The feminist activists amongst you may have been a bit baffled by the peculiar activist strategy of the Men’s Rights movement. That is, doing absolutely nothing beyond yelling a lot online, flooding comments of newspaper articles with Men’s Rights rants, and sometimes harassing individual women.
But apparently this is all part of their super seekret master plan. A plan, moreover, which is going gangbusters, all appearances to the contrary. For, apparently unbeknownst to virtually everyone in the world, the Men’s Rights movement is poised for a gigantic mainstream breakthrough. Any moment now!
More drama at A Voice for Men! Kristina Hansen — the excitable FeMRA videoblogger better known as TheWoolybumblebee — has been tossed off the good ship AVFM by Master and Commander Paul Elam for what he calls her “constant public conflicts with elements of our community.”
So we learned the other day from that Man Going His Own Way that male violence was, like, totally the fault of evil sexy ladies. Now, from this Men’s Rights Redditor, we learn that homophobia — or at least homophobia directed at gay men — is all the fault of straight women and their desire for macho dudes. Because straight men don’t ever express any sort of hostility towards gay or effeminate men — it’s just those darn ladies!
But, huh, what about all those straight dudes who are always calling other dudes “gay” and, you know, that other word that starts with an “f?”
Well, apparently that’s just playful joshing. No harm, no foul! If anything, it shows how wonderfully tolerant of gayness these guys are. I mean, come on, if you can’t see this, you must be stupid, or something. Or so says this other Men’s Rights Redditor:
They’re just having a little fun. You’re not against fun, are you?
While we’re talking about this whole Facebook thing (see here and here if you don’t know what I’m referring to), I figured some of you might be wondering: What does the eminent Man-O-Philosopher and self-described “Counter-Feminist Agent of Change” Fidelbogen think of all this?
So if you’ve ever wondered what sort of activism that Men’s Rights, er, Activists do when they do do activism, take a look at this little ACTION ALERT from A Voice for Men.
You may recall Paul Elam getting all worked up the other day because Facebook, responding to a campaign launched by a coalition of feminist activists and groups, announced it was going to try to do a better job removing “gender-based” hate speech from its site. You know, like this [TRIGGER WARNING] sort of thing.
Naturally, Elam and other MRAs interpreted Facebook’s announcement as the first step in the End of Male Speech on the Internet, or something.
Anyway, now the MRAs are ACTIVATING! AVFM has announced that it’s going after the groups that signed onto the feminist Facebook protest. Because, well, I’m not sure I get why exactly.
Here’s their explanation:
It’s time for action. The AVFM community has scrambled to look beyond the fine print of WAM!’s ultimatum to Facebook and into the signatories. We are finding that some of them are tax-exempt, and even government funded. We now know that government funded institutions have endorsed a harmful double standard that results in the censorship of men.
But, if we discover that even one cent of government money touched WAM!’s campaign, we will be exposing a whole new dimension of hypocrisy.
Uh, ok. I’m just really having a hard time finding the hypocrisy here. If you look at the names of the groups that signed onto the open letter, you’ll find a number of general feminist groups, groups concerned with the representation of women/gender in the media, and groups organized against sexual assault and other forms of violence.
They didn’t sign a petition demanding that all men posting on the internet be banned or, I dunno, kicked in the balls. They signed onto an open letter demanding that Facebook remove
groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.
That doesn’t seem hypocritical to me. It seems rather in line with what these groups promote.
And the only men who will be censored will be men posting this sort of hateful shit. If women post this sort of shit, they’ll be banned too.
Apparently, AVFM and its “activist” fans are so divorced from reality that they think they’re going to be able to publicly embarrass rape survivor support groups … for standing up against crude, hateful rape jokes on Facebook featuring images of brutalized victims.
In a post ostensibly about the imminent arrival of female Viagra, our dear friend JudgyBitch weighs in on yet another subject about which she knows shit: the reasons that women who are not her might not want to have sex with their husbands:
Loss of libido in women, excepting rare medical conditions, in my opinion, is a direct result of not seeing men as emotionally complex beings. If you’re married, at some point, your husband probably stood in front of you and promised to love you forever. Rejecting him physically is a very wounding thing to do. It hurts. Sex is one of the most important, intimate ways married couples show that they love one another. Refusing to have sex with your husband is telling him, in a very painful way, that you don’t love him. That you don’t care for him or about him.
Huh. If I hadn’t seen her on video, thus confirming her status as an adult human female, I would have a hard time believing that it was an actual woman saying this and not some horny, creepy teenage boy in the process of trying to manipulate his girlfriend into “going all the way.”
Oh, but she’s got more:
I guess the only way to justify that is to think of men as emotionless. It doesn’t hurt men to be rejected because they don’t feel anything to begin with.
Really? The only way to justify saying “no” to your husband when you don’t want to have sex with him is if you convince yourself he’s emotionless? But women should just force themselves to say “yes” to sex when they don’t want to and simply endure what follows?
That’s the ugly little reality behind female viagara. Will it actually boost women’s libido? Who knows. What difference will it make, though, if women are going to continue to see men as less than completely human? That’s the real problem.
Does anyone know where to get irony meters at a reasonable price? Mine just leapt off the table, ran around the room screaming, and exploded.
Men’s Rights, er, activists are waving their arms frantically in the air over what they see as a dire new threat to men and manhood: Facebook’s recent annoucement that it was going to try to do a better job of taking down violent images mocking victims of rape and domestic violence, and other kinds of misogynistic hate speech.
The top post on the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, with more than 300 600 700 net upvotes, is a link to this screenshot, posted as an example of radical feminism gone wild: