Here’s a cool, if momentarily puzzling, gif.
And another question for you all. Well, several related questions, really.
Where did you first run across MRAs and/or PUAs etc online (or offline)? What was your reaction at the time?
Flash forward to now: Where do you tend to run across MRAs/PUAs/etc or their ideas online (expressed by people who may or may not be MRAs/PUAs/etc)?
Oh, and by the way, feel free to discuss whatever else you want, or to post links to misogyny, and generally behave as if this is an open thread, because it is.
@Polliwog
Because nothing pisses off a boyfriend like his girlfriend having a healthy and enjoyable social life? That is terrifying on a number of levels.
Did those guys see one of the beer commercials where women sexily fight each other in sexy outfits in a sexy pool and think it was a documentary?
Don’t get me started on Goreans, I could go on all day about how fucked up they are. There’s a play party run by some friends which I really enjoy except for one fucking gorean who goes who annoys the hell out of me. Including giving me shit last time about topping a guy. Switches break his brain apparently. I had to keep repeating to myself that I can’t beat people non-consensually. I generally only hangout with pretty cool liberal feminist kinksters though.
I enjoy fetlife but I generally use it for keeping in touch with my kinky friends and events. I try to avoid the areas where douches hang out and resist the urge to poke them with the snark stick.
Google+ has a strong and vocal MRA presence…and yes as mentioned above Fetlife.
@Worried Mama Just wanted to say I appreciate your perspective.
I’ve noticed too that many MRAs are libertarians and atheists. I’m not an atheist personally, but I’ve been very disappointed to see how some people in the atheist community deal with gender issues. I know there have been many intelligent discussions on this topic on Manboobz before. I guess we can put to rest the idea that ‘only religious people and old people are sexist nowadays’ (which was what my father said when I asked him about the subject).
I think my first exposure to MRAs was on a movie review site of all places — Flick Filosopher.com. The critic’s name is Mary Ann and she is unabashedly feminist. She also loves science-fiction, action films and despises rom-coms. You wouldn’t believe the comment section there — though, not as of late. These days it’s mostly nerdly sexist guys who call her names like c**** because she doesn’t like films like “Scott Pilgrim vs the World” and “The Expendables 2.” When they do turn up, me and the regulars generally stand up to them…it’s not hard.
Long personal story:
I first encountered MRM stuff through articles on the hippie-granola drums-in-the-forest side of the early stuff, and in a book I saw in my high school library by the author of a bunch of parenting books my mum owned (Steve Biddulph, I think?), and then in yet another human-interest piece on “father’s groups” after an MRA type scaled the Harbour Bridge in a Batman costume to protest custody or something. I didn’t think at the time to question the assumptions behind the father’s rights stuff. Now, I love a good inconvenient protest, and the forest-drums-coming-to-terms-with-masculinity sounded reasonably benign, so I came to expect men’s rights stuff to be a lot like all of that and had a bit of a positive view of it. Stories of awful feminazis who want women to be better or something probably had an impact on me (from. . . somewhere? I don’t know. Seems they were in the air. I read pretty widely), but I’d always considered myself a feminist.
I would’ve been about or 17-ish with most of this.
Soon after all that, I had a pretty nasty and humilating breakup and fell into a bit of a slump. I felt hopeless about romance and googling what the heck to do led me to some of the more gimmicky PUA stuff – NLP and so on, people selling their courses. I spotted all this as bullshit, but looked into a lot of the PUA stuff. I could have sex with lots of women, thought I! Negs were one of the first thing I read about, and I though the framing was always a bit unnecessarily confrontational, but they fit in with my Aussie sense of friendly insults as humour. The “lowering self-esteem” thing was just how that all worked, then! Peacocking – dress differently to draw attention to yourself! Try, try again – that’s reasonable!
