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.
Yeah pretty sure that until there’s a ‘godless heathen-panic” defence to murder in the States, you don’t have to worry about atheists being actually and systematically oppressed.
Here is a link to the Google Quick View version of the study that found atheists to be less trusted than gays and lesbians. (If it works)
Here is the pdf.
Here is a decent enough summary of some of the findings.
Disturbingly, attitudes toward atheists also aren’t changing/improving like attitudes toward other minorities are.
Some Gal, Freemage, Melody – Asshole Atheists is a good name, and I shall adopt it over online atheists, it’s much more accurate and specific. But no, the US experience doesn’t translate here. Religion is not a major thing or obsession in Oz the way it seems to be in the US. I’d guess that the situation has similarities to what Dvarg described – some atheists doing the I’m-an-underdog thing based on US culture, not our own.
One misleading thing is that our parliamentarians are a pathetic, backward lot when it comes to pandering to miniscule Christian religious fringe mobs such as the Australian Christian Lobby (homophobic scuzzbuckets – actual churches have signs up saying “We are Christians and the ACL does NOT speak for us”). In doing that, parliamentarians are NOT representing mainstream Australian thought. Marriage equality is a good example. The majority of us want it, the Federal government (either party) is freaked out by the whole idea. Plus, our Prime Minister is an atheist woman. She gets a lot less flack for her beliefs than for daring to be PM while in possession of a uterus. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen an attack on her for her beliefs except from minority wingnutters who would quite possibly overlook that in a man.
Australia is much more lackadaisical about religion than the US. Granted I’ve never lived in a small town, but I’d be very surprised if there was the what-church-do-you-go-to pressure and nosiness here that I’ve heard about in the States. I’ve never heard of atheists being singled out or targetted or pressured. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but of all the things one’s likely to be victimised for here (race, sexuality, gender, disability) I think atheism is waaaaaay down the list.
So yeah … atheist being automatically likely to be victim or underdog doesn’t play as a worldwide rule.
Some Gal: Honestly, I don’t think there’s even enough anecdotal evidence to support the idea that atheists are being physically victimized at the level many other communities are, at least not in north america. Those who commit hate crimes are not exactly shy about their reasons, and I’d expect those incidents to be amplified through the blogosphere. I read both FTB and Patheos’ Atheist portals on a regular basis, and the assault/murder of atheists in North America is simply not on the radar.
The major issues with arrest, assault and murder of atheists is predominantly an issue in Islamic nations which have anti-apostasy laws which help legitimize the violent factions.
@thenatfantastic
Well, if you ignore that religion is seen as demonstrating that a prisoner should be receive parole. If you ignore that atheists are routinely sentenced to religious programs if they commit a DUI. If you ignore that many public schools require The Pledge of Allegiance. If you ignore that atheism isn’t addressed as an option even when many schools do units on different religions. Atheists can’t hold public office in some states. (I could go on listing big and small oppressions, all institutionalized.)
I didn’t mean to start an Oppression Olympics. I meant the “pretty much” to cover that there may be groups worse off, groups tied, etc. but that atheists as a group in the US are in the general area of most hated. I don’t think that is a thing to scoff at.
I would like to see those studies, thanks! You guys have already unpacked a lot of the nuances here, but I’d like to see how the questions were phrased, what groups are involved, and so on.
One factor that hasn’t been mentioned: Maybe atheists just seem like an acceptable target? Everyone knows that it’s bad to be racist, so hardly anyone will actually come out and say that they hate black people (even anonymously), but racism still manifests itself in other ways. So a simple survey might not be a very accurate way to gauge people’s actual feelings.
I do think that atheists are probably one of the groups with the highest ratio of how much antipathy they face vs. how widely it’s acknowledged. I think there are probably a fair number of people who don’t think that atheists face any discrimination at all, whereas everyone knows that, say, racism exists.
But it’s hard to hear “we’re really the most oppressed!” from a group that’s heavily white and male without thinking of Bill Maher types who obviously are just incensed that the whole world doesn’t appreciate the superiority of his man-brain. Not that present company is thinking like that, of course.
