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 got sex ed when I started school, so around 6. Nothing peso about that. Kids should be taught as soon as they are old enough to understand. And it would be good for it to include info about gender and homosexuality too. They might not understand it fully if they don’t know anyone as an example, but it’ll be thee in there minds to help them understand when they do see it in movies or whatever.
Perhaps there’s something I’m missing here, but the idea that it’s terrible for the kid to use the girls bathrooms because the other little girls might see a penis…um, how? The way most girls bathrooms are set up is with stalls. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else’s genitalia in the bathroom during my entire time at school.
I know this is a minor point in amongst all the other stupidity, it’s just bugging me for some reason.
melody — I write run-on sentences, you put periods between your clauses instead of commas. Let’s split the difference and we can both write proper sentences? XD
Kim — we didn’t have even a whiff of sex ed until 4th grade — ~9 years old (and I graduated at 17, so I’m guessing most of my classmates where 10). And it was strictly “so this is what puberty is” with the assumption that none of us would be doing that for at least another year. Just to make this more stupid, it was split by gender, I guess hearing about menstruation and erections were just to sensitive for people who wouldn’t be experiencing that?
Starting when school really starts sounds so much better. First grade / 6 works, because let’s face it, kindergarten is colors and numbers and can you say your alphabet without thinking lmnop is one letter? (My brother repeated kindergarten for that last one)
Cassandra — that point is actually the most reasoned discussion on so of the threads. I guess schools are removing the stall doors because of drug use, which, unsurprisingly, had people going “in grade school?!” I never saw genitals in the bathroom, or even the locker room, it I made a point of changing in the bathroom, especially during swimming. (Those locker room “you looking at me?” stories? Fun times)
So yeah, I’d love locker room privacy to become a thing, separate from this little girl’s desire to just fucking pee and get back to class. Oh and that’s wtf the big deal is btw, the school’s getting sued for discrimination for making her either use the nurse’s bathroom or the boys room — you can use the nurses bathroom, because you don’t belong in either bathroom and unisex bathrooms aren’t a thing.
My elementary school didn’t have…each grade had a pair of gendered bathrooms, individual bathrooms, not stalls. Wouldn’t have mattered which you used, no one was going to know anything. I’m not even sure it was a gendered pair, and not just one bathroom, I can’t remember ever having this debate (and I’ll use whatever’s available, so I think I’d remember it). Maybe they were gendered and since there was never anyone there I didn’t pay attention, I am a space cadet after all. Huge surprise, I know!
…I just typo’ed huge so badly that I got hegemony…how?!
So then, in ideal land we can do age appropriate sex ed the way we do math, ie at all grades as a subset of regular class. And just set up a bunch of private bathrooms, preferably at all ages, not just grade school. Private stalls in locker rooms too please, I suppose unisex locker rooms is asking too much? Can we make it not be? Please?
Wait, drug use in grade school? Is this an actual thing or just schools freaking out for no concrete reason?
People get so weird about this stuff. A friend of mine was working at a pre-school for a while and she had a fit over a kid who presented as male who she was convinced had an innie rather than an outie. I had to talk her out of offering to help the kid in the bathroom just because she was nosy and wanted to know for sure (wish someone had been able to film my face when I was all “wait, you want to do WHAT?”). And then she started going on about how the parents were abusing the kid by making hir wear pants and I was all “wait, the kid hasn’t even said anything about hir gender, this is all just you freaking out that you’ve never seen hir in a dress?”.
People are idiots.
Also, about the domestic violence photo series – why are MRAs so fixated on venting about what a slut they think the mother is that they’re not worrying about the son? Looking at the photos where Shane is with Kayden, he was one bad day or nasty argument away from hitting that kid. The way he was interacting with the little girl was less worrying, but with the boy? If Maggie hadn’t left when she did he would have hit the little boy too. You’d think that people who’re supposed to be all about protecting men and boys would at least have noticed that.
Bur, Cassandra, if a man hits a boy, there is no woman to blame, so why would they be interested? Unless the mother made him do it. Yeah that’s probably it, the mother made the man hit the boy.
This is probably most popular circle jerk topic on Reddit overall–how badly Redditors want to hit women. That they try to dress it up as a move towards gender equality is sickening.
