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 just post the link.
@Marie
Make sure that you have no spaces or anything on the same line as the youtube link. My browser sticks spaces in when I copy-paste* and so I messed it up about a gazillion times before I found the mistake. I don’t know if that is what you did, but it is what it looks like it might be from here.
So this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W20JFi6Xs4Q
Fails.
This:
Should work.
* What a useful feature says NO ONE.
Normally just pasting does the trick
We are all far too helpful.
@melody
Half ninja’d, but I know WordPress’ ridiculous and goofy youtube secret. Muahaha.
I’m no pro.
Wordpress gets me all the time.
Thanks for the embeding lesson…I’ll try it next video I post (as this one just got repeated a bunch XD)
Marie, I will see your adorable ball python and raise you one cute beetle (with a silly nose).
Who put that https in my url!
Why DID the sloth cross the road?
I always find the experiences of atheists really interestingly because the only times I’ve been insulted for my religion it’s been by atheists. I don’t consider it oppression or anything like that, though like atheists my beliefs aren’t publicly represented and they are often used as a punch line. If I had a dime for every time someone used, “Like, no one believes in ODIN anymore,” or “Our beliefs aren’t weird and wrong like those people who worshiped Odin” I’d…. have enough for a coffee, maybe?
I have had people tell me I seemed too intelligent to be religious, though, and that their opinion of me was less simply because I was religious. It was very odd, and I have a couple of ex-friends thanks to these conversations, because I ended up not being able to be friends with people who looked down on me that way. Like I said, though, not oppression.
@Deoridhe
Ugh. Those atheists were definitely Asshole Atheists. I am sorry.
RE Parochialism among American atheists…yeah, that’s a thing. I often get the sense that they don’t actually realize that the gleefully batshit version of Christianity practiced by American fundamentalists is a. very unlike mainstream Christianity in many other parts of the world and b. not much like mainstream Christian denominations in the US either. To put this in context – I’m an atheist, but my family are all various flavors of Christian (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Catholic), and none of them even vaguely resemble the kind of Christian who rants about wars on Christmas or wanting to put the Ten Commandments on public buildings. The public conversation about religion, and it’s influence on popular culture, is not the same in the US as it is in, say, Europe. I often feel like American atheists either don’t realize that or don’t care because why shouldn’t they make sweeping statements that make it sound like America = the world?
Also, Freemage’s point about passing privilege is a key one. I have no idea if some of my former coworkers know I’m an atheist because it’s not something that comes up in general conversation in an office here. Part of that is that this is the Bay Area and religion isn’t as public here as it is in other parts of the country, so atheists here have passing privilege without having to lie or consciously omit facts about themselves (so basically it’s like living in Europe in that sense), but given the online behavior of a lot of Atheists (note capital) I have to wonder if they’re being sort of obnoxiously evangelical about their beliefs in everday contexts, or if their offline behavior is less shouty. It did come up when I was at school, and people would sometimes side-eye me, but honestly, being expected to stand there quietly while everyone else was doing morning prayers was more boring than oppressive.
I’m with nat on this. “People don’t like the fact that I’m an atheist and trust me less than religious people in some undefined way and also people talk about their religious beliefs as if it’s assumed that everyone agrees and that’s annoying for me to sit through” is not oppression in a significant sense. It’s an irritant. I experienced that in Texas too, and to a lesser extent experience it now around my husband’s very Catholic family. In comparison to, say, the stuff I’ve run into as a woman in the workplace, or the stuff Mr C deals with as a POC, it’s just not that big a deal. Annoying, rather than systemically destructive. I think it’s significant that although atheist POC and queer people exist, you almost never see atheists who’re in either group complaining about being oppressed for being atheists. This is because they have a baseline of systemic oppression to compare things to.
I also think that people need to stop and consider how what they’re saying about being oppressed as atheists looks from the perspective of people who’re facing massive systemic oppression. Honestly, it makes us look really, really clueless when we act as if there’s any comparison at all between the issues we face and the issues people face for being LGBT or POC.
(The reason I keep hammering on about this is because I am an atheist and every time I see another atheist going on about how atheists are super oppressed, hated more than anyone else, etc, I have that moment where someone who belongs to the same group you do says something embarrassingly awful and you know that it reflects poorly on you too in the minds of outsiders.)
Also part of the reason for my perspective on this is that I’ve lived in one of the few countries where there really is active oppression of atheists (and anyone else who isn’t a Sunni Muslim who specifically follows Wahhabi teachings) – Saudi Arabia. I spent time there as both an atheist AND a woman (well, girl). Want to guess which one of those led to more oppression?
@CassandraSays
The one queer atheist who identified as such actually was complaining that coming out as an atheist was harder than coming out as gay. He particularly identified anti-atheist bigotry in the LGBT community. I can find it for you if you would like to hear from someone who has experienced real oppression.
I actually think I have felt more oppression for being an atheist than I have for being mentally ill (although some of those things intersected), but I am out as an atheist far more than I am out as mentally ill, mostly because people get awkward as opposed to just being cool or horrible (the reactions I get to being an atheist) and awkward sucks. When I lived in the South and growing up in a very religious area, I heard bad things about atheists more often than I heard bad things about the mentally ill.
I am not trying to compare oppressions in general, but I can compare my own experiences.
What qualifications would I need to speak about oppression and know what the fuck I am talking about? I am not LGBT (although my sister is and is an atheist and we both feel the same way about atheists being discriminated against – would her opinion count?), and I am not a POC. Mentally ill okay? Or is that a less real oppression? Physically disabled? Does that count?
@Some Gal, I am honestly surprised to hear someone thinks anti-atheist bigotry is a problem in the LGBTQ+ community.
I’ll just say again that I think BlackBloc got it pretty much right.
Yeah, I’m not having this conversation. What nat said, again, and to a certain extent what BlackBloc said too.
This isn’t the one I remember, but it made most of the same points (and also addressed coming out to individuals in both the Atheist and LGBT movements as gay and an atheist respectively).
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/12/being-an-atheist-in-the-queer-community.html
I don’t know why you aren’t hearing these things, but they are being said.
(And of course, I’ve experienced anti-atheist discrimination in every minority community I am part of. But I’m sure that isn’t because of any systemic oppression going on. Instead, I just make CassandraSays look bad.)
@cloudiah
If you are genuinely interested, I can keep trying to find the first one I read, but most of the search results are about the Boy Scouts discriminating against both groups.
RE: Some Gal
I’m mentally ill, queer trans multi atheist (oh god, stringing it all together like that just makes me want to gouge out my fucking face with a fork; it’s like someone made an equation to sum up the least interesting parts of me), and my experiences were the opposite of yours, which is actually kind of interesting. Atheist? No one cared. Multi/mentally ill? Lost my family, my health, my job, and my home, in that order.
I admit, having come from the Southern USA, I always feel sorta confused when I hear about anti-atheist sentiments and wonder if I missed something all those twenty-odd years I lived there. Was I just really lucky or something? Did having a Southern Baptist hubby to run interference save my ass? (Seriously, I LOVED having him around whenever someone tried to convert me, I used him like a fucking religious meat shield.)
I’m not offended or anything. Just… perplexed. (I have never been clear on the word ‘oppression,’ so I just don’t use it. I’ve had enough trolls shriek at me because they thought I said multis were oppressed, when I said no such thing.)
@augochlorella
well, it was cute, for a beetle XD (I don’t like bugs that much. the only ones I like are mayflys and rolly pollys (technically crestations) (sp?).)
RE bugs, I like ladybugs and will let them crawl on me quite happily, yet will freak the fuck out if any other bug gets near me. I’ve never been able to explain why that is other than that ladybugs are cute.
“Why DID the sloth cross the road?”
The chickens’ union was on strike.
@LBT
I’m always perplexed by people who have been there longer than I was (it was only a little over one academic year) and weren’t told they deserved whatever they got because they were atheists (no matter what it was, I deserved it), weren’t informed that they were destroying the country and didn’t belong, or were coerced into pretending to pray for their own destruction. I was right near a famous anti- (well, let’s just say anti-most fun things) hot spot though. The mental hospital was right there too, but apparently was fairly good according to my friend who had stayed in more of them. The staff were mostly ableist assholes, but both they and the patients weren’t too keen on atheists. I got lots of support for standing up to the ableism, and a lot of mean looks and a couple mean responses for my atheism. At least they didn’t make me pray and they stopped the conversion attempt eventually. :/
My mom (who believes in something… not much more specific than that most days and suffers from depression) gives me shit for both the atheism and the mental illness. I consider her an outlier on everything though. I’m sorry that you have a much worse family. No one deserves my mom, let alone that.
I use oppressed to mean that there are interconnected systems and cultural memes in place to make life harder for a specific group based on their membership in that group. I consider all the groups I am not in by choice (except my race and economic class) to be oppressed to varying degrees. Some of them I barely experience oppression in, but I know other people have it much worse. I consider microaggressions to be part of oppression.
Marie, that python was lovely. I like pythons, I think they have the nicest looking faces of any snakes – that long, almost dished snout look rather than being very short and stubby. I’d love to get the chance to handle one.
augurochella, that weevil was cute too! Never thought I’d say that, lol.
A blue-tongued skink lived under the bungalow in the back yard when I was a kid. We’d see zir once or twice a year when zie came out to sit in the sun on the back lawn. They live about twenty years, apparently, which doesn’t surprise me; this one was an adult when we arrived and lived maybe ten years more. It was always funny seeing our corgi get all het up about the lizard, who’d hiss at her.
That’s a cute lizard. I hope they’re not big enough to hurt a cat/small dog.