Roxy Music’s Manifesto: Far superior to the Men’s Rights version
What do Men’s Rights Activists want? Based on what they actually do, it’s seems pretty clear that many of them want little more than the right to pester women with endless cries of “what about the menz?” But from time to time MRAs will step forward with little bullet-pointed manifestos presenting their grievances — and their goals — to the world.
So today let’s look at one of these little manifestos, from an MRA calling himself TzeTze Anopheles. It’s pretty revealing. And stupid. But that goes without saying.
Alas, the Men’s Rightsers aren’t hopeful that anything will wake up the snoozing sheeple. BrambleEdge, for his part, worries that men will remain oppressed forever.
You keep using that word. I’m not even going to bother with the rest of this quote.
If you ever need proof that Men’s Rights Activists live in a world of their own, check out this, er, argument, found in a posting on A Voice for Men UK, the official British franchise of the American hate site we know so well :
All women are homophobic.
Whether the men being prejudiced against are gay or not is kind of beside the point – after all, ‘homo’ = man, ‘phobia’ = fear, therefore: ‘homophobia’ = Fear of Man – but, if you want to quibble over Greek & Latin etymology, perhaps we can at least agree on this: all women, to a greater or lesser extent, display the ‘symptoms’ we attribute to said condition: overt caution, fear &/or disdain of men.
Yep, that’s right. In order to find an excuse to call women “homophobic,” they’ve invented an entirely new definition for the word not based in any way on the actual etymology of the word “homophobia” (which is of course derived from “homosexual”) but on something they’ve just made up.
The author of the post then uses this weird logic to make excuses for actual homophobia among straight men:
Female ‘homophobia’ is so normalized in our society that treating every man you meet like ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’ is considered an ordinary, common sense fact of life – just so long as you are a woman. But if a man feels at all uncomfortable around another man sexually, he is presently branded an evil bigot for behaving the way all women do at all times.
A Voice for Men: they reject your reality, and substitute nonsensical unreality that allows them to say bad things about women.
Apparently, to a lot of the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit — like the hundreds who upvoted a post of this picture — the notion that men should raise their sons to respect women as equals is nothing more than foul propaganda and MISANDRY of the highest order.
And seriously, those guys in the poster look like total White Knight Beta Manginas.
Some of the Men’s Rightsers were especially offended by the white ribbon at the bottom of the poster, which they saw as a vaguely sinister reminder of a World War I campaign to shame British men into enlisting in the army. Because suggesting to your sons that boys and girls should be treated equally is the same as being guilt-tripped into becoming cannon fodder:
Others used the poster as an opportunity to rail against … marriage. The top comment in the thread, as I write this post, is this one.
Caspian_Drifter responded to the eeeevil poster with a rhetorical question that unintentionally helped to underscore the whole point of the campaign in the first place:
Seriously, ladies, why do gals like to go on and on about “equality” so much when your ladybrains weren’t even smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place? I mean, really, you ungrateful gals, you have a man/men to thank for that.
If I remember correctly, it was T. Reginald Equality who came up with the idea, with some help from his brother Ned (who suggested that he name it after himself).
The fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit are getting worked up over imaginary feminists again!
Yesterday, in a discussion of paternity fraud, a brand-new Redditor who had never posted a comment before posted a completely unsourced screenshot of what quite a few of the regulars took to be some sort of official feminist statement on paternity fraud.
Today, a brief foray into racist conspiracy theory, courtesy of the Men’s Rights subreddit. This is from a discussion of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s internet porn ban, which the Men’s Rightsers seem to think was orchestrated by the evil feminist overlords.
Lovely! You may wish to peruse k66ish’s comment history for many other nuggets of wisdom that may involve use of the word “cunt.”
Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing this one out in the comments here.
Men’s Rights activists have discovered something that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the rest of his gang at the Westboro Baptist Church learned a long time ago: outrageously offensive signs can mean media coverage.