(For the record, I know I’m definitely not the most oppressed of anything.)
I’m sorry, but no. “Less trusted” doesn’t mean anything. People might think that people who don’t have the fear of divine retribution might have less keeping them on the straight and narrow, but ‘less trusted’ can mean ‘I trust them 95%, but I trust (e.g.) Christians 97%’. Yes there’s evidence of religious fundamentalists preaching hellfire and damnation, and Fox News’ never-ending “War on Christians” memes (which target other religions just as much as atheists), but you’re not being denied education, you’re not being killed in swathes, you’re not being targeted by the police, you’re not being denied the right to use bathrooms, you’re not excluded from marriage, you’re not excluded from government support if you’re the victim of a crime, and you’re not denied healthcare. There’s a difference between ‘people don’t like me because they don’t actually know about my beliefs’ and fucking systemic oppression because of it. Yes it’s a bit shit. No it’s not oppression.
That wasn’t in response to your last post Some Gal.
But yes, that’s shit, and it should be stopped. But I am genuinely struggling to see how being forced to attend a boring-ass meeting about things you don’t believe in to qualify for parole is in any way comparable to there literally being a defence to murder for killing you for being who you are.
I was thinking that–I can’t think of a single case of an atheist murdered in an (atheism-related) hate crime, whereas QUILTBAG hate crimes happen every damn day–but bear in mind that anecdotal evidence really, really doesn’t mean anything. It seems hard to believe that there could be a spree of hate crimes against a group that don’t get reported on at all, but, well, stranger news biases have existed.
Thanks, Some Gal! Sometimes it seems like the general public has only two responses to mental illness, both supremely unhelpful. It’s either “Get over yourself and be normal” or “Just pop some pills.” I don’t know if it comes from ignorance or the same “If I do everything right, nothing bad will happen to me” fallacy that results in blaming the victims of DV and rape. Probably some of both.
Marx’s comment about opiates of the masses is very similar, yes. It is often badly mangled by ideologues, both religious and non-. The quote is not about religious people being dumb, but about them *suffering*.
Bakunin and Marx had a feud going but they shared a lot of beliefs, actually. Bakunin’s quotation (which I can never find… I’m sure it’s in God and the State but I read that twice already and have no intentions of slogging through it again, and just doing diagonal reading is not helping me find the quote) is much more explicit in its scorn for the bourgeois organs of organized freethinking (nowadays would be the atheist/skeptic movement). He also has a lot of choice anti-clerical quotations, but I’ve never seen one quote from him where he savages religious common folk…
The one issue anyone should have with Bakunin’s views on religion, though, is his anti-semitism (which he uses a lot in his invectives against Marx, though the fact Marx was German seems to be taken as a much much worse black mark against him than his Judaism, ‘funnily’ enough). It sucks a lot, especially considering how advanced Bakunin was in other respects, like women’s rights, compared to many of his contemporaries.
@leftwingfox
Shit. I didn’t mean it to come off like a rhetorical point. It was an honest question. In trying to find the study, I found a murder of an atheist for being an atheist last year that I hadn’t heard about. I wondered if there was anyone tracking them even just to show that it is rare.
And then American fundamentalists act like they’re underdogs based on what’s going on in places like Sweden XD
Around Christmas the atheists get slammed. Fox news is probably the worst as they have made jokes about the death of atheists. The joke was along the lines that as an Atheist why would you care if another atheist died.
Furthermore, I think it depends on where you live. There was no escaping it. Anytime you are constantly Attacked there is backlash. My debate team was constantly bringing up the bible. The sports teams prayed before a game. My teachers didn’t even try to hide their religious bais. It was a very frustrating time. I was upset because I couldn’t make myself believe and folks were constantly telling me how because I was a atheist i didn’t have morals etc.
Do we even know if atheism is a cause of suicide enough to be counted? I know anecdotally that people have been suicidal because of the reception their atheist beliefs have or just because not feeling the religious stuff everyone is “supposed” to feel is painful as hell. Are there numbers?