Hello all, back after pills and sleep, and thank y’all for the internet hugs!
On the little girl – haven’t seen the article but wtf is this “how do 5 or 6 year olds know the difference” – um, sounds like your gender policing isn’t working if they have no idea, non? I’m pretty sure I had some vague idea that boys had penises by that age, and I’d certainly never seen one.
Removing stall doors??? Fuck, that’s abuse itself, to me – talk about setting a child or teen up for humiliation. Not even bullying-by-other-kids humiliation, but aren’t most of us still taught to close the door, to be private? How long before some kids just don’t go to the loo at all from embarrassment? Imagine if an organisation tried to pull that stunt on adults. That’s worse than my cheapskate high school that expected us to use the showers after Phys Ed before curtains had been installed. (I refused point blank even when they had: nothing was getting me stripping in front of other people.)
Aaaaand score one for the italics monster.
The depressing thing is, when I tried Googling news stories to find the context on this video, I found dozens of OTHER stories about men knocking women out — in public, and unprovoked. Equality.
Assholes.
Regarding children and sex ed… I just read a book about Swedish children’s books from the seventies, which was pretty fun. It wasn’t an academic read, more of infotainment about how children’s literature have changed from the seventies to now. Anyway, back in the day there was this idea that there’s no such thing as being “too young” to know about politics, or colonial oppression, environmental problems, the cold war, or sex. We should respect children by not hiding anything from them, but giving them age-appropriate info-books about EVERYTHING.
So there were some VERY explicit books about sex, aimed at small children, around. Including actual photographs of people fucking in various positions (although most such books featured cartoon characters, some had actual photos), erect penises (showing how a condom works) and so on. Guess that trend sort of died out largely because a) we became more influenced by the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world photographs of people fucking and erect penises aren’t supposed to be shown to children, and b) the dangerous paedophiles started to get lots of attention, and thereby grown-ups talking too much about sex with children or showing sexually explicit pictures to them became suspect.
But hey, it wasn’t like my generation or the people a tad bit older than me became sexually traumatized or anything. We did just fine, despite having all this sex ed thrown at us when we were tiny. So I’m definitely with the crowd who thinks there’s no such thing as being “too young to know”.
(And it’s still the case that movies can get an all-ages-rating at cinemas, even if they contain full frontal nudity and sex scenes.)
@deezers
You almost got it right…The woman is blamed for NOT stopping the abuse against her son…It said so in the salon comment section.
I feel like from a film rating perspective we’re far too strict about sex and not nearly strict enough about violence (in the US).
Also, there was one movie I read about where they changed what had been a happy sex scene to a rapey sex scene because the rapey sex scene was able to get a more kid-friendly rating, whereas the happy sex scene they had originally planned would have yielded an R rating (I think it might have been Sucker Punch?). That’s a pretty good illustration of how messed up the ratings priorities are, that it’s more acceptable to show sex if it’s non-consensual than if everyone involved is having a good time.
FTR, I graduated a decade ago this year, in a school that definitely had drug use going on (to the point we had to track down the music man in The Music Man because dude, you’re on in 2, put down the joint!) — we had stall doors. Had to sign in and out and get a bathroom pass, but you could lock the damned stall door and burn a cigarette hole into the seat.
I *highly* doubt elementary school stall doors are being removed, and am inclined to chalk this up to paranoia and acedotal “evidence” — the few comments on stall doors prolly come from one location or something, I saw maybe 3 and a bunch going “huh what?”
My HS is the local public pool though, and they still don’t have shower curtains. But I mastered the art of changing behind a towel years ago.
Also, oh gods a kid who never wears a skirt! I wonder what’s under the pants! Ok um, creepy much?
As to the domestic violence photos, that one of Shane holding Kayden near/on the floor? I was expecting the next one to be after that poor little boy had had his head smashed into the floor. Nothing about that relationship says “not already abusive”. And frankly? Saying goodbye to the toddler that just watched you attack her mother, before screaming about how you didn’t hurt anyone and was just trying to protect the girl from her mother drunk driving? Nothing about that says “not abusive” — emotional abuse is still abuse. And using a toddler as a bargaining chip is low.
