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| Grace Jones will kick your bumper sticker’s ass. |
One of the quickest and easiest ways to make yourself look like a complete idiot is to festoon your car with an assortment of bumper stickers – preferably stickers that are belligerent, incoherent, and “funny.” (By “funny,” of course, I mean “funny only to people who share all of your social, cultural and political beliefs, and probably not even then.”)
Alas, the Men Going Their Own Way movement doesn’t have any bumper stickers of its own. Oh, sure, there are a vast variety of just plain sexist bumper stickers out there
(“If I wanted a bitch, I’d buy a dog”), and you can even buy
“I HEART misogyny” stickers on Cafepress. but there’s not much out that deals with the specific stupid concerns of the MGTOW crowd.
The good fellows on MGTOWforums.com want to change all that. Recently a batch of them began brainstorming about possible slogans for MGTOW bumper stickers. Womanhater started the discussion off with a doozy, managing to be both belligerent AND baffling to anyone who hasn’t already taken a sip of the MGTOW Kool-Aid:
Chivalry is Treason!
A promising start. Not all the suggestions that followed quite lived up to this standard. Quite a few were earnest and plodding, not very slogan-y:
When Was the Last Time You Treated a Man Fairly?
Single moms should stay single.
Some men live happy fulfilling lives, the rest get married.
Women and happiness don’t go together.
Still, some of the more earnest attempts managed to be attention-grabbing nonetheless:
I don’t believe any accusation of rape
Many others simply rehashed basic MGTOW themes:
We Are Men, Not Wallets
Marriage is for morons
Alimony is Slavery
But a number of the suggestions contained the spark of creative loopiness that keeps me coming back to the MGTOW forums again and again. Take, for example, the surprisingly large number that managed to work vaginas into the equation, generally in a highly off-putting manner:
Give women the finger and not in a good way
Excuse me, is that fish I smell?
Two holes don’t make a right
This last one, while not without its charms, is a little puzzling. If you do the math correctly, women have seven holes, and men have six (or seven, if you include one very small hole). Up to three of these lady-holes (and up to two for men) may come into play in the course of routine sexual activity. (More advanced fetishists may use more holes, as this somewhat NSFW video illustrates; don’t worry, it’s not a link to a video of someone putting something in a man’s seventh hole, because, OW!) I’m not entirely sure which two holes our sloganeer is fingering as the villains here.
Quite a few of the suggestions seemed almost designed to baffle everyone outside the confines of MGTOWforums.com (and even some within it):
Don’t blame me for 1920
Hammurabi was correct about women
Listen to Cato the Elder
For those playing along at home, 1920 was of course the year in which matinee idol Douglas Fairbanks married actress Mary Pickford, known as “America’s Sweetheart,” even though she was Canadian; it was also the year in which construction began on the Holland Tunnel between New York and New Jersey, thus setting the stage for the horror later known as the “bridge and tunnel crowd.” But I’m guessing the event our sloganeer is really concerned about is the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving American women the vote, though, unless our sloganeer is quite elderly indeed, I’m not quite sure why anyone would be blaming (or crediting) him for the Amendment’s passage.
As for the other two, well, the Code of Hammurabi, the first king of the Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC, “mark[ed] the beginning of the institutionalization of the patriarchal family as an aspect of state power,” as historian Gerda Lerner notes. Hammy (as I like to call him) also invented the idea of “an eye for an eye.” And Cato the Elder? He said some nasty shit about women.You can look it up yourself. I’m lazy.
Other slogans weren’t so much obscure as just plain odd:
If the FDA screened pussy, you’d need a prescription to get it.
I’d rather have guns than gals.
A cow in the bed…but a freak in the courtroom!
And then there was this little riddle:
Q)Why don’t women respect men?
A)Becoz a Mousetrap laughs at the Mouse
Uh, what?
Of all the proposed slogans, only one actually showed any real wit, this punny little contribution from Apeiron:
Better dead than wed.
Indeed, this one was so good I suspected it had to have been used somewhere before. And indeed it has been. A quick Google search showed that the UK anarchist group Class War used the phrase back in the 1980s on a poster protesting the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson. Of course, that temporarily happy couple ended up separating after only six years, and divorced a few years after that.
Maybe slogans can change the world.
Scary thought.
Despite that risk, I would like to encourage the MGTOWers to make up some stickers of their own. Maybe some t-shirts, coffee mugs, and baseball caps as well. Heck, put these slogans on everything you own. Seriously, anything that makes it easier to identify you, preferably at a distance, is more than welcome.
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