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.
I like Maltesers but not Ovaltine, isn’t that weird? Then again, behold the power of chocolate.
Chocolate is the life saver. Dinner last night after that anxiety episode was four Monte biscuits and a glass of chocolate soy at 9.30!
I’m a failure…I can take or leave chocolate. Just enjoyed a toasted crumpet though with a glass of water (not cold enough for an Ovaltine)
I’m weird about malt things in general. Can’t stand beer, which confuses people.
I don’t think I’ve ever tasted beer; I really dislike its odour, so there’s no temptation.
I come and go with chocolate, though I’ve been trying to cut down on it (T2 diabetes in the family, etc, etc).
Toasted crumpets, yum. With honey, or just butter?
I love beer but stay away from it, I drink too much of it otherwise. I guess I like malty flavours.
Kitteh, just butter and the crumpets slightly burnt round the edges.
Brushing teeth and off to bed, night all.
ARRRGH just got rid of the biggest damn whitetail spider I’ve ever seen. Thing’s body was the size of the end joint of my thumb.
Niters, BigMomma! I’m wending my way to bed too.
I hate beer too Cassandra.
I drink hard cider though.
I miss drinking like an old friend. I miss beer. Being broke and working on weight loss (and the side effect of being weepy for several days after a bender) have all but excised alcohol from my life. Ditto, cigarettes. I get wacky aroused when I see a sexy man smoking a cigarette now.
@Kitteh, some people who know their chromosomal arrangement bumped into it by accident while being investigated for other conditions. I have no symptoms of my aneuploidy (which auto correct gave me “acne uploads” for *shakes head*) so only know it because I partake in clinical trials, one of which chromosomal analysis was performed for.
@joanimal, SO relieved to know I’m not the only one who lacks the strength to expose themself to all the morsels David finds highlighting the attitudes we mock. I’m sort of a delicate flower and am actualy hurt by a lot of misogynist remarks, including those not directed at me. It resulted in my departure from mainstream atheism/skepticism. Still an atheist. I just can’t stomach the ferocious need to defend sexism and WHATABOUTTHEMENZ attitude that I feel have become somewhat characteristic of Western atheism now.
I can’t watch sad puppy commercials either.
@marinerachel you are not alone in being unable to deal. I get so wound up it effects my sleep and sometimes anxiety attacks.
Is the atheist group really so bad? I’m not part of any organization and don’t actively seek out other atheists. Which might be because I’m from a religious area and a religious family which didn’t have many folks to talk to.
Ah, and the same soccer mom-feminazi mentality that gave the world the American Temperance movement (and thus the American Mafia) and which nearly killed off the legalization of marijuana in the USA (if all those NatGeo documentaries are accurate) as well as tried to ban anything the average red-blooded heterosexual male finds entertaining is still very much alive and well even in 21st century Amerika. Good on WordPress for not instantly succumbing to the paranoid hysteria of moral panic. Dave Sim was so right, the Cyrinists are going to destroy the 1st Amendment and create the dystopia of the Handmaid’s Tale if Men are not eternally vigilant. No wonder why it is women who are gaga over 50 Shades of Garbage…
I’m kind of late to the depression talk. I am pretty sure I have been struggling with depression on and off since the onset of puberty, and I’m 29 now. I never had anything done about it because my mother didn’t “believe in it” (wtf mother?) and me being sad all the time was just a way to get attention, despite the fact that I typically hid from everyone and shied away from social activities when things would flare up. She thought that if there was something wrong with me it would look bad on her so I should just stfu and “pull myself out of it”. Well 29 yo now am still having issues. Now though things are worse because I don’t have a lot of friends where I live now, and some days the loneliness feels like “everybody hates me and I’m going to die alone and I can’t even have cat and why the hell am I even bothering!?” *cue crying, watching reruns of the office and not eating* Literally the only thing that makes me feel any better is when someone listens and doesn’t tell me to get over it. I’ve had very few people say you have the right to be sad, most just say I’m broken and to hide it so I don’t get looked down upon or worse, god forbid I make friends and family look bad by having to be seen with a broken person. I’m on the fence about trying drugs and too scared of strangers to open up to therapy. Right now I’m tryin a mix of talking with a few friends who understand, immersing in hobbies and making myself go the fuck outside for a walk when thought get really dark.
Bad_Dog–You have the right to be sad.
Bad_dog, like wordsp1inner said, you really do have the right to be sad.
Your story sounds similar to mine in many ways, but I (luckily?) managed to break down hard enough my friends dragged me to the school counseling center.
I have to say there’s a lot of craptastical therapists out there (or “bad fits”) but it is definitely possible to find someone who tells you its ok to be sad. And finding a therapist who tells you it is ok to be sad is *not* cheating. Promise.
In my experience, medication has been a lifesaver. I have lots of bad times still, but now there are good times in between where I can practice what to do if I have a bad time. I’ve been fairly lucky and found one with tolerable side effects for me though (Prozac). It takes a while to figure out if its helping, and a long time to get off of them when they’re not helping.
>>>Is the atheist group really so bad?
I once read a quote by Bakunin relating how freethinkers (those of his time, mind you… 19th century… plus ca change) were akin to people who, upon seeing a man with a gruesome injury choosing to addle his mind with opiates to escape the pain, would heckle him for using opiates instead of being angry at whoever caused his injury in the first place. I’ve been trying to find it again because I think given the state of online atheist “activism”, I’d have cause to cite it pretty much every day at least once.
Nobody can accuse Bakunin of being particularly sympathetic to religion, but his scorn for the bourgeois freethinkers was not lesser than his scorn for the priest.
Thanks starskita. I may look into meds when I am home again if I find there are still troubles. A good friend gave me the number of the therapist she was seeing for helping with her bipolar. But she did move back closer to family recently because she was still having a hard time dealing with her illness and living here.
My grandfather used to give me Ovaltine! Now I’m all nostalgic. 🙂
@Bad_dog
Yipes about your mom. My mom suffers from depression so luckily that was taken pretty seriously. It was the mania that was, written off as me being a bitch (her word). So boo for mean mothers! Friends who understand are the greatest.
@marinerachel
The sad puppy commercials with Sarah McLachlan really bother me. (I don’t know if you are talking about those in particular, but I am really starting to hate Sarah and her music from the association.)
@starskita
The problem with finding a good therapist is that you have to be pretty strong and know yourself pretty well to 1) recognize a bad fit or someone who is just bad at their job, 2) either pick and choose what to take from their advice if anything, and 3) stand up for yourself and/or find a better therapist.
I was really unlucky in that all my bad therapy experiences were when I was really young (at 13, I was told I was just depressed because I missed having a father and told to get some books with pictures of girls and their fathers *eyeroll*; at 18, I had someone at the mental hospital tell me I was selfish for wanting to kill myself *rage*; at 19, I had a psychiatrist tell me the drugs had to be working so I was wrong when I said I didn’t feel better, coerced me into giving consent for him to talk about me to my mother, proceeded to believe her fucked up view of me over what I said was going on; and those are just the highlights…). I suppose I would be better now at picking a therapist and taking what I could from the experience, but thinking about going just makes me feel tired.
Oh, and more on-topic, let’s not forget the therapist who said feminism was a nice thing, but not something you could live by. That still bothers me. I was too shocked to say anything and most of the responses I’ve come up with since then are rather mean jabs at his religion. (My inner snarky atheist is kind of an asshole.)
Disparate topics ahoy!
1: To the depression battlers, my sympathies. For those considering treatment but not yet in it–my strongest advice is to make sure you find a good doctor first. This should be someone you are comfortable talking to, and someone who communicates well back at you. These are two separate skillsets, and they are both vital in someone providing treatment for depression. You’re going to need solid communication about both effectiveness and side-effects, and that won’t happen without LOTS of two-way communication. If you need an advocate to help you explain things to a doctor (such as a trusted friend or spouse), don’t hesitate to ask them to come with you. (My wife gets tongue-tied sometimes and forgets a key thing she meant to tell the doctor, so sometimes she asks me to come along and be her back-up brain.)
Once you’ve got that down, then it’s a matter of yes, working through the ‘what works for me’ roulette wheel. My wife has found one that generally dampens the depression effects (Pristiq), and which makes anxiety attacks a little less common, but once they hit, it’s completely worthless–she’s got an as-needed prescription for Xanax for those cases. Combos like this may make it easier to use smaller doses of any one med, which can help reduce side-effects, or may make the drug in question completely worthless. So, yeah, lots of communication. If you don’t have someone you can talk to directly, I’d recommend a journal/diary. Just write down your moods through the day, and then you can compare “month when I had no drugs” to “third month on the new meds” and see if it really is making a difference or not.
2: “Organized” atheism is going through a fairly major (and long-overdue) shake-up right now. Privilege manifests in some strange ways at times, and one aspect of that is that it’s generally much easier for white, middle-class men to decide they no longer believe, and to publicly declare such. That is, it’s easier to walk away from the privilege American society offers to practicing Christians (and, to a lesser extent, some other religions as well) if you’re otherwise sitting in a nice comfy seat of privileges that aren’t related to religion at all. Women often live in a situation where walking away from religion means losing their social and support networks; same goes for poor PoC communities (where disclaiming religion is also often seen as turning your back on the Civil Rights movement, because of the role black churches played there).