This time the MRAs toned down the offensiveness in favor of simple outrageousness, combined with a healthy dose of incomprehensibility. The most incomprehensible of the current lot is probably this one, which comes straight from the A Voice for Men poster page:
But my favorite is this one:
I was originally going to write a sort of rebuttal to this, pointing out that by most measures Canada is, generally speaking, a rather unfrightening place for men (and women), what with its high standard of living, decent health care, relatively low crime rate, and so on.
I mean, if I were to pick a frightening country to live in, as a man (or a woman), I would probably pick someplace like, you know, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan or South Sudan, someplace like that. Syria’s probably not a great place to visit at the moment either.
But then I was thinking: Canada’s main problem, in terms of its international reputation, is that people tend to think of it as boring, not frightening.
Maybe Canada should embrace the whole “most frightening place to be a man” thing, and take advantage of this silly quote from Erin Pizzy to promote itself as scary, edgy, intense, EXTREEEEEMMME!
Maybe with some posters like the one at the top of this post?
I don’t know. I’m not that great at photoshop. Perhaps some of you would like to have a go at it? I know we’ve got some talented MRA poster-parodists here.
This email from a non-fan was so thoughtful I thought I’d share it, and my responses to it, with you all. This is the whole email, by the way. No, “Dear David” or any other niceties at the start.
1. Why do you represent yourself as a head of a creepy fucking child?
Because the “creepy fucking child” in the picture is me? It’s sort of my favorite picture of me.
2. How can you honestly believe that we live under a patriarchy, at least in modern western society? I mean, men hold no where near as much power as they’ve had in the past. Women nowadays have pretty much all the rights and opportunities that men have (hell, they probably have MORE rights, privileges and opportunities than men have).
You two do have your similarities to each other: you’re both fat, have beards, wear glasses, are very opinionated, and both enjoy insulting the people you don’t like (feminists/MRA’s) and naturally attract a lot trolls from those respective groups. But, you two are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to feminism and gender politics.
Huh. How could that possibly be, with both of us being fat and wearing glasses? I’ll have to bring it up at the next meeting of the Bespectacled Fat Elders of the Internet.
Also, there is a bit of a difference between bullying people you don’t like (a la Amazing Atheist) and QUOTING WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAY (a la me).
And no, DO NOT bring up his sexual exploits, trying focusing exclusively on his merits as a video blogger, and as a person who gives his opinions on YouTube.
I don’t give a shit about his “sexual exploits,” whatever they are. And I don’t have much to say about his “merits as a video blogger,” because I’ve only watched a handful of his terrible videos. What I do know. from what I have seen from him, is that he’s a nasty, hateful, misogynistic asshole who bullies rape victims online and mocked a teenage girl who was bullied into committing suicide.
That kind of outweighs (get it? get it?) any fat solidarity I might have for him because of his fatness.
Hope that helps!
Yours, in fatness,
David Futrelle
EDITED TO ADD: My correspondent has responded to this post! Here is his reply. You may notice certain ironies.
That’s fine, go ahead and post all my emails to you on your website. All it’s gonna do is show how much of a colossal douchebag you are. And nice job on having your army of worms and insects crawl from the woodworks to attack me. Just goes to show how much feminists and the people who support them DO NOT deserve to be taken seriously, when all they do is stoop to personal insult and just linking to articles when someone questions them.
On the abortion thing, yeah that’s a problem, but how does it prove that’s there’s a patriarchy in western society? How do you explain the states that do allow abortion, how do you explain the modern western countries where abortions are legal? All it proves is that , yes, there are some states that continue to live in the dark ages and are run by assholes. How bout next time, try to actually answer my question instead of linking to an article and hoping that I’ll be satisfied. But then again, I guess that’s too much to ask out the modern-day feminist simpletons in society.
Oh yeah, and about the Amazing Atheist, he actually bothers to refute what the feminists. It’s not like he just looks at a feminist and says “haha your ugly, your fat, etc.” You on the other hand, stoop to nothing but personal insults. Pretty much all you do is find people you don’t like, hold them up and say “haha look at these people I don’t like, now point and laugh my personal army of woodworms.” You don’t even bother to explain why you think they’re wrong. It clear to me that somebody doesn’t know how to use the search feature on Youtube.
