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antifeminism artistry memes MRA reddit

If a “Pro-Male” meme fell in a forest and there was no one to see it, would it make any sense?

ProMaleMemes, with its 148 subscribers, is not the most popular of the Men’s Rightsy subreddits. It’s not just unpopular compared with the original Men’s Rights subreddit, with its 319,488 subscribers; it’s even a bit of a laggard compared with the subreddit that spawned it, the also-highly-unpopular ProMaleCollective subreddit, with its 4608 subscribers.

It’s not hard to guess why the ProMale subreddits are so marginal: their inhabitants have declared war, not just on feminists and women in general, but also on the Men’s RIghts movement itself, as well as on “tradcoms” (traditional conservatives), whom the ProMale boys think of as insufficiently hateful towards feminism. They’re also critical of MGTOWs, whom they see as a bunch of losers. (I can’t really argue with them on that one.)

Aside from their harsh criticism of most of their potential allies on the antifeminist right, the ProMaleMeme crew faces yet another obstacle on the path to popularity: their memes suck. I mean, they really, really suck, even by the famously low MRA and MGTOW standards.

Indeed, the memes are so unrelentingly awful you almost think they must be the work of trolls trying to make the ProMale crowd look bad. But most of the memes posted to the subreddit, including some of the most baffling ones, have been posted by the subreddit’s three moderators. In other words, they’re serious about their unintentional ridiculousness.

Let’s start with some of the antifeminist memes.

Apparently feminists are always pulling guns on them.

The longer you spend in the subreddit, the more baffling the memes become.

I guess it’s not enough to whine like babies and try to organize boycotts of any comic book action movie with a woman in a starring role. I’m not quite certain what the meme-maker thinks that good antifeminists should do instead.

Apparently “debating” feminists is a wuss move.

They really don’t seem to want any antifeminist allies.

While they hate feminists, they’re not convinced that feminists are all a bunch of ugly losers, as MRAs often suggest.

But they have absolutely no conception of how feminist women think or act.

The ProMaleMeme subreddit seems to be home to more than a few Cosby-lovers.

The memes just get weirder and weirder.

When women what?

That’s the whole meme; I didn’t cut the bottom off or anything.

The meme’s creator explained to another ProMaler:

It’s meant to imply they’re female worshippers and they are pathetic.

Still does not compute.

But this one is even stranager:

The creator of this little masterpiece tried to explain himself in the comments:

female sex drive selects for violent men but deselects pacifist men. female sexuality also demands that men participate in status and resource hoarding wars that forces men to invade other countries, take their resources and bring it back to women to prove their worth, which usually creates violence. so, female sexuality breeds violence.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works.

But hey, keep posting your bullshit for your audience of nearly none, keeping me amused.

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Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
2 years ago

Promalememes… wasn’t he the Greek general during the Peloponnesian wars???

Rob Salyers
Rob Salyers
2 years ago

I feel like their fondness for images from anime and manga says something… I’m just not sure what.

Trying
Trying
2 years ago

I can’t see the full memes without going to their site. But they look like incomprehensible garbage from another dimension.

Robin Lionheart
Robin Lionheart
2 years ago

I interpret “when woman” to be like the crypto bros’ impatiently aspirational “w[h]en lambo?” (“when will I get a Lamborghini?”). Like they’re implying tradcons and MGTOWs are holding till their Sexual Market Value ? s to the ? , thus enabling them to obtain all the womens.

Last edited 2 years ago by Robin Lionheart
Battering Lamb
Battering Lamb
2 years ago

So… Am I hallucinating the blue ‘double masculine symbol’ flag in the ‘when woman’ meme? Given how these types generally think about anything ‘woke’ I’m not sure what I am supposed to make of that.

Lumipuna
Lumipuna
2 years ago

I think “when woman” is a jokey phrasing for “when a woman simply exists within sight”. The explosive nosebleed is anime visual code for “girl/effeminate boy character is uncontrollably sexually exited”.

Yes, I am extremely online and I just barely figured this one out.

LollyPop
LollyPop
2 years ago

female sex drive selects for violent men but deselects pacifist men. female sexuality also demands that men participate in status and resource hoarding wars that forces men to invade other countries, take their resources and bring it back to women to prove their worth, which usually creates violence. so, female sexuality breeds violence.

It would of course be misandrist to ask a pro-male to engage in the 5 seconds of critical thinking it takes for this argument to fall apart.

Full Metal Ox
2 years ago

How long will it take for a manospherean subreddit to become so omniversal in its hatred that no one qualifies to join, so that it exists solely as a thought experiment?

(You can’t participate, but that won’t stop the curators—not members, mind you; that would compromise its abstract purity!—from accepting your money for the inevitable NFT.)

Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
2 years ago

I recall these kinds of arguments from boys in my grade school.

For example, they would say to the teacher, “You know the answers because they’re in the back of the book. No fair!”

They had lots of this BS, all of it vehement. I would be wondering, “What the what. I’m eight years old like these guys, but I can see that this is bullshit.”

I suppose when you’re defending what you believe to be your right to be the invincible, immortal king of all that is, any argument will do.

Moon Custafer
Moon Custafer
2 years ago

Anyone else think the meme-maker(s) just has a kink for women with guns and is trying to indulge it without admitting it?

Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
2 years ago

This feels like some sort of manosphere singularity where there’s a trillion tons of misogyny per square inch, and coherence cannot escape.

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

What’s with including only two images in a post about bad memes? The rest are only linked to, which means a) opening lots of extra tabs, b) clicking through to enter their cesspit, and c) link rot some day.

Elaine The Witch
Elaine The Witch
2 years ago

Being “pro male” apparently means shitting on women and forcing them to have sex “weak” men.

Also you know the men that complain about war have never served or have even been within 20 miles of a military base.

Battering Lamb
Battering Lamb
2 years ago

@Surplus: That may be your browser acting up. Images loaded fine for me, 15 bad memes + a Morpheus by my count.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
2 years ago

Looks like most of the images are blocked by NoScript in my case; judging by the page source code, I think it’s scripts from redditmedia.com that are responsible, but I’m not going to go through and re-enable all the JavaScript site by site to see which one. I can well imagine just from the couple that I’m seeing.

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

Well, that shouldn’t be; pages here shouldn’t be reliant on third-party scripts (or, preferably, any scripts) to display correctly. Especially not to do something as basic as including a few images, which can easily be done in plain-jane HTML.

What you’ve said also suggests that the images are being hosted by Reddit instead of locally, which means they could be changed or removed at any time. If Reddit quarantines this hate group, poof go the images in all likelihood. This is aberrant, given David is normally quite meticulous about archiving copies of anything that might go “poof” and linking to those copies in addition to the originals.

Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

@ surplus

poof go the images

Linking to images which might suddenly vanish is excellent practice for anyone considering investing in NFTs.

Acid Kritana
2 years ago

Wasn’t the original Pro-Male subreddit hacked?

Acid Kritana
2 years ago

@Battering Lamb

So… Am I hallucinating the blue ‘double masculine symbol’ flag in the ‘when woman’ meme? Given how these types generally think about anything ‘woke’ I’m not sure what I am supposed to make of that.

I thought it was a gay male flag?

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

Meta: What the hell is going on here? For hours now I keep getting very slow loading or none at all, or bogus 503 and 504 “errors” (where I’m quite certain I’ve made no error). Meanwhile people like Acid Kritana apparently have had unobstructed access…

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

Finally! Managed to sneak a post through. It would often just get stuck “spinning” and never complete, or even spontaneously cancel and go back to editing mode.

Who has done this and why?

contrapangloss
contrapangloss
2 years ago

Surplus, it wasn’t just you. First time online today, for me.

I know I’ve said this before, but it’s important to learn to roll with inconveniences on occasion. Should the page have been down? No.

But are pages occasionally going to be down? Yes!

The internet is a mess of distributed servers, and occasional outages of individual sites are pretty much inevitable. David (as site admin) may be able to do some sleuthing to figure out where problems occurred, but even he may not be able to identify the source of the problem.

Sometimes, there’s nobody to blame. It could be weather, it could be a cooling system broke, it could be someone hit a wrong key, if could be a squirrel busting into the wrong electrical substation, it could be any one of a thousand things that you and I cannot figure out from our user endpoints.

I’m sorry you were frustrated, but these things happen.

There are sites for helping figure out if you’re alone in an outage, and mine def said I wasn’t alone.

Fire
Fire
2 years ago

I mean, he’s not wrong that women who think women inherently can’t consent/PIV sex is rape also don’t think men can be raped. That’s a position I’ve only seen on super radfem sites of a very specific vibe

Elaine The Witch
Elaine The Witch
2 years ago

I coughed so hard last night that it burst a bunch of blood vessels in my eyes. I had a doctor’s appointment today and I full on made a child cry today when they looked at my eyes, which are just blood red.

I’ve reached demon level.

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

@contrapangloss:

David (as site admin) may be able to do some sleuthing to figure out where problems occurred, but even he may not be able to identify the source of the problem.

As he’s the site admin, if he can’t then it will go unfixed, so he’d better be able to!

Meanwhile, it looks like you and I were affected, but Acid Kritana wasn’t. At around 6:30, I got it to reload during the wonky-times, after several bogus 503s and stuck-spinnings, and the last comment here was Robertshaw’s listed as 12:47 pm; I was completely unable to get it to either accept a new comment or refresh the page from literally seconds after that until about 9:30, well after the timestamps of the two Acid Kritana comments directly below that Robertshaw comment. The moment I finally got it to work again, both of those comments popped up.

So, during that same interval I was stuck hammering on “reload” and getting nowhere, he was able to access the site normally and post comments. And you were locked out during the same interval, from the sounds of it.

The obvious question is, why were we treated more poorly than he was? Seems unjustified. Also, additional hours have gone by with no official word from the admin explaining events, or even acknowledging that anything unusual even happened. The site seems stable again … but what assurance do we have that it will stay that way, rather than go all wonky again 5 minutes from now and stay that way permanently? Is the kind of shitty experience we had this evening an aberration or the new normal? I don’t like being kept in the dark, and I don’t like being refused service for no good reason, and I especially don’t like being refused service while other people (e.g. Acid Kritana) get the red carpet treatment at the exact same time. Double especially at a nominally left-leaning site! With the possible exception of the admin, there should be no VIPs here of all places, surely.