I spend more time on YouTube than I probably should. Most of the time I’m on the site, I’m tracking down strange and awesome music videos. But I also love cat videos (big surprise), ridiculous fake alien and UFO videos, videos of people behaving in incredibly unwise ways that are somehow not lethal to them, and pretty much anything that’s got Yackety Sax as its soundtrack.
What do MRAs enjoy watching? As far as I can tell, when they’re not watching videos of other MRAs, or flooding the comments of feminist videos, they like watching videos of women getting punched.
How else to explain the hundred-plus upvotes that greeted this brief video – it’s all of 15 seconds long –of a man knocking out a woman who was assaulting him. The video starts with a fight already in progress, as a woman rains blows on a much larger man backed up against a wall at what seems to be a strip mall while her friends shriek in the background. The man, after fending off a number of punches, hits her directly in the face and she drops to the ground.
That’s it. That’s all we know. We don’t know who these people are, what the fight was about, or even who started it.
But to the denizens of the Men’s Rights subreddit, this is a man who is fully justified in using violence against a woman, and they can barely conceal their excitement, posting dozens of comments proclaiming him a sort of Men’s Rights hero.
“Kudos to the guy who stood up to this bullshit,” dalsgaard declares, in a comment that gets dozens of upvotes. “I hope other men will take his example.”
Tim8080 only wishes he’d been there to take part in the punching:
Actually, the man in question isn’t particularly old, and he’s certainly not frail; he’s actually rather large and imposing.
Gus2144 thinks that for some reason gender equality necessarily involves a lot of hitting:
Evidently in that last comment Gus took it a little too far for his Men’s Rights bretheren, and he garnered himself a few downvotes.
But the serious downvoting in the thread was reserved for those who questioned whether or not MRAs should be celebrating the incident captured on video as a grand victory for Men’s Rights.
Indeed, CapnDancyPants won himself more than two dozen downvotes for simply wondering what might have happened before the fifteen seconds shown on the video:
MRAs: If they can’t punch women, they don’t want to be a part of your revolution.
The youtube comments look almost as MRAreddit.
It must suck to have to hurt women in order to feel more like a man.
Look at these charming gentle(wo)men and their modest opinions.
Inigo93 14 timmar sedan
Only shame here is that the guy didn’t put a bullet in that bitch.
micohelin 14 timmar sedan
That bitch should just get fist more often :DDD
SwagLamarJohnson 14 timmar sedan
That’s not a girl, that’s a street kid. Regardless gender they are one race, species, etc and it is worse then rodents.
ShanequaBootlips 12 timmar sedan
Should have also punched her in the ovaries to make sure she never squirts any hellspawn out.
Are all MRAs on youtube?
Strange logic. By extension, if one guy could punch any other guy to the floor then he’d be the only guy in the world. What happened to brotherhood?
^ Wow, how could any woman not want to sleep with men like that?
I made it about 10 seconds into that video before I wanted to go lay on the ground. Of all the scary MRA stuff you’ve ever posted it took a bunch of crazy russian dudes showing off to actually terrify me.
A Voice for Pierre alert (I LOVE Pierre, btw): http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/03/03/get-him-boy-man-mauled-by-police-dog-as-punishment-for-not-obeying-wife/ Don’t they almost write themselves sometimes?
Once again, it all comes down to wanting to hurt women.
At least gus2144 is honest? Shame about his lack of self-awareness though. He’s basically saying that he’d be willing to bestow equal rights as long as he got to punch some chicks.
My main response to all these guys is that equal rights do not work that way.
Gah. Another piece of pigshit who doesn’t get what equal rights means (probably willfully ignores rather than genuinely stupid): Andrew Bolt in the local Murdoch rag going on about how we already have marriage equality in this country because gay men are free to marry women and lesbians are free to marry men, same as anyone else.
I’ve always loathed that wingnut (among other things, he’s on the payroll of petrochemical companies – guess what his attitude to climate change is?) but this sort of sneering hypocrisy and bigotry enrages me.
/derail
It’s very much out-of-context, isn’t it? No idea what the trouble is. You see someone attacking someone, and screaming, and you think — why? Well, at least, I do. I’m surprised that so many people seem to understand the entire situation so completely from no evidence at all. But if you look at the nature of the comments, ideas at least suggest themselves: for example, that people want to see something that justifies a preconceived opinion. But I still find it hard to understand how anyone can be so positive about the meaning of what they see.
I notice that idea of a society where people don’t solve things by hitting one another doesn’t seem to hold much appeal for MRAs. Well, if they can’t win arguments by logic and persuasion (and when have they ever?) then I guess fists and weapons are what’s left.
