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 Kittehs’
I mean handling as in killing and flushing down the toilet (it is the only way to be sure) and then rubbing the imaginary spider cooties off my hands and hand-washing compulsively. So, I am touching them through a paper towel or Kleenex. But they are dead. (This may be TMI, but I can’t pee with a dead bug in the toilet. I keep thinking they’ll come back to life and attack my sensitive exposed parts.) I might not have a full-fledged phobia, but I am pretty close to one.
(I’m tensing up a bit just thinking about all this, but in a good way, like a horror movie vs. a real-life killer clown.)
Okay, that’s way worse than anything I’ve felt!
Odd, when I was a kid I had the guilts about putting bugs down the loo. I had this idea that some sewage worker would see them (magically floating in clean water, at that) and THEY WOULD KNOW I’d put the poor thing down there.
Weird.
I’d sooner deal with spiders than any clowns. Only clowns I can abide are the pathetic members of the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Fools and Joculators and College of Clowns.
My mom collects clowns and so I am mostly immune to their terrors. Evil Santa’s OTOH? AHHHHHHHHH!
This, unlike clowns, evil Santas and spiders, is adorable and funny.
@ hellkell
If you love the witches, have you read Lords and Ladies yet? It has lots of witches and bonus evil elves.
If what you like about the witches is that the books with them are more ensemble pieces than individually focused, as well as focused on women, I can’t say enough good things about Monstrous Regiment.
Looks like Lords and Ladies is next for me.
And Greebo! It has Schrodinger’s Greebo!
Some Gal – LOL thank you!
I, um, have two Pratchett books downloaded onto my Kindle app, but haven’t read them yet. [scuffs shoes and tries to pretend she’s with the cool kids]
Flushing isn’t the only way to kill spiders…I go for the smeared into oblivion option! (That smear on the wall? Yeah that used to be a spider = my views on spiders)
Flushing them requires so much more contact than dropping something flat and heavy and sliding it. Textbooks, they do have a use! 🙂
::hands cloudiah lollipop::
Anyone who can do your blog is one of the cool kids.
@Argenti
Oh they’re technically dead before they are flushed. Or pretending to be dead. You never know with spiders. That’s why I flush them. If you can’t watch them disappear, they could be anywhere. (None of this necessarily makes sense to anyone but me.)
I carefully and respectfully relocate the spider to the yard.
Roaches get smashed, drowned, poisoned, glue-trapped and generally callously disposed-of, now more than ever. The thought of one of those hairy-legged brown bandits putting a toe on my babies makes steam come out my ears.
And yet, oddly, I am perfectly at peace with the concept of the Vorkosigan Butter Bug, which basically looks like a large roach with silver accents. I was even disappointed to learn that someone had done up some butter bug hand puppets, and they had all sold out.
I don’t think I could bring myself to abuse a book like that.
Crud. All that concern about spoilers, and I went and let one slip. 🙁
A bit belated, but here’s my ladybug story.
I was about 1 1/2 – 2 years old. My mom took me to the store to do household shopping, and one of the items she picked up was a carton of live ladybugs from the garden center. You were supposed to leave it in the fridge for a few hours so the ladybugs would get nice and sleepy, leave it open in your yard, and the bugs would gradually warm up, crawl out, and eat the aphids in your garden. But – and this is the important thing – the cartons weren’t refrigerated in the store.
While we were checking out, I, sitting in the kid seat at the front of the cart while my mom put stuff on the conveyor belt, got ahold of the package of ladybugs…and opened it. Hundreds of perfectly alert and active ladybugs crawled out ALL OVER ME. I was absolutely delighted. Fortunately, the checker thought it was hysterical. So did my mom as soon as she realized nobody was upset.
I’ve always loved bugs. And reptiles. I won’t kill spiders in my apartment – if harmless, they are allowed to set up shop. (They eat the roaches.) If potentially dangerous, such as black widows, I catch them in cups and release them at the far side of the complex parking lot.
@Karalora
That sounds delightful. 🙂 Thanks for telling it.
Karalora, what a lovely story! 😀
Official reminder: Feminists are BITTER and ANGRY at all times. All of these adorable ladybug stories are really letting the sisterhood down.
🙂
@cloudiah
Clearly, the story proceeded only as it did because they were ladybugs and the three principles were all female. It would have been different with a carton of manbugs. We would have squished them all or something. Misandry!
@Karalora
Now I feel like the evil person, thinking ladybugs aren’t cute but scary and creepy. Though 2 year old you does sound cute.
One of my favourite parts of gardening is collecting or purchasing ladybugs for release in the vegetable patch and then watching them go to work.
All things flappy freak the shit out of me (seriously, I will poop my pants if a moth gets too near to me) and ladybugs flapping around me are no exception. If it’s just one crawling on me though, winning. If they tickle me or flap in my face or there are too many for me to manage, I will run. Watching the buzz about at a distance is delightful.
And they are absolutely right. Don’t expected to be treated equally if you can’t take equal punishment. The fact that feminists immediately spin this into domestic violence just shows that they can’t face actual equality.
“Punishment” – so you think people hitting each other is okay? Are you perfectly happy to be beaten by someone because they don’t like what you said, how you dressed, or any other reason? Fuckwit. You’re just another MRA jacking off to the idea of hurting women. You’re as cowardly as the rest of them, too, leaving comments on inactive threads as if it means your Manly Man Thoughts are getting the last word.
Manly Man Thoughts is the world’s worst cover band.