By David Futrelle
A young Men’s Rights Redditor named Destonreson is puzzled by the hostility directed at him and others of his kind.
“I’m an MRA,” he writes in a post on the Men’s Rights subreddit,
and I simply cannot understand the hate it gets. I think my views are fair and equal. … But the things I hear people say, the pure hatred the MRM gets, it makes zero sense to me. It’s upsetting and scary and has given me a negative view of society.
Really? Because it seems to me the hostility towards MRAs is pretty self-explanatory.
Yet again, a girl I matched with on tinder blocked me when I brought it up.
Ah ha! Now we get to the real source of his discontent.
“I’m glad she did,” he says, though the fact that he’s now writing a giant wall of text on the subject suggests he’s not quite as glad as he’d like us to believe.
I see being anti- MRA as a red flag. IMO, the real reason feminists are so bothered and angry by MRAs existing is because they want to be abusive and controlling in relationships.
Uh, what?
So they hate it when they know a man wouldn’t put up with it, and they hate it when a “white male” dares to have the audacity to see himself as a human being.
Wait, how did “white” make it into the mix here?
Domestic violence against men is one example of what I think is a basic and obvious point of fairness that feminists hate and attack- but why? If you’re against “harmful gender stereotypes”, then why are you against recognizing that male victims exist?
Weird, because the only people /i know of who have actually done something about domestic violence towards men — as opposed to yelling about it online — have been feminists.
Another thing is circumcision. It’s mutilation and IMO not a debate.
Most feminists I know are opposed to circumcision.
But feminists will attack you for even bringing it up, and will constantly defend it or it minimize it by bringing up FGM.
Maybe because by this point the discussion has already become a shouting match? Maybe because every time feminists try to talk about FGM online they are immediately surrounded by angry and sometimes abusive men screaming about circumcision? The anti-circumcision movement is so full of fanatics and antisemites that anyone with reasonable views on the subject is repelled by them.
Yes, FGM is disgusting and barbaric and has now place in the world. It doesn’t just mutilate women/girls, it’s fatal and kills many women/girls. I know! I acknowledge that.
But how is that a relevant part of circumcision? Why does that mean I shouldn’t be able to talk about it?
Talk about it all you want, just don’t barge into feminists spaces to “what about”it.
Would you say “littering doesnt matter because global warming is worse” or “rape doesn’t matter because genocide is worse”? No, because that doesn’t make sense. Why do feminists ALWAYS bring up FGM to “counter” circumcision? As if it’s a “defense?” It’s not.
Feminists, in my experience, don’t bring it up as a defense; they bring it up to see if the men yelling at them about circumcision actually give a shit about the barbarity of FGM.
Feminists are just incapable of making intellectual/logical arguments.
There’s a leap. Not sure you’re doing very well in the logic department yourself, bucko.
There are so many things that MRAs are right about…the education gap, the unemployment gap, the life expectancy gap, conscription, higher pension ages, homeless men being denied shelter because they aren’t “priority need”…what am I wrong about? What do MRAs say that isn’t true?
Where do you want me to start, Destonreson? How about with your assertion that feminists hate MRAs because they all want to be abusive girlfriends?
Of the rest, well, the education gap is real, to the extent that college admissions offices routinely let in less-qualified males in order to even things out a bit. Part of the reason for the education gap, moreover, is that men know they can make better money than women even with less education.
The life expectancy gap is also real, but it’s not the result of discrimination. Conscription? No one in the US is being conscripted right now, and feminists generally believe that if there is going to be a draft, women should be included as well. Indeed, the National Organization for Women sued over this at least once.
The others? I’m pretty sure you’ve just made up the unemployment gap, since the unemployment numbers for men and women, last I checked, were almost identical, with male unemployment only fractionally higher, at least in the US. The only “pension gap” I’ve run across is the result of men getting more pension money than women.
As for other MRA untruths, there are too many to mention. MRAs are gender wage gap deniers. They pretend that domestic violence towards men is the same or worse than that directed at women; never mind that it’s mostly women who end up in the hospital or the morgue because of their partners’ or ex-partners’violent attacks. MRAs pretend that men are as likely to be raped as women. Even more absurdly, MRAs like to pretend that we live in a “gynocracy” secretly run by women, and that men are the real victims of gender inequality.
But the biggest MRA untruth is probably the claim that Men’s Rights activists are actually activists. While they sometimes bring up real issues faced by men, they don’t — outside of the fanatical intactivists — try to do anything about them. Instead, as I and many others have pointed out many times before, they simply use all of these issues — real or bogus — to attack women. As Destonreson has done here, and as commenters on the Men’s Rights subreddit do day after day after day.
Destonreson, if you by chance are reading this, and you’re still wondering about the hostility towards the MRM, just take a look at some of the comments on your own post. One commenter calls feminists “lice infested moth [sic] breathers crawl[ing] out of their lesbian orgy,” another declares feminists opposed to “decency [and] truth,” still another says “that MRAs threaten their lucrative victimhood,” as if all complaints from feminists are manufactured.
I just don’t get it.
No, you really don’t.
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@Naglfar: If birds are dinosaurs, then birds are also archosaurs, because dinosaurs are archosaurs. Archosaurs are reptiles. Reptiles are tetrapods. Tetrapods are fish. Therefore, birds are fish. You’ve got to cut things off somewhere.
Part of the problem may be that the designation of “dinosaur” is lumping together two rather dissimilar groups. One could make a reasonable argument that birds are saurischians, but ornithschians like stegosaurus are a different enough biologically to belong in their own category. “Dinosaur” origninally was, and is still sometimes used in casual parlance, as an unscientific catchall category for non-bird archosaurs; maybe “dinosauria” should be retired from scientific usage.
Maybe. We don’t know enough about the biology and genetics of long-extinct animals, and there’s always some degree of arbitrariness in the end.
@Snowberry
Yes, I recognize that there is a cutoff point. However, it appears that the paleontological community is in agreement that birds are dinosaurs, so although dinosauria is not the best defined group, birds do appear to be considered members.
I mostly posted the comic because it seemed relevant to Ohlmann’s comment.
Could someone with the capability perform a wellness check on David? He hasn’t been active for nearly four days and, as you might have heard, there’s a nasty bug going around right now …
@Surplus
He’s still active on Twitter (as of last night) so he must still be alive. I don’t live in Chicago so I can’t really check on him in person (plus we’ve never met in meatspace, so he’d probably find it a bit weird).
I cannot, but yes, it would be good to be sure he didn’t have had a problem. Especially given that almost dying is expensive in the USA 😡
@Snowberry : where is the problem of birds being archosaurs and tetrapod ? They aren’t reptile, because reptile isn’t a monophyletic group. The correct term for what you want to say is sauropside, because unlike reptile it avoid a lot of confusion by not using a term for a widely different meaning.
Fish isn’t a monophyletic group either, if you don’t include litteraly any land animal in it, in which case it’s called chordates. And even more than for dinosaurs, the vernacular term include species that really are extremely different.
You talk of casual parlance, but the two main groups of dinosaurs are *MUCH* closer to each other than different fish are, as well as being closer than snakes and turtle are. In that sense, dinosaur is a well defined group, that just happen to include bird as a subcategory. Which, when you have seen reconstitutions of velociraptors, really don’t seem all that far fetched.
Evolution-wise, reptiles and fish don’t really exist because the term designates randoms juxtaposition of species.
On the vernacular side, birds *are* becoming accepted as being dinosaurs, similar to how dolphins were for a long time classified as fish and now are generally thought as not being fish. The confirmation the birds come from dinosaur have been one of the biggest story of the end of XXth century to me, doubly so because it all but confirmed that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and consequently aren’t sluggish as some old work depicted them.
The Field Museum jokingly tweeted a few weeks back that their T. Rex, Sue, had heard about the Shedd Aquarium penguins being allowed to roam the closed institute and demanded the same privilege. Later they added:
I guess women making intact men to clean themselves properly, or else they would be denied sex, is just more than enough proof that feminists in default are in favor of genital mutilation of baby boys…
Snowberry, I apologize if I came off as insensitive or smug. That is not what I intended at all, although after rereading my post I can see why you feel that way.