May his every step be filled with Legos!
Yeah, it was actually the photo of Shane holding Kayden down that bothered me the most out of the whole set. Not sure if that’s because I’ve seen so much domestic abuse or because I went into the photo set expecting to see that, so I was braced for it, but not for the shots of the kid being abused.
The one at the barber is creepy too.
“I feel like from a film rating perspective we’re far too strict about sex and not nearly strict enough about violence (in the US).”
Yeah, that. I see no issue with letting even little tiny kids have sterile medical info on sex, gender, dangly bits, etc. Clearly you don’t go telling kids about sex acts in graphic detail (eg penis goes in vagina = ok, anything about moist pink clams is not) — but why do we lie about the stork and whatnot? If the kid is old enough to ask, they’re old enough to grasp that there’s a special organ for growing babies once the requisite things occur. The nitty gritty of contraception science is probably beyond 3 year olds, but “there’s an organ that babies grow in” is like, they can ask a question? then they can get this.
Versus the comic violence that exists in cartoons, acme anvils and shit like that. Dynamite blows up in coyote’s face? Lol the roadrunner wins and the coyote looks foolish! No, the coyote’s head is in another state, and fireworks are dangerous and look similar. Maybe don’t suggest that the worst they can do is make you look foolish? (I’m biased here, I loathe fireworks, they make me extra jumpy)
Ugh, did I ever tell the story of my cousin and the firework here? Guy Fawkes Night, some asshole shoved a lit firework down the back of her sweater. She ended up in the ER, and then had to wear this weird medical covering over her back for weeks because her skin was such a mess it couldn’t come into contact with fabric. I’d never seen a bad burn before and what that thing did to her skin was just horrifying.
Dude who did it didn’t get into any trouble. Yep, women sure are privileged when it comes to the legal system.
What the everloving fuck? How do you not get punished for that?! I’ve never seen a particularly bad burn in the flesh (I apologize for my lack of better words) — I’m the goddamned master of accidental second degree burns, but I manage to keep them small enough to use regular bandages (those blister band aids work on burns as long as the blister is intact). I can’t fucking imagine the amount of damage done to require that sort of dressing, how do you just get away with that?!
That is just…*shudders* skin belongs as skin, not removed, there’s a reason we’re covered in the stuff. And to just walk away scot free while she’s got a back covered in a medical dressing, wtf is wrong with the world?
The cops decided that he was just kidding around and hadn’t intended to hurt her (…sorry, nobody is that dumb), and they were both teenagers, so he got off with just a “now don’t you do that again, young man” from the local police. It was such bullshit.
@Cassandra
That is indescribably horrible. I’m no stranger to severe burns (three so far, but they were fairly small by comparison), but God DAMN. And the jerk got away with it makes it even more awful. I am so sorry she had to suffer through that.
The boys will be boys mentality gets kids out of a lot of trouble.
Even sexual assault sometimes gets a dismissive attitude of boys will be boys when they are teenagers.
Intent, it’s fucking magic!
Except apparently it is with cops…why am I sure this idiot is white?
“You don’t do that again” is appropriate for, idk, the time my mother couldn’t find the current car insurance info because my father’s moved it and she was barely speeding and had both of us with her and was clearly flustered about how he must’ve moved it how can that be the expired info?!
Not appropriate when there’s someone in need of ER treatment!
Ok, actually in need of it, maybe appropriate if people are just being paranoid — my brother got shot with a paintball gun one Halloween, Mr. Brilliant, our father, took him to the ER cuz he was nauseous, took all of 5 min to have the dr agree that eating an entire bag of candy will do that!
Two idiotic stories caused by my father in one comment! My ability to derail is quite honed >.<
Boys will be boys and accidentally knock you over while running too fast, sure. You don’t accidentally put a firecracker down someone’s shirt. Shit ain’t an ice cube!
Thing is, even if he didn’t understand the full extent of how much injury it might cause? He knew it was going to hurt. “I’m dumb and I don’t think things through” shouldn’t be a valid defense when you’ve caused someone to end up in the ER.
I mean, think about car accidents. The fact that in the majority of cases there was no intent to cause harm doesn’t get you off the hook if you accidentally kill someone.