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.
An angry young fellow named Tim
If I were to go out on a limb
Just doesn’t get it
When guys say “I’d hit it”
Or why the girls all run from him
@Dvärghundspossen
The last Die Hard movie (#4) included a very long action sequence of the hero kicking the shit out of and then killing a female villain. And Die Hard movies are my go to for “acceptable masculine violence”.
Shooting down helicopters with cars. Check.
Creative use of 16-wheelers and fire hydrants. Check
Hitting women who are trying to kill you. Check.
So I think that we have to fall back on the “MRAs are time travellers” theory to explain this one.
@Dvärghundspossen – This is where I really find myself baffled. It’s the almost total lack of genuine concern amongst these people about some really quite serious issues that many men face. It seems they’d rather spout their statistics and ‘theories’ without doing anything at all to ACTUALLY help, and instead just use the real problems faced by men to further their ‘wimmin are bitchez’ shtick.
The prison rape argument gets me most of all. “What about men getting raped in prison, you feminsts don’t care” – erm, first of all, yeah, we do. Second of all, what are you doing about it? Nothing except using it to shut down conversation. Isn’t that a bit sick? I sort of think that men who are victims of rape and abuse in prison would prefer if these guys actually did something other than trying to use their pain and suffering to discredit a bunch of other people. It demonstrates, to me, that they don’t actually give a fuck, and those men being raped in prison are, to them, nothing more than some abstract concept that somehow makes feminists shit. And that’s all they want. It’s disturbing and sad, and shows just how much the MRM is not actually about other men and their issues at all. Why are these guys not out marching, creating legislation, setting up shelters and crisis centres for men, if they are as concerned as they would have you believe?
Hmphhh.
We (as a society, not as in Manboobz where this sort of thing is justly verboten*) tolerate an awful lot of violent posturing, especially from men. In the case of men, we almost seem to expect it like someone is considered less manly if they don’t engage in violent rhetoric.
I find it pretty disgusting, off-putting, and a bit frightening. That doesn’t seem to be how most of society looks on it.
*Just because it is frowned upon doesn’t mean that we (as in at Manboobz) don’t either forget and slip back into the more general stream of violent posturing or hit a personal point at which violence seems an acceptible rhetorical response (possibly “real-life” response as well, but I’m not sure that affects the perception of violent rhetoric as the distinction would get lost in the sheer amount of posturing rhetoric anyway).
It is scary how fixated they are with hurting women.
It seems to me that there is a wide gulf between what men say and what they do regarding punching. They may list the circumstances under which they think punching is justified but when you ask them if they do punch people who “got in your space or questioned your honor” the answer is usually no. Because circumstances, yanno?
@thebewilderness
Maybe they don’t actually want to punch people, but know that they are expected to at least act as though they do or is that giving them too much credit?
I don’t care who it is, but if someone is physically assaulting me, I will defend myself.
@Some Gal: I suspect that most guys who say they would punch someone who got into their space and so on but don’t actually do so may simply find real violence a bit scary, although they enjoy playing up violent scenarios in their head where they get to be hero (not that you’re actually a hero for punching someone who gets into your space…). Although they’d never admit that.
I’m speculating wildly here…
It’s the human rights movement at it again!
I think you are right. It is mostly about posturing. They are usually shocked when a punch is actually thrown. The dominance dance has many steps.
I do think they resent the idea that it is wrong to beat people who are smaller. Fairness is interpreted as unfairness by those who resent looking like an asshole for beating up a person half their size. This is one of the reasons abusers beat their children in the privacy of their home instead of in public.
@ thebewilderness
Yes, there probably is a gulf for some things, but I am acquainted with two guys who like to tell me and others in great and loving detail about the people (almost all men) they have punched, wounded, thrown against the wall, etc. for reasons like ‘he looked at me wrong’. I think they don’t take it very seriously, which I find more than a little disturbing.Of course they could also just be lying.
Like Some Gal says, they are expected to act that way. I think it also has to do with culture and socio-economic status, to a certain degree, but I don’t want to go off on something I don’t know enough about.
@Some Gal
I totally agree about the violent posturing. It really really bothers me. I am also not a fan of guys who say they would ‘kill’ anyone who commits a crime against, say, a female family member. It’s like, ok, great, thanks for telling me never to tell you if anything like that ever happens to me!
and the ‘asking to get punched’ thing is just disturbing. I know a lot of people who have talked that way, but very few who have actually hit someone. In fact, since high school, *nobody* I know has been in a physical fight. But I hang out with geeks, so there’s that. Not often a tabletop roleplaying game breaks out in violence in real life, though I’m sure it does happen…
Two of my cousins were very belligerent when they drank. They would take offense at just about anything and get into fist fights with one another. They eventually outgrew it. The fist fights, not the belligerence.
Again I’ll say it: If the first thing you say to someone saying they want equality is “awesome, now I can hit you” then something is wrong with you.
And agree that it is a women are smaller/weaker thing. A guy once got up in my friends face and pushed her around. However, he was very quick to back down when my 5’9” self got involved. It was one thing to push around a 5’1” woman, but another thing to take on a taller and non frightened woman.
Agreed. They want to pretend it is gender alone. However, when a high schooler is wailing on a middle schooler people frown on that too. Any notable size/age difference between the attacker and the attacked results in a response.
So don’t these guys get pissed when a woman hits a man? And then they say about “equality” when a man hits a woman. That is not equality. In any sense of the word.
@melody
And it really is pretending because they rely on this to make the woman look more* in the wrong. Otherwise, thy wouldn’t bother trying to categorize a rather large, sturdy man as old and frail.
*I have no idea if the woman is at fault or not, but since the men in question seem to take it as given that women always are…
FTFY
Some Gal – yes, that argument makes me see red, for both partners in such a marriage. The idea of being expected to have sex with someone you cannot feel sexual attraction for is repulsive; the idea of being tied to someone who cannot feel attraction to your body is repulsive; the idea of being told you cannot marry the person you love simply because you’re the same gender, but are perfectly free to make a sham marriage, is repulsive. Makes me wonder if these filth have any clue as to what a loving marriage is about, if they reduce it to that.
Bolt is a disgusting piece of shit – he’s racist (actually lost a court case over comments about who is a ‘real’ Aborigine recently); he’s as misogynist as they come (he hates our PM even more for being a woman than for being a Labor politician) and he’s homophobic.
I really wish the video gave more context……..
And because I just got this video by email and we could all probably do with a laugh: presenting, the Almost Fastest Dog In the World
http://youtu.be/gPjl13VC1jc
@The Kittehs’
The crowd’s reaction is hilarious.
The kitteh, I’d be happy to join a “down with Andrew Bolt” party. The man is a foul and lying idiot. Now that he’s finished dissing the gays he can get back to campaigning against Gillard. Cos how dare she continue to run for government!
Melody, there was an American photo journalism piece recently ( I think in the Time, but discussed on Slate and other places), that showed domestic violence as it happened. It was amazing how many of the comments refused to attack the aggressor and focused all blame on the woman or the photographer.
Here is the Time photo essay “Photography as Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence.” Trigger warning, but if you can handle it, I recommend it highly.
*Photographer
Gods. At least the police officer told Maggie that “they don’t stop until they kill you” about this sort of thing, and that she wasn’t getting Shane into trouble, he’d done it himself.
And what a low shit that “good guy” Shane is – Mr Insecurity who whines that he’s not the centre of her attention, that she spends more energy on her children, who are actual toddlers with first claim on her care, not bloody man-children. Fucking grow up, you disgusting creature.