first person has waved?
Her analysis was only slightly better than the graphics we are mocking here, and depended heavily on reducing me to a caricature of a 70s feminist, a “bra-burner” (which of course never happened, except toke burns.)
Okay, she’s a twit, I thought, but I’ve been out of academia for some time; I better get caught up on this wave model if I’m gonna be talking to people. And I have to say, it never made any sense to me. Never occurred to me (possibly because the twit was Australian) that it was an American creation based on an extremely narrow view of what “feminism” is.
@banananana dakry Oh, ouch, feel better! (And may I say, every time I see your nym I giggle. As Pratchett said about another word, sometimes you have to send out for help to know when to stop spelling it.)
The idea that women’s sense of self be based exclusively on the approval of men is a basic tenet of patriarchy… it might be THE basic tenet (except for control of the money)
Like Make America Great Again?
@Oogly
Nah, that particular meme cluster never uses Judaism; Jews don’t proselytize (to any significant degree at least), never have, and show no sign of starting.
Waves? Screw that. I think of feminism like a laser. We started out at 1kiloWatt, ramped it up to 1MegaWatt, then ramped it up to 1 GigaWatt, next stop 1 TeraWatt.
Also it’s a violet laser, because purple is my favorite colour.
@Lukas – Ummm, maybe? The connection came to mind, of course, but I don’t think this is how you’d say it in Arabic. The verb is more like “enlarge”, which can also mean “make big/great”, but of course putting the slogan as “Enlarge America again” would be rather silly.
@Jules – Thanks! I’ll try to get around to something, when I’m back on my computer. Touchscreen keyboards are annoying.
I finally dyed my hair red. I guess this makes me a third wave feminist. Or is the dark red of blood a “respectable” color?
I’m just going to say that the “wave” model of feminism has never made much sense to me. It’s hard to divide any cultural or social phenomenon into neat little time-based categories.