After reading the article, which only addresses XX and XY aspects of sexual identity and effects concerning health and longevity advantages and disadvantages, I was struck with the notion that it could be one of a number of possible answers to the ancient question of why, historically, such a large number of men have hated, feared and oppressed women. Granted, that itself is a complex issue, but it does cross all boundaries – religious, cultural, geographical and more – which makes it rather a large question. If genetic women, and I did use that term in my previous post, tend to live longer and enjoy certain health benefits, that could be part of the basis for such virulent hatred.
I did not address the issues of transgender or any of the many other issues that make up the whole of human gender-related life. For one thing, the article, as I said, spoke only to the XX and XY aspects and the health and longevity aspects that are affected. For another, I really do not know enough about all of the possibilities to speak to them.
Again, my deepest apologies for any and all offence I gave. Please accept that it was unintended.
@Samantha
Thank you for your apology. I understand that we are all in a stressed state right now and that I may have overreacted to your original comment, and for that I am sorry. Thank you for clarifying.
@Samantha
Naglfar has already taken care of the genetic women part, but to answer your question, throughout much of history women have actually lived shorter lives than men despite having stronger immune systems, in part because of sexism.
Men still hated women, they just made up different justifications.
@David
This is a hella problematic statement that seems to imply that only abuse that results in a trip to the hospital or morgue is to be taken seriously. I know that’s not the intent, but imo it is the implication.
Emotional abuse is real abuse.
@Moogue – Yeah, the part about how MRAs suppose “domestic violence towards men is the same or worse than that directed at women” was a little unclear for me. Maybe it’s ambiguity in the wording and not intentional, but it sounds as if it’s saying a particular occurrence of man-to-woman abuse would be worse than the reverse.
And it’d be unfair to suggest that one kind of abuse is worse than another, or that men who are abused are going to be less affected by it.
But maybe what’s actually meant is “the number of men who abuse women is higher than that of women who abuse men.” I think that at least is true. It would also, sadly, make sense – not because men are necessarily more violent, of course, but because they have more social power on average.
The topic in general reminds me of a video I watched in my sociolinguistics class. The speaker is Jackson Katz talking about violence against women. Someone in my class pointed out that the way he talks about “leadership training” instead of “sensitivity training” also shows the effects of gendered language – men might think “sensitivity” sounds more feminine and be wary of it.
Anyway, here’s a link if anyone’s interested; CW for talk about physical and sexual abuse: https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue?language=en
@Moogue : in addition to sexism, there’s also the fact that giving birth is a messy, dangerous affair when you don’t have modern hospitals, especially for humans whoses baby are pretty big for the mother size. That’s probably a part of why women have stronger immunitary system to begin with.
I don’t expect the MRAs to go as far as trying to understand why women have better health system however. Samantha here didn’t even blink when going from “better immunity system” to “live longer”, even while it’s actually a pretty big jump already, among a sea of other random jump of faith in his or her reasoning.
Also, “genetic women” probably should not be a term. Genetics don’t determine if you’re a man or a woman after all.
And for current lifespan : remember that the biggest differenciator in term of health is actually men acting more recklessly, and dying more from accidents, smoking, and that kind of avoidable death. That don’t invalidate Samantha’s reasoning however ; it’s not like it would surprise me to learn that men blame the consequence of their actions to women because thoses women have the gall of not acting the same as them.
@epitome
I don’t think men are inherently more violent. However, I do think that from a young age many boys are taught to be more aggressive, which causes some to grow up into aggressive men. Something that should be done as part of a feminist movement is reducing the amount of toxic masculine impulse taught to young boys and helping them learn healthy ways to treat others.
Unfortunately, I think many men do think that way. I think sensitivity is something more people should try to have, but I do know that many men might not like the idea of it, but do like the idea of leadership. If it gets them to go to trainings, calling it “leadership training” seems like an acceptable sacrifice.
@Ohlmann
I do know that having 2 X chromosomes does increase the chance of certain dominant autoimmune disorders so cis women have a higher risk of autoimmune conditions. So immune-wise it’s a double edged sword.
Agree. There are better terms for someone who has XX chromosomes.
@Ohlmann –
Good point!
Also, to point out anecdotally and non-scientifically that genetics are weird, I’m my parents’ biological kid and this happened:
Mother: Curly red hair, blue eyes
Father: Curly black hair, blue eyes
Me: Straight blond(ish) hair, hazel eyes (brown-green around the pupil, blue further out – and now I know it’s called central heterochromia, thanks to this thread. Fancy! 😛 )
@epitome
Both of my parents have blue eyes (as do I) while my sister has green eyes. There are a few other people in the family who have green eyes, but my sister is the only person in my immediate family who has that color.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
I can’t really parse that statement out without coming up with something problematic. Although I’m assuming it’s just poorly worded as well.
Could be, and that would make a lot more sense. However, it would still have the problem of mostly focusing on physical aspects of abuse.
OT, but I just got back from burying 3 of my 4 parakeets. I neglected to close their cage door last night and they must of gone out of the cage and then panicked in the dark, and somehow all 4 ended up behind my dresser. I went to feed them today and couldn’t find them until I heard scratching, and found my youngest one alive and the other three (including my baby that I’ve had for 10 years) dead, presumably suffocated.
I’ve been reading a lot of stories about people accidentally suffocating their birds. Looks like the common scenario
is that when they fell asleep the bird comes to visit and ends up falling between the bed and the wall, or worse, ends up under their human. Not what happened with me but still a hard lesson learned. Because of how they breathe birds suffocate easily, quickly, and quietly, always make sure that they’re locked safely in their cages with the cage door closed securely when not supervised. It’s like a nightmare for it to be most of my flock, I feel completely emotionally numb. If I had just been there last night I would have been able to save them.
@Moogue
Sorry about your parakeets.
@Naglfar
Thanks 🙁
@Moogue : that’s horrible. I hope you best, and I hope a long live to the fourth one.
Birds are fun, but high upkeep. I commend you for taking the difficult road as long as pet go.
@Naglfar : realistically, evolution-wise what happened is more that when male and only male lose a bit of immunity it wasn’t a super big deal, but mutations that were problematic for both gender or only women probably didn’t have a great transmission rate, due to mother dying too easily.
I might be wrong, but as far as evolution is concerned, the average human didn’t lived long enough for auto immune disease to be a major concern. Remember that almost all genetic evolution on human is based on the hundred of thousand year before writing, not the 5000 or so year since.
@Moogue
I am so, so sorry about your parakeets. I can only imagine your emotional pain right now. Stay strong. Sending you good thoughts and my best wishes.
@ moogue
I am so sorry to hear about you birds. I really feel for you; it’s so awful to lose furry or feathered friends. 🙁
@Ohlmann:
Fair enough on the ‘evolutionary leftover’ bit… as you say, evolution doesn’t really have a direction of progression. (Evolution isn’t biased towards ‘good’… it’s biased towards ‘good enough’.) I used rather loose language there.
There was a convention in 2012 in Ottawa where I met PZ Myers in person for the first time; we had a tour of the Natural History Museum there, including both the bird and the dinosaur exhibits, which were referred to half-jokingly as the ‘ancient and modern dinosaur exhibits’.
Really, if there’s one general rule we’ve learned about in biology over the last century, it’s that hard dividing lines between groups almost never actually exist in any way that won’t have some exceptions. See for example ‘ring species’.
Yes, in the same way our current definition of species is spectaculary inadapted to a lot of, well, species. My prefered example is thoses threes “species”, who have A and B able to procreate, B and C able to procreate, but not A and C.
@Ohlmann
I think the term for that is “species continuum” or “ring species.” A somewhat related example is how among Inuit languages, each group can understand the neighboring groups’ dialects and occasionally the neighbor’s neighboring dialects, but not further dialects.
@Moogue:
My sympathies, that’s awful