So this dude called rochesterslim went to the Men’s Rights subreddit today with some questions:
why is mens rights/such groups always ridiculed and labelled and how do we stop it? …
how do we get ppl to listen and stop the automatic assumptions we’re just sexist male pigs and all that crap?
As I read through the various answers to his questions, I found myself pondering a different question: :Do Men’s Rights Activists have even the tiniest sliver of self-awareness?
See what you think. Here are some of the responses to rochesterslim’s big questions:
First, from someone called TheColdHardTruth6:
Any time you speak out against women you are labeled as a misogynist. If you want to know who your oppressors are, find out who you can’t criticize.
Feminists and women control the media so if you try and discuss what women are like now, you get labeled a bigot and shunned.
In a followup comment he added that the way to deal with the allegedly false accusation that MRAs are bigots was to
Keep speaking the truth about womens true nature and the haters can deal with it. Polite people seldom make history.
I award these comments zero self-awareness points.
A dissenter — clearly not an MRA– remarked sarcastically that
I guess some people think that discussing negative female traits and calling them ‘women’s true nature’ is misogynistic. Shocking discovery.
This inspired an angry response from someone called Jakeybaby125:
Because it is their ‘true nature’. Look back throughout history and you will see the exact same behaviour being performed by women because that was the only way they were going to survive
Someone called DanteLivra decided that it was a good time for men to take credit for creating civilization while the women apparently sat around eating their proverbial bon-bons.
Society is built on the exploitation of men.
Asking that men should not be exploited is asking to the change the very foundation of society.
LiquidDreamtime had a similarly insipid idea:
I think the first step is being honest with ourselves. Men built the world. If the world is hurting men, we have to acknowledge the systems that perpetuate that hurt, and hold its creators accountable.
O_nore_mews decided to throw a little racism into the mix:
Strong white men represent the strongest opposition to new world regime plans.
DocRocksPhDont had his own theory:
Unfortunately, I think it’s because men’s rights groups often get infiltrated with misogynists and it ends up hurting the people with real grievancs.
Yeah, it’s not like misogynists are ever, say, the heads of Men’s RIghts groups or anything. The bad rap the Men’s Rights movement has is probably all the fault of “infiltrators.”
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Mr dreamtime was so, so close. “We built the world, but the world is hurting us now. Who can we blame?”
Maybe you could build a new world? I have some ideas for a location to start. I hear good things about Snake Island.
**********
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/lessons-plans/well-behaved-women-seldom-make-history/
Good to see the fascists continue to appropriate progressive thought and language for their own purposes.
If feminists and women actually controlled the media, one would think we’d have an easier time of it working in that field. I just glanced the other day at an article by Katie Couric about Matt Lauer, for example. That guy was at the top, while the women he victimized often failed to get their careers off the ground. But, MRAs have never let evidence get in their way.
I blame Antifa.
Have MRAs ever actually done anything for men? They keep making up fake issues and blaming women for everything but they seem to ignore any real issues. Patriarchy should be their biggest enemy, not women.
@Kat, now they’re stealing from women, these men who build and do everything. I love the way they ignore the fact women weren’t ALLOWED to do anything and that if they didn’t have women at home raising their crotch goblins and running their lives they’d have had a hard time building anything at all.
OT: I was just having a discussion with a friend about car commercials and neither of us can remember seeing one where the woman drives if there is a (man/woman) couple. He always drives or dad does if it’s a family theme. Maybe I’ve missed some, and I know it’s silly, but it just made me think.
@Ninja Socialist
In the mid-1960s I did my own research into actual man/woman couples and who was at the wheel. According to my kid-scientist research IRL, as I recall, about one or two women in one hundred couples was doing the driving. My conclusion was that when a woman was driving, it was because her husband was ill or tired or drunk. I’m sure the numbers have changed — but how much?
@Kat: It doesn’t seem to have changed much and I know it’s petty but it does uphold an old fashioned stereotype I’d hoped we were moving away from.
Ninja Socialist
neither of us can remember seeing one where the woman drives if there is a (man/woman) couple.
Pleased to report from down under. We seem to have quite a few of them at the moment – including ads for windscreen repairs, fuel, insurance as well as for the vehicles themselves. There’s even one car ad where the car doesn’t appear at all, it’s just a lot of people making vroom vroom and squealing brakes noises … at least half of the people willing to make absolute fools of themselves doing this are women.
Warms this old 2nd wave heart.
It’s been my observation that most Authoritarians and Right-ists, are thoroughly lacking in self-awareness, even though, paradoxically they are deeply self-involved and selfish. They definitely seem to have some idea of what they want, though,as they are quick to tell everyone. Unfortunately, their lack of self-awareness makes them unreliable narrators.
Ah yes, the old “I’m not a bigot, I’m just telling it like it is [insert hateful stereotype]” defense. It’s right next door to the “Sorry you’re a [insult that offended you]” nonpology.
If a society can’t function without exploitation, then that society should change.
@Ninja Socialist
Please don’t use terms like “crotch goblins” to describe kids. Thanks.
Speaking of women driving cars, have you seen the latest Michelle Fiore campaign ad?
It’s the Republican platform in a nutshell. No plan for jobs, healthcare, education, clean air and water, tax reform, or infrastructure. Just chewing up the desert in a giant pickup truck and shooting “Critical Race Theory” beer bottles as proxies for liberals.
Tellingly, though, there’s no man in the car with her.
Yeah, not seeing a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.
Say, I don’t know that these guys (in the original slang meaning of outlandish persons or dummies) are anti-Semites, but their rhetoric sounds awfully like that cult’s standard tropes with ‘Jew’ (or ‘Zionist’ or ‘Mystery Babylon Khazarite’) filed off and ‘women’ written-in, in crayon.
LiquidDreamtime is actually close to getting there. Although I’m sure it’s a so close yet so far away situation.
I don’t agree that men built the world, as women always have and still do plenty of labor. However, institutional power is patriarchal and that’s where MRAs should be placing the blame for how men are hurt a lot of the time by the status quo.
I doubt this guy will ever admit that patriarchy exists and can harm men though.
Men built the world? No, workers built the world. If the world is hurting workers, workers need to do something about that.
Is this guy really an MRA? If you truly believe that women need to behave a certain way in order to survive, how can you blame them for that, rather than the people/systems threatening their survival?
I see Bettridge’s Law of Headlines remains true here.
“Is Betteridge’s Law of Headlines true?”
Dammit, Alan! 😀
Another topical example of Betteridge’s Law:
https://uxdesign.cc/can-squid-game-make-you-a-better-ux-designer-1592011b7e2c