No doubt you have noticed that, despite the assertions of Men’s Rights Activists to the contrary, men are not actually the most oppressed creatures on planet earth.
And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that MRAs spend so much of their time raging not against real injustices in the world but rather against the straw feminists that exist only in their own minds.
MRA memers are especially enthusiastic fighters in this war. So let’s take a look at some of their work.
Here’s one memer taking a stand against the “pro-statutory rape when women are the rapists” wing of feminism, which of course is not a thing.
And one suggesting that feminists think child abuse is fine as long as it’s a woman doing the abusing.
Here’s a meme targeting alleged anti-beard feminists:
And here’s a meme excoriating feminism for its alleged hatred of fat men:
Not to be confused with anti-skinny women feminism, which demands that all skinny women make themselves fat.
Or whatever kind of feminism this is:
Here’s one on the wholly imaginary “objectification is only good when women do it” brand of feminism.
And let’s wind up this little meme roundup with one on the evil of feminists allegedly forcing women to get education and jobs.
Congratulations, MRAs and antifeminists generally for so creatively conjuring up so many boogeymen (or rather boogeywomen) to scare yourselves with.
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So the girl in the hosiery ad is totally me (although I’m a sheer tights kind of girl, and also I wouldn’t be seen walking my guys without whip-in-hand…just a better aesthetic to me) but what MRA assholes don’t get is that just because I enjoy my guys’ bodies that way that’s not the same as how men objectify women against our wills. No woman who enjoys handsome sexy male bodies that way is going to do it without the collaboration of the human beings whose bodies they are. She can’t because even if she wanted to she wouldn’t have the power. And even so she’ll never get to enjoy men that way without fighting battles against slut-shamed and harassment and entitled complainers her whole life. That’s is not the same and it upsets me a lot for someone to say it is.
@Snowberry, Naglfar:
It’s my belief that thin shaming, when it happens at all, is usually caused by the existence of fatshaming— i.e., if thinness is prized by society, then some people may seek to resist by sniping at thin women. Acceptance of all body types would eliminate that motivation.
O/T, but for all the corvid fans here.
I don’t normally approve of animal experiments; but as he’s just getting food for showing how clever he is I guess this is fair enough. Especially as I couldn’t figure out what you were supposed to do in that last one.
Now, say “Eureka”
“Nevermore!”
“Stop that!”
@Naglfar
Practically neighbours with Mr. Robertshaw!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/11/trum-and-farage-supporter-flies-flag-for-qanon-rar-right-conspiracy
That’s an 8 month old article though, and there aren’t exactly a whole load of other examples.
@Threp
Conversely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midland
(dude makes up high-profile pedophile ring conspiracy, everyone falls for it, no-one opposes the suggestion for fear that it might be another savile thing. turns out to be utter bullshit, original source turns out to be pedophile)
:-(((( I can’t see Alan’s corvid (I just get a blank rectangle on the screen) (come to think of it, this is the 2nd or 3rd time since the site makeover) – does anyone have any idea why this might be/what I can do about it? Corvids rule (of course they do)!
(and while I’m asking for help … I need to change the email address I use with WHTM soon, but I don’t want to change my name, avatar etc. (can’t remember what I did to get started here, way back when). Grateful if anyone could tell me how to do that – is it as simple as filling in the new email address and waiting to go through moderation again, or will the site ‘think’ I’m an impostor? And would it mess up my gravatar too? Thanks for any advice!)
@opposablethumbs
You should be able to just enter a different email, you’ll have to go through moderation again but then you should be fine. You will have to change your gravatar, and I’m not sure if you can update your old one or have to create a new one for the new email.
Thank you Naglfar! Will have a try …
@ pie
Oh dear, how embarrassing. I blame the tin oxide in the local water supply.
I find reassurance in this though.
@opposablethumbs:
A gravatar can be associated with multiple email addresses (I currently have five addresses for mine). You’ll need to login to gravatar.com, after which you can then add a new address.
Qanon does seem to be making inroads in the UK, fuelled both by COVID-related conspiracism and the new “Freedom for the Children” branding, which disguises it. There’s an article from late August here (I hope that link works; I’m new to the site revamp).
Incidentally, the best video I’ve seen on Qanon is Dan Olson’s latest on his “Folding Ideas” yt channel, where he examines flat Earthers and how that movement has fed into Qanon. Good stuff.
Thanks Moggie! (think I might go with a new one anyway (if I manage to get this right 🙂 )
It looks like it works, on my screen; just in moderation for now.
Out of moderation with my new look (same as the old look) – thanks again Naglfar, thank you Moggie, and thank you David!
I’m much thinner than average and the only people who ever told me I was too skinny and I should put on weight were definitely not feminists.
I know the original question was about the U.K., but QAnon has been spreading in Canada as well:
Anti-mask protest in Montreal draws large crowd, propelled by U.S. conspiracy theories
Gah. It’s annoying enough that U.S. culture has been overwhelming Canada for years (in large part because it’s cheaper for many Canadian broadcasters to just licence American shows than it is to create their own, and only the CBC actually has a legal requirement to create Canadian content) but for some reason importing U.S. conspiracy theories bugs me even more, because a lot of the people parroting those theories here don’t even0 seem to understand that Canada and the U.S. have different legal frameworks.