I’m working on my account avatar and settings, please bear with me.
@The Kittehs’
That talking point drives me nuts like no other. So, we’re all free to have loveless marriages is what they’re saying and we are all supposed to be glad of that? Gah!
My father was gay and his having an affair and leaving my mother really did a number on her. They really don’t stop to think about what it must be like to be the heterosexual partner of a closeted homosexual person, do they?
Some of these guys aren’t even pretending they want to be able to punch women for ‘equality’, they’re just flat-out admitting they like hitting women. Nice.
I wonder. All these guys who make comments about how unfair it is they ‘can’t hit a woman’ when they’d hit a guy. How many guys do they actually hit for pissing them off, in the average week? Are they just going around rage-hitting guys all the time?
My guess is a lot of them spend so much more time watching youtube/ playing video games than interacting with people that it warps their idea of what’s reasonable?
This shitagain? Yeah, at least Gus is upfront about it, but they all seemed to have missed the “don’t hit, at all” lesson in grade school.
Yeah, probably. Also everyone’s a hero when they’re talking about what they ‘would’ve’ done in X situation. It’s one reason I’m so sick of hearing ‘well, I would have punched him’ about someone who was rude to a clerk/cheated on their sister/whatever. Most of the time, no, they probably wouldn’t have. And if they did really do it it wouldn’t make them the hero they think it would.
twomoogles: they just think they’d like to hit. I’m sure if they were any danger, they’d shrink like the stinkbugs they are. That’s probably why they want to hit women, less danger for them.
And the very specific situation of ‘woman is assaulting man, man is afraid to defend himself due to rules about hitting women’ does come up, sure, but that’s not what these guys are focusing on. It would be at least somewhat sympathetic if *that* were their issue. But no, they truly seem to want to make people ‘eat through a straw for months’ and so on.
(I know one actual case of ‘female hits male, male too scared to defend himself, is injured’. Both participants were under 8 at the time.)
Zanana, do you mean, that everything onscreen becomes like a game, and the important thing is to get the hits in? It’s a truly horrible thought, but you may be right. I was thinking more along the lines of the tendency people seem to have to take sides, regardless of whether they know anything about it or not. Perhaps because they don’t like someone’s face, or because someone is screaming and hitting someone. Or because they see a woman screaming and hitting someone, or because they see a man being attacked. I really don’t know.
They think they’d like to hit, as long as the person they’re hitting is weaker and there’s no chance they’ll be hurt themselves. Cowards playing at tough guys on the internet. Sigh.
The comments on that Spearhead article scarlettpipistrelle posted are, predictably, terrible.
I think I’m going to go snorfle in my kitties’ fur for a while, and imagine a world where everyone works toward less violence and suffering overall rather than trying to spread it around equally.
I really don’t think there’s a big taboo against defending yourself if you’re a man and actually assaulted by a woman. If we’re talking a DV situation where someone doesn’t defend himself, I’d say that’s more due to psychological mechanisms where the victim blames himself. And women just attacking men – it’s just not that common. WHEN that happens, if you were to study all cases of men being violently attacked by random women (say, muggers who try to beat him down or steal his wallet, or just some completely crazy-ass violent chick), I doubt you’d find that a large percentage of these men declined to defend themselves because of some “don’t hit women” rule. I mean, I don’t KNOW of course, I don’t know of any such study, so maybe I’m wrong. But all these MRA:s seem to consider it OBVIOUS that in society today, defending yourself if you’re attacked by a woman is considered completely taboo, and that’s not obvious at all to me. At least it happens in fiction now and again that a male hero gets attacked by, for instance, a female assassin and defends himself, and that never causes any outrage.
The real problem, which they OUGHT to focus on, is that violence against men often isn’t taken seriously enough.
A while back I decided to ask some guys I know (as in, about 10 of them- so not a great sample size) if they thought it was unfair they couldn’t hit a woman, and when they thought it was OK to hit someone. I was a bit disturbed by what they said, since most said things like it was OK to hit someone who ‘got in your space’, ‘questioned your honour’, or ‘was asking to have their fucking face smashed in’ (exact quote).
However, most of them also didn’t like the idea of hitting someone a lot smaller/ weaker than them. They didn’t see much difference between hitting a man and hitting a woman in theory, but said they would be less likely to hit a woman because they are usually smaller. I think MRAs like to hit people they know won’t be able to beat them up.
We need to make violence seem like less of a solution in general, I think, irrespective of gender.
Exactly, Carleyblue. I agree that it’s less bad to hit someone your own size or someone bigger than to hit someone smaller, but it’s still bad. THAT’S the message that should get out.