@melodyraewood
I once saw a church marquee around Thanksgiving that said “Pity the atheist who is grateful but has no one to thank.” Not as crass as Fox News’s joke, but similarly brain-breaking. How can you not realize that gratitude can be directed toward other people, and not just God? Do the people in that church write thank-you notes to Jesus for their birthday presents?
@Some Gal, I just googled atheism and suicide and look at what popped up first on the list.
Is it wrong of me to think that if you’re oppressed to the point of being killed for your beliefs or systematically bullied into suicide, you’d actually be aware of it rather than people having to wonder if there’s any evidence? I don’t mean to be short or glib, but some things are obvious.
Some gal:
That study you linked to seems to ask just two questions: “This Group Does Not At All Agree with My Vision of American Society” and “I Would Disapprove if My Child Wanted to Marry a Member of This Group.”
Groups not listed include trans people and any sort of mental illness. Hell, gay people aren’t listed in the second question.
The results are very marked and I don’t want to diminish them, but “hate” still seems hard to derive from those results. Hell, even “distrust” in a general sense isn’t really explored: Would people be more likely to cross the street if they saw someone approaching who they (somehow) knew was an atheist vs, say, a black person?
I’d really like to see some non-survey studies so we could get a better sense of how this manifests in real-world situations.
Actually natfantastic, what I’m finding in the scholarly literature is more that “religiousity” has the effect of discouraging suicide, not that being an atheist causes oppression/bullying and then leads to increase suicide rates. For what its worth. Really hard to measure that though, and of course different religions have different attitudes about suicide, and is it really the religion that is helping to prevent suicide or is the feeling part of a community, etc. etc. etc.
I’m an atheist in TEXAS, and have no problem, so I don’t buy the atheist oppression bit. Yes, it sucks. but as Nat said, it’s not oppression.
I think part of it is that A.) I don’t really going around proclaiming it, and B.) I’ve always been an atheist and was never raised religiously, it’s kind of like having brown eyes–it’s just who I am. YMMV.
I wonder if atheists who do feel oppressed came to it later in life.
SIGH.
I think we can repudiate the bullshit that white cis male atheists are the most discriminated against without falling into minimizing the actual existing oppression of atheists qua atheists. There are many communities in which atheists are oppressed… it’s just that you know that in all of them, so are LGBT, and LGBT people are also oppressed in more urban settings as well.
OTOH, the support networks for protection against discrimination for atheists are quasi-inexistent, precisely because in a lot of places the problem is mild and the movement is composed mostly of privileged people for whom their atheism has, as best, been an inconvenience. Personally I wish the atheist/skeptics movement got off their ass and provided defense funds and the like instead of spending so much time on the work of laughing at all the ‘dumb religionists’.
For instance my partner is having issues with CPS (they took custody away and gave it to the state because her home was a ‘danger’ to the child… because her prior partner beat her and strangled her unconscious and left her for dead… so yeah). Part of her getting custody back is that she needs to see therapists that work with CPS to determine her fitness as a mother. Well, the fact she’s an atheist has been an issue with how she was perceived by the therapist, and it was introduced as potential evidence she’s not fit as a mother. Now, the fact she’s a woman is probably the most important facet of the whole thing (that’s why she was the victim of domestic violence, that’s why anything she does is to be scrutinized under a microscope because everything she does must be The Best For The Child) but, you know, intersectionality.
That makes sense; religion gives you an automatic social group that can be a good source of support. But wow, there are so many factors.
@thenatfantastic
Well, on suicide, part of me wonders how you’d know. Particularly if you live in an area where atheist=hell-bound, would you tell anyone your doubts? Would your friends or family tell anyone if you had? The fact that atheists are probably the group most likely to pass also means their the group most likely to suffer in ways that aren’t counted.
The fact that atheists can pass is also why it seems like no big deal to force them to lie. Unless, of course, you think lying is the type of thing that can damage the person forced to do it. And, of course, depending on the type of religion you are surrounded by, it is possible to be terrified without actually thinking you’d be violently attacked. I was coerced info attending a church service with one if my friends and certainly was terrified to the point I felt dizzy and ill. But I never for a second thought I’d be physically attacked. It was simply being surrounded by so much hatred of me for not believing (and being a feminist and a liberal).