I’m getting messages saying that the straw feminism that is circulating around us isn’t too good.
And we’re back! In this Memeday Rewind, which is something I just came up with as a way to do a followup to my Memeday post on Friday, let’s return again to that awful Feminist Nazi meme — a meme intended to highlight alleged feminist hypocrisies, but which invariably ends up highlighting the meme-makers’ complete and utter ignorance of the subject.
I sometimes make fun of Men’s Rights activists for their assorted misunderstandings of feminism. But this guy gets it! I’ve never seen the essence of feminism distilled into a comic as ably as this.
It brings back memories of the first time I read Andrea Dworkin’s classic “Intercourse: You’re Not Getting Any Unless You Pay for My Dinner.”
As the guy behind a long-running blog devoted to, as my tagline notes, tracking and mocking some of the worst pieces of crap on the internet, I’ve come to expect a good deal of criticism from the aforementioned worst pieces of crap on the internet.
What still surprises me is that they almost never criticize me for anything I’ve actually said or done. Instead, they attack my weight and my fondness for cats. And then, evidently having run out of true things to say about me, they move on to attacking me for things they’ve conjured up in their own brain about me, most of which bear little or no resemblance to the truth.
Dean Esmay wants you to know that you’re a cruel bitter bitchy hatemongering bigot harpy who needs to be spanked, metaphorically.
Dean Esmay, the Chief Operations Officer (whatever that is) of A Voice for Men, has scored a major public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement with his aggressive promotion of an exciting new Twitter hashtag, #SpankAFeminist.
In what I can only assume is an attempt to convince the world that MRAs do indeed spend a good portion of their days fantasizing about doing physical harm to feminists, Esmay explains in a post on AVFM that the hashtag is necessary “because it’s finally time to put abusive liars over the knee.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (The PayPal page will say you are donating to Man Boobz.) Thanks!
So I’ve discovered a new bunch of antifeminist meme-makers who’ve somehow managed to pull off something close to the spectacular ugliness, incoherence, and just plain wrongness achieved by the meme masters at A Voice for Men.
Let’s give a big round of applause to the graphics whizzes of the United Anti-Feminist Coalition and their lovely Facebook page.
The Godwin-tastic meme at the top of this page — which gets bonus Godwin Points because Gloria Allred is actually Jewish — may be my favorite of theirs I’ve seen so far, but there are so many other brilliant contributions on their page that I hardly know where to start.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the neverending struggle against imaginary feminists continues apace. Today, one brand-new Redditor, a self-described former feminist, won himself several dozen upvotes from the regulars by bringing them a literally unbelievable tale of his adventures with a coven of slap-happy feminists.
I stopped calling myself a feminist a few years ago when I went to a meeting and was told “men are inly allowed in this safe space if they participate in a slap circle.”
The idea was that it would be harder for me to intimidate with my six foot stature if all the women had a chance to slap me in the face. I left.
Another guy actually did it.
It’s all true. I WAS THAT GUY.
BUT WHO WAS PHONE?
Actually, no. If this dude’s story is true, I will literally eat my cats.
While most of the Men’s Rightsers commenting in the thread seem to have swallowed this story whole, “slap circles” aren’t actually a thing in feminism.
They are a thing, though, amongst bored and/or drunk young men (and sometimes women) around the world, as countless videos on YouTube can attest.
As as site called Hungry Teen explains, a “Slap Circle” is
A great way to bond with friends, release aggression and stimulate the face. The Slap Circle is a game made for the more hardcore, daring person and can be used as a test for finding the manliest of the group. Although adopting female fighting techniques, the slap circle appeals far more to men. Nothing is required for this game, other than a hand, a face and a set of balls.
All you do, is stand in a circle and slap the person to your right in the face, while waiting for a slap from the person on your left. If you’ve had enough, you step out of the circle and the last two standing fight it out for the winner.
I eagerly await stories in the Men’s Rights subreddit detailing Andrea Dworkin’s demand that all men and boys be forced to take the Cinnamon Challenge and all those insidious mandatory nut shot seminars being forced upon all college students unfortunate enough to be born with a pair of balls.
Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of designing posters that aren’t embarrassingly ugly and offputting?
Posters designed by MRAs are so routinely godawful it’s hard not to wonder if there is something inherent about them or their ideas that prevents them from seeing what a complete mess they’re making when they put together something like the poster above, which I recently found amongst a whole collection of similarly terrible posters at the website What Men Are Saying About Women.
In the case of Christian J, the WMASAW poster-designer, there is clearly something more than bad ideas at work here, but I do think the bad ideas of the Men’s Rights movement are a large part of the reason why MRAs can’t design posters to save their lives. Their posters are muddled messes because their ideology is a muddled mess.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are getting worked up about imaginary feminists again. Well, I suppose that’s pretty much all they ever do. But these two have managed to get even more worked up about even more imaginary feminists than they usually do: