If you want to make a Men’s Rights Activist sputtering mad, try asking them if they’ve ever lifted a single solitary finger in the real world to help their fellow men. Because the overwhelming majority of them haven’t, and won’t.
They’ll complain about men getting injured or killed on the job — but they’ve never tried to organize a workplace safety campaign. They’ll wax indignant when people make jokes about prison rape — but won’t join up with other activists campaigning against this barbarism. They’ll complain that DV shelters for men are scarce, but won’t put in the effort to set up shelters of their own. The list goes on, and on.
Anyway, so the other day someone showed up on the Men’s Rights subreddit to ask why MRAs as a group are so completely inactive — except when it comes to complaining about “misandry'” online.
“Do any of you guys actually do something about the things you are complaining about?” asked a Redditor called Audiotune2.
While I whole heartedly agree with most of your opinions and beliefs of the damage feminism has done on society, men, and boys, what have you done to change that? Most of the men I’ve seen are just complaining and not doing something, and when given advice to turn around their situation, they snap at female supporters. I genuinely want to know, because I want to attend these events in support.
Men’s Rights Redditors were not pleased to find themselves questioned like this. One commenter responded by asking “why does a group of men venting their emotions offend you?” Another more pithy commenter wrote simply “fuck off.”
There were a few MRAs who claimed to be activists of some kind. One fellow noted that he had self-published a book setting forth his ideas about “Lovism,” a philosophy that he thinks should supplant both feminism and Men’s Rights activism. (It’s ranked as the 5,695,898th most popular book on Amazon, so it’s not exactly selling like hotcakes.) He’s also, he says, set up a (largely unread) blog and several online forums that he admits “haven’t taken off yet.”
A handful of others said that they had contacted their elected representatives to lobby for Men’s Rights. One claimed that they had “spent many many hours with nonprofits helping boys and men.” Another said they had “volunteered for suicide hotline support.” A few others made similar statements. No one mentioned the names of any organizations they supposedly had worked with.
A good number of the commenters tried to frame online (and offline) kvetching as a form of activism.
“I hold women accountable IRL,” said DIES-_-IRAE .”No pussy passes, no casual misandry, and no jokes.”
What a joy he must be to be around.
“I actively avoid women that openly dismiss men or speak anti-male feminist statements,” explained Iamsteve42, who may not be aware that he is doing these women a huge favor.
Others suggested that the most important thing they could do for Men’s Rights was simply to exist.
“Curently am trying to be a good role model to my peers and people around me just hoping for a lil bit of change of perspective, ” wrote someone called Stand_Alone50.
“I am building myself to be successful, famous, and influential so I can introduce my men’s rights ideologies, and use my platform to help men and mentor men. I want to change the world,” wrote PQKN051502.
“Just changing years if not decades of societal conditioning in oneself is a huge step towards changing things,” explained nyarlathotep999. “The first place anyone is enslaved is in their own mind.”
I think actual slaves might disagree with you on that one, buddy.
Other so-called activists offered little more than excuses.
Some argued that real-world Men’s Rights activism was impossible because it would face opposition from feminists. As if feminists themselves have never faced opposition.
“I dontate, I advocate, I spread the message,” wrote oafsalot.
But then I have found that any real efforts get jumped on by anti-MRA feminists who have no limits on what they will do to prevent mens-suffrage.
Pretty sure no feminists are trying to take away men’s rights to vote. (Though they do like to fantasize about doing it to woment.)
According to CaptainPrestedge, MRAs can’t be activists
[b]ecause feminism has removed our abilty to do or say anything. If you say anything for mens rights you’ll be dragged across hot coals as a misogynistic, women hating sexist. If you go to the lengths of raising funds, getting permission, support, kitting out and building a fully equipped shelter then feminists will ralley against it, chain themselves to it to prevent vulnerable men getting food and saftey then actually getting it shut down which is exactly what happened to the first male shelter not so long ago.
That’s weird, because the two men’s DV shelters that have been built in the US in the last several years were built by feminist DV activists.
ManofGod1000 went even a step further than his colleagues, suggesting that the future of Men’s Rights is pretty much entirely in women’s hands.
I have ghosted society and realize that many things are not going to change, unless a majority of women make it happen. If they do not do that, like going down to the family or divorce court building and dismantling them brick by brick, nothing will change.
At this point we should probably just call them Men’s Rights Inactivists.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Men’s right to complain but do nothing. That’s what they are.
Hey, don’t be sexist, women and non-binaries have the right to complain and do nothing too!
Whiny little boys, all of them.
While the MRAs where probably the original “manospherians”, at least in the sense of being the first to arrive to prominence on the internet, sometimes it feels like they’ve become a dumping ground for those who don’t fit in any of the other groups.
MGTOW claim to have cut women from their lives, even as the most visible ones are visible because they continue to obsess over them. MRAs still want women.