So when atheists started deciding it was time to actually advance atheist worldviews (necessitated by things like the push for creationism and its imitators in the classroom), they looked around and saw that they lacked a lot of demographic diversity, and started trying to change that. Unfortunately, like most privileged sectors of society, there was a significant contingent that didn’t understand that this meant more than saying, “Women and minorities welcome.” It involves actually changing the culture they had built–both in its internal dynamics and its external approaches. So yes, if the movement is to grow, it needs to actually care about things like misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism and class warfare (external). It also needs to work to actively promote those women, PoCs, transgender folk and homosexuals who have been in the movement all along (internal).
This process has not always been pretty. One infamous example was an atheist convention where they had a panel discussion on drawing more women into organized atheism (good!), and the panel consisted of one woman and three Penis Privilege Possessors (not so good). And then, on top of the fairly broad cases of cluelessness like that (which often can be addressed just by pointing it out and letting logic kick in), there were folks who resented the change entirely, who didn’t want the culture to change at all. This pushback is ongoing, and it’s…. bad. David could probably do a week of nothing but “Misogynist asshat atheists”, and he’d still only scratch the surface. (One of the big names in the movement, Justin Vacula, has had one of his columns featured on A Voice For Men. I trust that tells you how bad it can get.
Hm… i seem to have cast wall of text. Sorry about that.
@Bad_dog, So sorry you’re having a hard time. Glad you have some supportive friends. Count on us too, if we can help.
Going back to the bathrooms discussion (sorry, my brain is on a go-slow today), it reminded me of something that totally boggled my mind the other day:
A national newspaper ran a story about some public toilets near to where I live, claiming “PC GAWN MAHHHD” as the council had designated them ‘gender neutral’ toilets (and apparently spent £100k to do so).
So fair enough, thinks I, meandering through the article. I mean, it’s a bit silly for people to be so het up, what do they think is going to happen? What do they do with their bathrooms at home? Then I discovered that the £100k was actually being spent on refurbishing the toilets, not renaming them.
Then I read a bit further and discovered that it was the local parish paying a vast majority of the money for the refurb anyway, not the council.
Then I read a bit further and discovered that the toilets had always been ‘unisex’, since they’d been built – they just decided to use a different term.
Then I read a bit further and discovered that the public toilets were 4 individual bathrooms that all opened out into the street anyway.
Then I realised I’d been reading an article which could be summed up as “toilets get a spot of paint”, with some totally fucking bizarre transphobic nonsense (we have to waste public money because of treating them like human beings you know!) spackled over the top. Not that I should expect any more from the rag colloquially referred to as the Torygraph.
@Freemage
So much this! My doctors have met my mom, the boyfriend, and my sister because whoever drove me to the doctor comes in. (Except for the psychiatrist, but if I felt I needed someone there, they would be.)
It’s really interesting that this conversation about depression is coming up. My personal life is falling apart and it’s making my previously successful treatment for my depression ineffective. 🙁
@inurashii
Hugs if you want them. I think one of the worst feelings in the world is having something that has been working well stop working. It is like betrayal, but with no one at fault. There isn’t anywhere to direct anger and it can just feel so hopeless and isolating. I am so sorry that is happening to you in addition to the personal life stuff.
You can always vent to us or just get a bunch of virtual hugs and well wishes any time you want/need to. Take care of yourself as much as you can. 🙂
@Bad_dog – seconding what everyone else said, and especially Freemage’s advice. Internet hugs if you want them.
@Melody – the online atheists (who I tend to bracket as if they were trolls, sometimes) really come across like a bunch of seventeen-year-old boys who’ve just discovered atheism All By Themselves and have a bad case of smartest person in the room syndrome. The spaces I’ve seen are also very parochial, in that Christianity gets treated as if fundamentalist US sects with disproportionate political influence represented the whole religion worldwide. (NB I’m culturally Christian, but have never been Christian myself and loathe fundamentalism.)
I keep thinking that it’d do them good to recognise that believing in some form of creator or ground of being =/= the Rotten Bastard Old Man in the Sky notion, or any organised religion at all; or that not-atheist =/= child believing in fairy stories. Somehow I doubt someone like Bishop Spong, f’rinstance, could be called a gullible child.
Oh and the so-called Four Horsemen … yeah, well, don’t know about Dennet but Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins? Bright (no pun intended) blokes but as much professional douchebags as anything else.
@BlackBloc – that quotation rather applies to how Marx’s famous “opiate of the masses” comment is misread, doesn’t it? Wasn’t he saying that the masses were in such dire straits that of course they needed an opiate, and that those in power found it very convenient to keep things that way? (Vague memories here, please correct me if I stuffed it up!)
@thenat – are there any papers left in Britain that aren’t Tory/Murdoch rags?
inurashii, hugs if you want them from me too! That’s scary.