It’s meme time again, in which I present a number of Men’s Rights memes I’ve found recently and mock the shit out of them. I will also be providing rudimentary fact-checks for some of them.
So let’s get right to it. The first couple of memes are attempts to prove that feminists are hypocrites who hold contradictory beliefs on an assortment of topics.
Er, femininsts have also pushed hard for paid paternity leaves and would be thrilled if men involved themselves more in child care.
Feminists don’t believe that women can’t be abusive; they believe that they are less likely to be abusers than men — because they are, at least when it comes to the severe sorts of abuse that land women in hospitals for domestic violence at much higher rates than men.
As for combat, well, women do tend on average to be smaller than men, but by this logic short men should also be kept out of the armed forces. In any case, very few wars these days are decided by fist fights.
Yes, it’s true that feminists sometimes celebrate women for acting in ways that have been seen as traditionally masculine. But they don’t celebrate women acting like dicks on crowded subway trains.
Here’s one more Schrodinger’s Feminist meme; it’s the last one, I promise.
Feminists don’t give a shit how many women pickup artists sleep with; what bothers us are the pickup techniques in question, which involve mind games and manipulation and sometimes outright rape. And it’s not exactly news that the whole Red Pill/pickup scene today is rife with misogyny.
Here’s a meme attacking feminists for (allegedly) resorting to ad hominem in arguments.
And here are memes happily resorting to ad hominem, mocking feminists as allegedly all fat and ugly. (Don’t ask me to explain the point of the first one because I’ve never seen any feminist say anything remotely like this to an anti-feminist.)
Not much to say about this next one except that MRAs really seem to enjoy fantasizing about hitting women.
Here’s a perplexing one. Am I missing something here or is this completely incoherent?
Also, I’ve never seen a feminist say anything like this ever.
This one has a fact in it.
In this case the fact is actually true, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It’s just that this percentage has nothing to do with some imagined plot against men by the evil gynocracy; men make up the overwhelming majority of prisoners because men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. Now, it’s true that a lot of those in prison are there because of bullshit drug charges and the like, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish that has much more to do with race and class than it does with gender.
Here’s one final meme I’m not going to bother to fact-check because I can’t even fucking read it.
Graphic design is my passion!
H/T — The MRAmemes subreddit, where I found all these lovely memes.
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I think the jellyfish are supposed to be very “high” (on drugs)?
The Shark Tale meme seems coherent assuming the jellies are stoners and therefore high on whatever the underwater equivalent to weed is.
Not that that helps its idea of how feminists talk.
Meerkat beat me to it.
The jellies are parodies of human Rastafarians, thus they can be expected to “very high” in the sense of having smoked a ton of marijuana…
…but that creates a pun with the “high” rates of suicide.
ETA: Okay, both meerkat and rikalous beat me to it, darn comment display!
As always, MRAs are less interested in lifting men up than they are in dragging women down.
Whoever made these “Schrödinger’s Feminist” memes appears to not only lack any understanding of feminism but also doesn’t seem to understand Schrödinger’s Cat either.
Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t most military combat done with firearms and other ranged weapons nowadays, meaning that being very strong as an individual doesn’t make as much of a difference as it would in prior centuries?
Do they think the only way to act masculine is by manspreading?
To be honest, I’ve never seen a reason given for manspreading other than just taking up space. As a woman who has a penis, I’ve never had an issue sitting with my legs together, in fact I generally prefer to sit with my legs together or crossed. I would assume most cis men would be capable of the same without much difficulty.
I can’t tell if this one is trying to be transphobic against trans women by trying to call trans women as trans men (or, as TERFs are fond of, “TIMs”) or transphobic against trans men. I just can’t tell which way it’s trying to be transphobic. When I see a cis woman spreading misogyny, never once have I assumed she was a closeted trans man on that basis.
I rather doubt many people go into boxing rings during matches with the intention to not get hit.
The second to last one really does highlight the hypocrisy of MRAs. They’re complaining about men being in prison, but I have yet to see any of them push for criminal justice reform or any of the projects attempting to exonerate wrongfully convicted men. Yet most of the feminists I know do support that and many are involved in activism or campaigning related to it.
After reading the last one my brain feels like the last panel. I’ve never watched SpongeBob but I imagine that even fans would have a hard time finding meaning in that one, even if the font were more readable.
i gotta say i spend a lot of time on insta lookin at memes and i think the fact the spongebob one looks like that is an attempt to be “funny”, it’s pretty common for “ironic” memes to be deep-fried, or pixelated to hell for some reason, the font is just bad tho. like there is a website called meme generator that even allows you to use the impact font that most of these use, did this guy slap it together on mspaint?
“Most rapes are men”
How absolutely dare they sully Spongebob with their toxicity. He is far too pure and sweet – and that episode is a hilarious choice, because it’s the one in which Patrick, as “dad”, is lazy and hopeless and does nothing to help Spongebob “mum”.
@Naglfar
Yep. My brother served a life sentence, and my mum worked for years with prisoners’ rights orgs. There’s plenty to be improved on here, but MRA types have absolutely no interest in helping all those men in prison that they love to complain about.
@Naglfar
Perhaps it’s an MRS observing one specific subset of feminism (TERFs) and extrapolating to the entirety of feminism? It’s not uncommon. I’ve seen it in (otherwise unracist at least in their own minds) people, who think if they meet one or even two lazy or asshole black people, that is representative of all black people, or even in my days as a baby atheist being assumed to be a sociopathic monster because they saw Penn Jillette or even some loudmouth jerk at the bus station who was an atheist and extrapolated that to every single atheist person everywhere. And the list goes on.
Most rapes are men
What does that even mean? Presumably the meme maker intended to say most rape victims are men, but it sounds like it’s saying rapes = men. Or it could just as easily mean most rapists are men, which is you know, true, but probably not what an MRA wants to communicate.
I may as well stick this here; it’s vaguely related I guess.
But anyway, someone sued Fox for defamation, arising from comments made by Tucker Carlson.
The judge rejected the case. It does seem correctly in terms of the law.
But one of the defences Fox ran was that no reasonable person believes Carlson anyway.
Full judgement here:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7216968/9-24-20-McDougal-v-Fox-Opinion.pdf
One day I watched a documentary about women soldiers. They said that in the army, women have to cope with a lot of sexism and men who are just jerks. Just saying.
They always think the army one is such a “gotcha” but is it really something feminists discuss a lot? Women serve across the army in loads of roles, including combat in the UK if they pass strength/aptitude tests (just like men). And as @happycat pointed out, it’s sexism and generally bullying within the institution impacting those women’s experience of their work that is probably the bigger problem to tackle.
Also, while I think the army in my country could be useful in achieving less nefarious aims (because it is full of very highly trained individuals who understand logistics) I don’t have a burning ideological desire to see more women as professional soldiers in war zones, because the UK’s recent war record fucking sucks.
@WWTH
That’s how I originally read it as well. I would imagine they’re making their classic (and wrong) argument that more rapes happen in prison to men than outside prison to women.
These always make my head hurt.
The most interesting part of this is figuring out how the jellies manage to smoke cannabis, considering they have no lungs and live underwater.
I guess they must eat it? But then how do they bake the brownies? And can they even get high if they don’t have a brain?
What does it feel like to be a jelly and how does that change when you get high?
@Lukas Xavier
The most important question of our time.
In all seriousness, it appears that there is debate in the scientific community on whether jellyfish nerve nets have cannabinoid receptors. If they do, since they lack a brain they probably couldn’t get high in the way humans can, but they might experience other effects on neurotransmission or movement.
Naglfar: I’m more comfortable seated with my legs somewhat spread out.
It’s not a problem making room for others but it’s not how I would naturally sit if it didn’t matter how I sat.
@Lukas Xavier : I would say the lack of a brain isn’t the main problem. It’s whether they have a mind similar to own enough to get high. Which isn’t a given ; similar to trees and plants in generals jellyfish have proven that they have some kind of mind, but the concept of being “high” seem hard to translate, as well as hard to effectively check.
I personally have an hard time imagining how the mind of any creature without a language work. So very little of what I do don’t involve language !
There’s nothing hypocritical about saying women shouldn’t be *expected* to stay home, but those that *choose* to should get paid leave.
Most military fighting these days is done with weapons that don’t require so much brute strength, but also physical strength/fitness requirements for combat soldier jobs are lowered by age as well as gender. So if you’re gonna say “Women will be too weak to do their job and people will die” I better see you complaining just as much about the fact that an older man who wants to be a combat soldier has a lower physical strength requirement than a younger one. Funny how that rarely comes up.
Judges are more likely to put men in prison than women, and to give them longer sentences. You can’t blame that solely on men committing more crime.
Of course, that should be considered in the wider context of sexism. Women are traditionally considered less dangerous than men and more delicate, making longer sentences seem both less necessary and harsher. Women are also infantilised at times, so some judges are likely to see them as less responsible for their actions.
It’s one of the areas where sexism against women is, in an extremely limited context, beneficial to them.
The mistake the MRAs make is assuming it’s due to society punishing men instead of not taking women seriously. As well, I don’t think any feminist is against women being treated equally by the justice system. Indeed, I’m pretty sure most feminists support prison reform across the board.
@Jack
In addition, female judges are more likely to give women longer prison sentences than male judges, likely because they don’t infantilize women the way many male judges do.
The “Most rapes are men” one makes rape sound like something which involves a victim but no aggressor, like an illness or the weather. You’re going about your business one day, and then, oh dear, rape happens. Perhaps they erase the rapist from the picture because (regardless of the gender of the victim) most rapists are men?
@Alan Robertshaw: The U.S. is chock-full of unreasonable people. My mother mentioned something she’d heard on TV, regarding Coronavirus. I responded that I found what we told me, hard to believe, then asked her where she heard it. She said she’d heard it on Fox News, from Tucker Carlson, “and I don’t think he’d lie.” It’s just so disheartening, to hear this coming from her. She graduated Cum Laude from a four year college. She should know better. Tho, I’ve read that people tend to become more gullible, as they age.
RE: SpongeBob
There’s a funny – I think it’s funny – SpongeBob parody on YouTube, called “SpongeBong HempPants”. Sponge Bob and his buddy Squidward (Is that his name? The sea cucumber dude?) are potheads. Seriously, it’s pretty juvenile, but I chuckle every time I watch it.
Ernie and Bernie are Jamaican enforcers that torture people (fish) to death … not exactly friendly laid back stoners. So that meme is even more meaningless than their usual efforts.