TVtropes (actually decent a lot of the time) and 4chan’s /r9k/ (nuke it from orbit, please) were both places I browsed at the time, and both were somewhere between slightly and incredibly misogynistic and supposedly sites for intelligent discussion, which legitimised misogyny as a viewpoint to me, I think. I’d seen a lot of female-on-male cheating for reasons that’d probably derail this already rambling anecdote, and a lot of the stuff read as “scientific”, so I didn’t get too upset about it or viewed it as reasonable if an overreaction. I never stopped considering myself a feminist, but I read and agreed or partially agreed with a lot of incredibly stupid stuff at around that point. I read Atlas Shrugged on a friend’s recommendation at the same time, but the strikes-in-reverse thing seemed pretty pointless even then. I agreed with a lot of libertarian stuff, though, and discovered original/left-libertarianism and democratic socialism around then.
It was when I first read incredibly “LMR” stuff that I suddenly felt very sick and began to really dislike the PUA thing for more than just trying to suck money out of people. NSWATM pre-GMP was the first blog I ever read calling those fuckers out – Ozy and Noah Brand wrote for it at the time. I wasn’t actually thinking of all that when I stumbled across Man Boobz – it was just an interesting name I clicked in the sidebar of Pharyngula, which I used to read a lot.
Anyway, thank God for me being too shy to never try out any of the PUA stuff.
I’ve encountered a few people with MRA-ish views since then and an old friend’s incredibly creepy and far older PUA boyfriend, in terms of IRL MRAs.
Was set up to see MRM as benign, got angry with an ex and read a lot of stupid shit, sort of agreed with it until I saw outright endorsement of rape and white supremacy that I couldn’t rationalise away, Ozy pulled the weeds out of my head, found Man Boobz by accident and loved David’s articles and the sense of community. I’ve encountered MRAs or pseudo-MRAs IRL but not often.
A friend coming out as trans at around the same time as the breakup, leading me to read a lot of feminist-101, helped a lot too. To this day I’m disgusted about how uneducated people are about LGBT stuff, and how much normal schooling ignores it.
It’s interesting how many MRAs encountered online and IRL by people here seem to be Australian. Really sorry, everyone.
@Kittehhelp
SMH seems to be the most reliably non-shitty mainstream Aussie paper, but they’re all pretty bad. Hopefully this just isn’t my New South Welsh bias, but I think papers suffer from that less than the Tooheys-versus-CUB/NRL-versus-AFL/schooners-versus-pots/cossies-versus-togs arguments.
lowquacks, Most Australians I’ve met (in person and online) have been awesome. You have nothing to apologize for — at least, not any more than any other country. XD
@Kitteh which Nwoslave rant? I think I must have missed it.
@Nepenthe I still ran into “nice guys” in college. They slowly diminished out once I got into the working world. Of course I work with kids which may factor into the types of men I meet.
@Marie
It is hard to tell who is actively part of a movement and who is not without asking…..
I totally agree I think most men with misogynistic tendency don’t know about MRMs.
@Kgrrrl
I think the problem is that there are SO many more males than females on the site. Which is part of the reason I don’t want to join.
http://socialstatistics.com/
Random: I talked with a trans woman today yesterday on the walk home (nighttime). She seemed a little freaked and we ended up walking and talking together.
It was interesting. And she was very open about herself once she realized I wasn’t a threat (it is weird to me to be thought of as a dangerous person a very unique experience thought after hearing her talk I totally understand).
It seems to me we all have met some misogynists. Internet hugs?
@Bunny – gods yes, we were talking about a Dr Nerdlove letter the other day – some guy doing the “oh woes, I is incel” stuff. There were a couple of raging douchebags of the MRA variety in the comments.
@lowquacks – there’s one thing I can’t forgive Fairfax for, and that’s having that misogynistic “lie back and think of England” rape proponent Bettina Arndt writing opinion pieces for them. The scum really rises to the surface in the comments then.
Melody – I haven’t seen the original one, apparently he posted a link to Google images or something to back up his assertion that women dress like sluts, and it included pictures of little girls at the beach, wearing, y’know, swimsuits. I’ve just seen it referred to in lots of comments from the last couple of years while I’ve been trawling around. (Anyone around at the time remember the specifics?)
He also focussed on the clothes of some eleven-year-old girls in a horrible video where they were (I think – the vid had been taken down when I read the thread) stripping and humiliating a smaller boy. If I read it right, one of the girls was in capri pants, and NWO ranted on about her being dressed like a slut.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah, one of them grew out of it already. XP Most of them still have this attitude.
@ Marie. THIS OMG. I’ve only been attracted to one dude so it’s only a small loss if I only choose to see women. Sometimes I just canteven be bothered with talking to some of my guy friends (basically my dnd group plus a few) because… Well… I’ll put it this way. They’re Seth McFarlane fans. -.- And I think most women feel this way about casual misogyny.
Yeah, I’m catbeast and catbeasty. WordPress drops the y for some reason.
That being said, I’d never go”mgtow” on guys, particularly not the dumb attitude Mgtows have towards sexual politics. >:P okayillstopramblingnow
@The Kitteh
Ah. Yes.
I don’t understand how swimsuits are an example of how slutty someone is.
Guys wear swim trunks (almost like underwear). Women wear: bikinis, tankinis, one peices ect (basically underwear). Is it just more slutty because it a woman? Because talk about double standards.
Oh, and to the person who asked he was in swim trunks.
Ah, someone who’s new to the Owly theory of sexuality, in which women experience their sexuality mainly by wearing clothes at men.
Imagine if Owly happened upon a crowd who’d stripped off for one of Spencer Tunick’s group photos. He can’t cope with women wearing clothes at him; his head would explode if he saw a mixed crowd of nekkid people.
I swear Owly can’t be the much-travelled tech he claimed to be. Nobody who’d ever actually been in public and looked at people could think all the men were running around with boners and barely suppressing their urges to attack teh ebil wimminz who were dressed at them.
You forgot about how high heels clickity clack just to arouse men, which is something something a tease since they won’t fuck him.
Also, I must be a ninja because androgynous people don’t exist (I’m really tempted to switch back to my ninja avatar, but Cheshire Cat!)
I think he has a terminal case of invisible-to-me-itis — the condition wherein the sufferer is unable to see anyone they are not attracted to, whereby rendering said people invisible to the sufferer.
I know we joke about misogynists not understanding that women are people a lot, but in Owly’s case he quite literally does not appear to understand that women have inner lives, subjectivity, etc.
So if he has an erection then obviously it’s something the woman he was looking at did to him on purpose, because it’s impossible that she could have not even noticed him and be walking along thinking “need more coffee…must remember to pick up dry cleaning…shit, I’m late for my meeting”.
Which would make walking through crowds really difficult.
Owly seemed to think women’s inner lives or thoughts consist solely of making men miserable, extracting money from them (it’d be so much easier if the local councils would clean those sidewalks!) and teasing them sexually.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bloke with a boner in public. All those thousands of men on the train, on the street, in offices, in thirty years of working, and none of ’em seem to have this uncontrollable sexual arousal brought on by women being around. I seriously doubt they were all well-trained manginas, either.
OT, thinking about when we were talking about the term neckbeard t’other day: I saw a young guy yesterday who literally had one, but knew how to make it look good. He was sort of like a younger and prettier Russell Brand, without the weird wild-eyed expression – had the mane of curly hair, a neat moustache, and a beard that was mostly stubble above his jawline, and thicker below it. The thicker hair was short and neat.
Too transfixed by the gif to answer the question
Lucky! Or, well, I could live with the boner, it was the guy with his fly open on the train who kept checking to make sure that people could see his boner that I could have done without.
@catbeasty
Same here :/ I don’t spend as much time with my dad because of the casual misogyny, though me and my sis have actually talked about it and tried to get him to stop. My brother too, but he’s fifteen, not fifty, so I’m willing to cut him more slack. (also, my dad does it way more often.)
@melody
that was me.
@Argenti Aertheri
this is really off topic, but your avatar looks creepier the longer I look at it.
Marie — I’m going to take that as a compliment. I was going for the Cheshire Cat and he is supposed to be at least unsettling, if not outright creepy.
Regarding boners in public places, can’t say I’ve ever noticed, but I don’t think I’d care much about it as long as it wasn’t flat out indecent. Dude Cassandra got to see far too much of = epic creep. Sorry you had to see that Cassandra.
@Argenti Aertheri
Well, I didn’t mean it as a bad thing, I just hadn’t really looked at it so much before. XD
Facebook statuses. Although, I can’t say these people identify as MRAs, they simply write statuses that espouse the same ideas MRAs do. I’ve gotten into the habit of arguing with them and keeping screen shots of the conversations. Perhaps I’ll put them together in a book someday. Or not.
RE: Kittehs
OT, thinking about when we were talking about the term neckbeard t’other day: I saw a young guy yesterday who literally had one, but knew how to make it look good.
Is that possible? I thought the neckbeard was one of the rare fashions that looked good on absolutely NOBODY! (Not that I disbelieve you; just surprised and having trouble picturing it!)
LBT – lol that was pretty much my reaction!
::am seeing man who looks good with neckbeard::
::it does not compute::
::head explodes::
😀
The guy had the advantage of being good-looking anyway; probably of Greek background (Melbourne has the third largest Greek-speaking population in the world) with a well-groomed mane of hair. The beard was more even than the usual neckbeard: the hair on his cheeks was sort of past stubble but not quite beard-thick, and the hair under his chin was thick but closely trimmed. Plus he had a good moustache. I can’t quite get the description right but it was a good How To if anyone was aiming to grow a beard that way.
Why, you can meet me right here.
Far East, Far Right.
Solidarity against liberalism worldwide.
What are you blathering about, moron?
What’s the matter, can’t read?
More to the point, can you write anything that makes sense? The evidence so far suggests not.
I first ran into them on Reddit, when I first joined Reddit in 2011. The guy I was dating at the time used Reddit a lot (fun fact, he also turned out to be a domestic abuser, but I am sure there’s no correlation, cough). When I first heard of them I was amused as hell that people took them seriously. Their lack of self-awareness was reminiscent of Michael Scott, no exaggeration. I still view MRAs the same way I view any other believers of woo: climate change deniers, anti-vac parents, birthers, and so on.
I run into them on Raw Story, the Atlantic, Mother Jones, and anywhere else that uses Disqus for comments. You click on their Disqus name and you see every other website where they are spouting their bile.
I wanted to let you know that your site is so refreshing after the hate filled sites I have seen belonging to the MRA’s. I first came across these horrible postings and rants when I was reading some Yahoo questions in the what was then known as Women’s Studies. There were a few people there who were genuinely interested in discussing real feminist issues such as rigid gender roles that exclude both males and females; all forms of oppression such as ableism, racism, ageism etc. and of course the ongoing struggles that teenagers face in adjusting to negative media images. There were a tenacious, group of mostly males who would troll and derail and attempt at diologue or discussion. At one point one of the group sent the most horrendous threatening post to most of the feminist regulars. I was truly deranged and again suggested sexual violence as a means of dealing with feminists. Other examples were perpetuating rape myths, degrading women and using a picture of the perpetrator of the Montreal Massacre as their identification picture instead of a avatar.
Thanks again for taking a firm stance against what is clearly a group that is motivated by bitterness.
I was actually lucky enough to see this one coming. My first encounter was a real-life PUA I met through an acquaintance. He was a self-professed psychopath who abused his girlfriend.
I don’t think the MRA “movement” had really gotten going at that point yet, but I saw it coming. All of the guys who hired him (yes, with real money) to teach them “game” were whiny faux “nice guys” who hated women. They were just unbelievably angry at women. They couldn’t make the connection between their rageful, awkward personalities, and being “incel,” as they call it. They thought it was just women being bitchy.
And those are the kind of guys that the original PUA’s made their money of off.
I remember thinking to myself, “Well, this isn’t going anywhere good.”
Looks like my gut was right.
Where did I first run into MRAs? I don’t even remember, but somewhere online, of course, because they wouldn’t dare exit the safe confines of their computer with this shit.
What was my reaction? “Is this shit for real?”
Flash forward to now: Where do you tend to run across MRAs/PUAs/etc or their ideas online (expressed by people who may or may not be MRAs/PUAs/etc)? Everywhere, all the time, nonstop anywhere there is a woman who isn’t completely silent and naked….and even then sometimes…