(I’ve ranted about the Sovereign Citizen types before… sure, their arguments don’t actually work in the U.S. either, but a lot of the ones in Canada are still using entirely U.S.-centric arguments about Social Security Numbers that don’t even match the outer details on why the arguments should have any merit whatsoever.)
I saw an article a while back that noted that the pandemic has been QAnon’s best friend, because a lot of people were suddenly unmoored from their normal social connections and had nothing to do but go online and wander around Facebook, which has been a breeding ground for extremism of various sorts pretty much since it was created…
@Jenora Feuer
I’d also guess that the Venn diagram of QAnoners and sovcits is a circle, or close to one at least.
This was one of my favourites…
https://twitter.com/fingerbIaster/status/1179826449395531776
I still don’t understand how much cleavage they think would be too much if that was “just enough”. I do give whoever made the meme credit though as the woman in the photo is nothing like what they usually argue the “typical” feminist looks like.
@ tabby lavalamp
Well the Musee D’Orsay think it’s this much.
But décolletage, in a French art gallery! What is the world coming too?
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/musee-orsay-discrimination-1907226
@Tabby Lavalamp
As far as I can tell, MRA stereotypes of what feminists look like generally are either second wave-inspired sex-hating puritans (who occasionally appear to be political lesbians, but I doubt MRAs know that term) or scantily dressed women with brightly colored hair that are supposed to be hypersexual and subject to slut shaming. For some reason, both stereotypes are often drawn as fat. I’m not sure where the idea of feminists as fat got started but it predates modern MRAs, going back at least to the anti-suffragette movement in the US.
Far as I can tell, it’s the “they only want the vote/equal pay/an end to discrimination because no man will sleep with them and it makes them bitter” argument.
The following is highly tangential (re Qanon and imaginary child abuse), but I’ve recently seen some interesting discussion on actual child abuse prevention at the Finnish public broadcaster’s website (link in Finnish, my paraphrasing below).
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11486549
It’s an interview of Mikko Ylipekka, the psychologist responsible for directing national rehabilitation program for child sex abuse offenders. This is a relatively recently introduced program, and naturally Ylipekka wants more outreach for it. (In another recent article, it was noted that while therapy and medicinal treatment are available outside prison setting, they need to be made a lot more accessible.)
Ylipekka points out the distinction between pedophilia (a person’s sexual tendency towards children) and the act of sexually abusing children. His recommendations for better prevention include:
@ lumipuna
Related to your point no. 1; don’t use euphemisms. Or at least teach children the proper technical terms for body parts as well.
I have seen examples (which I can’t verify but they certainly seem plausible) of children raising issues of sexual abuse with appropriate adults but being misunderstood because of the language used.
@Lumipuna
Something I’ve seen that relates to this is suggestions to start talking about consent very early in a non-sexual way. For instance, asking consent to give a hug or telling the child they can say no if they don’t want to be touched in a certain way.
This. Society makes it very hard for non-offending pedophiles to get treatment because to get the right treatment they need to out themselves, which often has serious repercussions even for individuals who have never and will never molest children. We know very little about pedophilia and this too is a problem, as knowing more would help us prevent child sexual abuse.
@Alan Robertshaw
This. I am not sure why, but a lot of parents seem to think it’s better to teach children slang terms rather than anatomical ones. That probably also contributes to the general lack of knowledge around genital anatomy, e.g. 42% of AFAB people didn’t know what a cervix was when surveyed. In addition to the issue of sexual assault, this could lead to medical consequences like a patient not going to cervical screenings or prostate exams because they don’t know that they have the relevant anatomy.
Alan:
Indeed. Apropos, I just saw this on the Guardian (someone is promoting a book on this very subject):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/15/the-idea-of-too-much-information-is-bad-for-our-health-its-time-we-ditched-it
If I had small children, I’d definitely have to teach them both a formal and colloquial name for certain body parts, to avoid confusion. Or perhaps more than one colloquial term.
(When I was about five, I got the impression that birds have “shit” while humans and dogs have “poop”. It made perfect sense, considering that avian and mammalian feces look clearly different.)
There’s also an issue I’ve seen come up recently in The Fandom Discourse of some fans stretching the definition of pedophilia to include stuff like the fictional portrayal of a romantic or sexual relationship between two teenagers, or between any two people with an age gap, even if the younger person is in their mid-twenties. There seems to be some debate over this began due to a) fandom shipping wars, i.e., people determined to portray their OTP as right and good and denounce any rival OTPs as problematic; or b) splash damage from TERFs and SWERFs portraying everybody else as “grooming children for abuse.” As with Qanon, there seems a danger here of creating boy-who-cried-wolf situations.
@Naglfar:
I wouldn’t say a circle, but probably a subset… as in, pretty much all SovCits are probably QAnoners, but not the other way around. QAnon has simply become a much wider thing rather quickly, and while other conspiracy theories are pulled closer by the usual crank magnetism, they haven’t all caught up yet.
@Lumipuna:
I agree with all of those statements.
@Moon Custafer:
Hardly just fictional couples. I recall hearing about at least one case in the U.S. years back where some ‘tough on crime’ District Attorney charged a sixteen or seventeen year old woman with child pornography because she’d sent a nude picture of herself to her boyfriend.