Well, it took them a little while, but the folks at Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men have finally figured out an angle on the Trayvon Martin case. According to regular AVFM contributor August Løvenskiolds, the whole thing can be blamed on a woman — specifically, Rachel Jeantel, the friend of Trayvon Martin who was on the phone with him just before he was killed.
According to Løvenskiolds, who seems to know more about what happened that night than it is in fact possible for him to know,
During a post-trial interview with Piers Morgan on CNN, Rachel Jeantel, the reluctant phone witness who was talking to Martin just before Martin assaulted Zimmerman, finally revealed that she had warned Martin that Zimmerman might be gay, or even, a gay rapist preparing to approach Martin.
This isn’t news; Jeantel said in her testimony that she told Martin she was afraid the man following him might be a rapist. But Løvenskiolds moves quickly from “sworn testim0ny” to “making shit up.”
Martin freaked out over the idea that Zimmerman might have sexual designs on him or his family, and this seems to have precipitated the attack on Zimmerman – which, of course, would make the attack a violation of Zimmerman’s human rights as a (purportedly) gay man, and make Jeantel the proxy instigator of the attack.
Yes, that’s right, the whole thing was “violence by proxy” instigated by an evil homophobic woman.
Would you like some armchair psychoanalysis to go with your unfounded speculation?
So, Trayvon Martin was killed in the act of gay-bashing (in Jeantel’s and his own minds, anyway). The fury of Martin’s sudden turnabout attack is now explicable (he had been avoiding being followed up to the point of the introduction of the gay rapist idea) and it indicates the degree of Martin’s revulsion that he went from flight to fight mode in so short a time.
And this of course makes it all All About The Menz Rights.
The men’s human rights issues related to a woman (Jeantel) being held blameless for using gay/rape threats to precipitate man-on-man violence ought to be obvious.
It’s always a woman’s fault, isn’t it?
Elsewhere in the post, Løvenskiolds seriously suggests that when a police dispatcher told Zimmerman that “we don’t need you” to follow Martin, that was Super Seekret Man Code for “we actually DO need you to follow him.” No, really.
Such negative suggestions are as clear to savvy men as this: “Honey, you don’t need to buy me roses for Valentine’s Day” – meaning, of course, “if you know what is good for you, I’d better get flowers AND chocolate AND jewelry AND a nice dinner AND…”
The fact that the dispatcher further expected Zimmerman to meet with officers – drafting Zimmerman into the militia, as it were – made it clear to Zimmerman that his continued pursuit of Martin was expected by the police as well.
The societal expectation of militia service by all able-bodied adult males is certainly a men’s human rights issue and an indication of inequality between the genders that needs to be redressed.
MRAs may not be good at much, but they’ve got mental gymnastics down to a science.
EDIT: I added a graf after the first quote from Løvenskiolds clarifying that Jeantel says she did in fact tell Martin that she thought Zimmerman might be a rapist.
Hello, and welcome to The Man Boobz Fiction Workshop! Today we will learn my foolproof two-step method for writing believable fiction. It’s as easy as pie — well, easier, since pie can take a bit of finesse — and it is absolutely GUARANTEED to work.
Here it is.
STEP ONE: Write believable fiction.
STEP TWO: If step one fails, write a story that makes a woman look evil and foolish, and post it to the Men’s Rights Subreddit as a true story.
If you don’t believe me, check out this little story from a fella calling himself the-final-word — a Redditor for less than two weeks, with only one previous comment to his name — in which a highly successful gentleman happily humiliates an ex-girlfriend trying to steal his money with the old “baby” ploy.
Take a look at the thread itself to see how eagerly the Men’s Righsers eat up his tale of victory over evil womanhood!
That is the beauty of my two-step method. If people don’t believe your bullshit, find a more gullible audience. And there are few audiences in this world more gullible than Men’s Rightsers.
I should note that I had nothing to do with the-final-word’s story, nor did I sneak into the Men’s Rights subreddit to give his story 47 upvotes and a bunch of positive comments.
Thanks to hackattack92 in the AgainstMensRights Subreddit for pointing out this wonderful example of shitthatneverhappened.txt