Redpillers come up with the more out-there conspiracy theories about global matriarchy and men’s oppression and such. MRAs wouldn’t go quite that far.
Incels believe they are hopeless losers, and it’s society’s fault they can’t get sex, insert over-the-top revenge fantasies directed mainly at women here. MRAs wouldn’t lower themselves to that level.
PUAs, if any organized groups still exist, are obsessed with casual sex. MRAs are more into relationships and marriage, and at least a few *are* married.
The ones with a more active bent mostly went elsewhere – whether to right-wing political groups, to actual activism (even if their initial motivations are suspect), to neo-nazi paramilitaries, to sovereign citizens groups, or to wherever else their other interests lie. There’s more options out there which are widely-known now.
So what’s left? The vaguely disaffected complainers, the few who would rather be part of a more “respectable” group than the alternatives, and maybe a grifter or three.
Complaining is so much easier than fixing the problem.
OT but I am really gettting sick and tired of constantly being defrauded in ridiculously petty ways. It never seems to stop, day after day. I put in 100% of the effort to get something and only get 95% of what I should get. The excuse is always that I did some thing wrong in some minor way so no/less whatever for you, even when I did not make any incorrect choices. Something external to me interferes. Especially common on computers and similar devices: say, I long-press but the software acts like I tapped instead, and does so in a context where it results in my having to do extra work to complete the task I was doing. Or it acts like a drag operation started or stopped at a significantly different position from where it actually did. Or something I typed comes out differently from what I typed, etc.
It’s not just computers though, or electronics more generally. The constant factors are that a) it’s something ridiculously petty, b) it is a false accusation (I did not actually make the wrong choice that I am treated as if I had made), and c) that accusation is then used as the basis for withholding something from me, making me do work over again, giving me less than 100% of the rightful fruits of my labor, or similarly.
It’s petty, stealing-lunch-money scale bullying and it seems to come from the entire world and every single artificial, built system within it, and I really wish it would stop. What is the reason for it? I suppose, like all bullying, the bully is on a power trip and perceives the victim as easy prey for whatever reason … so how do I make whatever is responsible for this constant drumbeat of petty frauds stop seeing me as easy prey? Assuming that there’s no chance of actually making the responsible party be made accountable. Though that would be nice too. Those dribs and drabs have accumulated for literally decades. The responsible party would probably have to give me a few tens of grand to make me whole at this point, particularly given that some of the nickles and dimes that have been wrongfully withheld from me have accrued tens of years of interest by now …
Oh, and did I mention that this thing regularly veers into outright Kafkaesque territory? One of the ongoing harassment campaigns consists of making me redo photo uploads to Facebook, sometimes two, three, or even four times. The upload will often just stop partway through for no apparent reason. I didn’t do anything to cancel it. I didn’t do anything that would cause it problems indirectly, such as messing with my network hardware while it was in progress. But I’m treated as if I did. It doesn’t even give any specific explanation for what I allegedly did wrong, and I can even have been completely hands-off from the moment after starting the upload until the moment it seemingly self-cancelled. That last proves the underlying accusation to be a lie, of course, and proves that the extra labor on my part of repeating the upload command was fraudulently extorted from me and I am owed compensation for it. Though I’m not sure from whom. Note: there’s no problem with my internet connection. Everything else stays working perfectly fine right through these events, and nothing else has anything like the constant problems with the photo uploads, even other Facebook actions such as browsing.
This is the degree of pettiness we are dealing with here. Nickles and dimes, ten-second intervals of my time, labor whose strenuousness is measured in mouse clicks, etc. … it’s just ridiculous. Doesn’t whoever is behind all of this nonsense have anything better to do than spend 15 hours a day hovering, somehow, over my shoulder while I go about my various activities, from social media to preparing a meal for myself to whatever else, and every so often issuing a bad-faith criticism of my technique or decisions that, magically, has the effect of the world believing it and acting as if I’d really employed the claimed bad technique or made the claimed wrong decision even though I hadn’t? All the while this claim itself is inaudible to me, though apparently not to whatever I was working with that then acts upon it as if it were fact …
It’s frankly bizarre that this is even capable of happening. And once again, just for emphasis: why the fuck am I singled out for this “honor”? There’s no mention of anything like this in literature or on the news or the like so it can’t be that everyone has an invisible criticism-gremlin following them everywhere whose pronouncements somehow have the force of law. Either I’m singled out, or at the very least it’s exceedingly rare. I mean, if it was everyone, you’d hear about it on CNN for fuck’s sake. Prime Ministers and Presidents and other prominent public figures would get accused wrongly of making various minor errors with giant consequences. Not to mention, it would happen to someone with the clout to actually fight back in a major way. There’d be a Congressional task force on invisible criticism-gremlins, and a Parliamentary committee. Someone would check their mirrors while driving, get accused by their criticism-gremlin of having not done so, said criticism would result in an actual car crash, and people would die, and there’d be a coroner’s inquest. A criticism-gremlin would get indicted for murder. All of these things would be newsworthy, yet there is never anything in the news that remotely resembles this. … unless the news is also fooled into believing the criticism, and it just gets reported as a driver failing to check their mirrors being the cause of an accident. Well, that’s a scary thought. But the actual target of the gremlin knows better, knows darn well what choices they actually made and that they differ from what is claimed, and would protest, surely, and some of those targets would protest from prominent platforms. Perhaps even the podium with the White House seal on it. And that doesn’t happen. So it’s rare, and presumably it “punches down”, as bullying generally does, at people perceived as vulnerable and easily pushed around, and not therefore at Presidents and other prominent elites.
Now, if this thing is completely unique to me, then this has all likely been wasted … but if it’s merely rare, there must be other reports of such experiences by other victims out there somewhere. Posts like this comment somewhere on the internet, etc. I just don’t know what would be good search terms to find those posts. My hope is that someone here has heard of something like this affecting other people, and knows of resources online. Blog posts, social media groups, maybe even any standardized terminology that might have emerged in such a community. And maybe, just maybe, even ways of getting rid of the damned things. Again, there must be something that makes particular people (me, at the very least) seem like “safe” or “acceptable” targets for this bullshit, and if that’s the case, there should be some (hopefully not expensive) way of moving oneself out of that set of people, whereupon the (invisible, or remote, somehow) bully will hopefully go find themself a new target.
In the longer run, that would still be zero-sum. For me to be free of this pest someone else would become its next victim. So a real solution has to be a way to make these people, or things, or whatever they are stop doing this to anybody. But how?
@ Surplus to Requirements
I have been getting a lot of ads on my phone acting like I clicked them when I didn’t intend to recently, in addition to the long standing usual wrong letters typed in, an inability to exactly hit the right spot in a text box like I am using to write this now, etc, etc. (Seriously, I go back and fix multiple errors a post here, something that is a pain in the ass when I keep trying to hit a specific spot towards the end of a word and keep winding up in the middle. Perhaps I should stop correcting things. See if anyone can underatand me ay all when I do it.)
I, being a failable human being operating a finicky piece of equipment several years old that has been dropped and abused, figured either fat fingering, simply wear and tear, or both.
Occam’s Razor. That is your easiest explanation: Shit happens to everyone, but we don’t assume a conspiracy is out to get us. (I have had many MANY problems uploading photos and videos online, to address something specific in your complaint.)
When I first heard about the MRAs, before I actually knew anything about them, I initially thought they were FEMINISTS.
Yes, it is incredibly funny. But just as there are feminists focusing on other specific issues, such as LGBT+ issues, or racism and so on, I first thought the MRAs were a subtype of feminists who focused on the destructive effects of the traditional male gender role, helping men build a more modern, healthy masculinity.
“Such a great idea!”, I thought. “That could potentially:
But no. I was very, very wrong. Sadly, often these concerns are just used to shut up feminists who are talking about other things. I have seen some (usually feminist) initiatives targeting these issues, but it seems they have a hard time getting men interested. The initiatives I have seen often get a lot of pushback from men who accuse them of making men weak, or gay, or forcing men to talk about their feelings. Why are men not more interested? Is being a Real man more important than the potential benefits?
Like @Snowberry mentions, many men seem to interpret feminism as the enemy, not the solution, and they enter far- or alt-right movements instead, trying to make things better for men/themselves by pushing women back into the kitchen and LGBT+ people into the closets. But building one’s (gender) identity on a need to be superior to others is not very constructive, since that would require the cooperation of others to remain subordinate. Masculinity needs to be more stable and benign that that.
Two incels walk into a bar …never mind, they would never leave the house.
Shame, you can’t even make up a decent joke about them.
@.45: You seem to be describing mistakes you actually made. I routinely get treated as if I’d made mistakes that I know, for a fact, I did not make. Does that ever happen to you? If not, then we’re talking about two different things here.
@ Surplus to Requirements
Well, I’m not perfect like you, but I think I know how to properly click on “Upload Photos”.
You are talking to someone who has had licenses revoked and missed out on unemployment money because the websites that worked for computer illiterate people on the first try seemed to malfunction for me on repeated attempts. Nobody is gliding through life effortlessly with zero problems. You are not alone in having problems, you are alone in attributing them to a vast conspiracy centered on you. I don’t know what else to say.
@ Surplus to Requirements
I’m with the others on this one. You’re going beyond what could be called justified complaints and into the realm of paranoia. Seek professional help, or at least just stop acting as if you are literally the only human being who has been at the mercy of aggravating glitches. You’re not important enough for anyone to persecute anyway.
Privilege is a hell of a drug.
“I am building myself to be successful, famous, and influential so I can introduce my men’s rights ideologies” Well he can’t go wrong with a master plan like that!