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.
Holy shit, Bad_dog. I don’t know if that was drunk posting or what, but it’s frightening.
@Cami Ask him how he feels about trans men using the men’s bathroom ….
I don’t get the problem at all. It’s not like I have multiple bathrooms at home all labelled up for every part of the gender spectrum. Ok, I do sympathise where people are shy about going within earshot of anyone else but otherwise what’s the big deal?
I work with a trans guy who transitioned at work nearly 20 years ago, and the bathroom issue is what people freaked out about. Luckily both management and a significant minority of his co-workers had his back, and the freakout ended pretty quickly.
I didn’t understand the freakout then, and I don’t understand it now.
I am just catching up and I read through some of the comments on the Salon article and WTF, someone claims that abuse victims with children are now having their children taken from them until they leave the abusive situation?! Are the authorities (if they are doing this) trying to get the victims killed?
I haven’t caught up on the thead yet, but I had to chime in with two things. The first is that I saw my first penis in preschool where we all shared a bathroom with really low stall dividers, no doors. You had to try a little to look, but we were mostly curious little kids so we did that. No big deal. I don’t see how it becomes a bigger deal when the kids are older except that it is less okay for the person being seen. (In this case, I feel bad for the little girl if everyone else is trying to scope her out, but the other parents at the school could stop that behavior easy by both explaining trans* and also emphasizing the no-peeking-in-the-bathroom rule. Easy.)
@melody (sorta)
Have you read Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality? It opens with that point. I haven’t finished it, but am very much enjoying it so far. It isn’t as good as her book Virgin, but it is still quite informative. Anyway, it opens with how complicated biology is and uses that to demonstrate that being straight is also more complicated. (Her boyfriend is XXY. Does that make her relationship straight? Lesbian? Neither? Both? etc.)
I was wondering why the fact that the other kids might potentially see a penis on a kid their own age was considered such a problem, too.
Totally off topic, but a friend of mine posted this on Facebook and it made me laugh really hard so I thought I’d share. I needed a laugh.
This Film is Not Yet Rated talks a lot about fucked up MPAA attitudes about sex in movies. Apparently cunnilingus is a way bigger no-no than fellatio, especially if the woman is enjoying it/orgasming. I got to see tons of male orgasms in the American Pie movies, but a woman having an orgasm from cunnilingus tips a movie into an X rating. Such bullshit.
On sex-segregated bathrooms, I was once waiting in line for the single woman’s bathroom at the Harvard Coop and it was quite some time before one if the women went to the men’s (I think it was a combination of weirdness about using the other bathroom and not wanting to jump the line). Of course, this line of 10+ women using two bathrooms stopped the second a man showed up. He went right into the men’s while glaring at the woman who came out for making him wait an extra minute/using the wrong bathroom. Would it have been such a big deal to just join the women’s line? We’d been waiting forever, surely we had more right to either bathroom. smh (well, annoyance)
@cloudiah
OMG. I am boggled. Because a picture of fruit is too girly for some men? My Trader Joe’s yogurt just has a patterned single-color background, ffs. The boyfriend had some for breakfast ftr and his masculinity seems as intact as it ever was (meaning only masculine sometimes in some ways, just the way we like it 🙂 ).
Some Gal Not Bored At All–I just picked Straight up from my university library. I really liked “Virgin: The Untouched History” and I’d heard about it here from another commenter, so I thought I’d get it.
Does anyone else want a Manboobz book club? Maybe on the forum?
I still have to join the forum (maybe I’ll get around to that when I get back from the doctors this afternoon)…
I would love a book club though. We could have a lot of fun. (The movie/tv conversation the other day was certainly awesome.)
That a rapey sex scene would be more kid-friendly than a consensual one is just… I don’t get it! I mean, usually when people believe stuff you consider completely wrong, you can still see WHY they believe what they do, you can see what arguments they’d bring up, even if you don’t agree with them a bit. But this? I HAVE NO IDEA.
Re bathrooms, etiquette expert Magdalena Ribbing, who answers etiquette questions on DN, Sweden’s biggest newspaper, cleared that up in a post. Men go to the MEN’S room and women go to the WOMEN’S room, that goes for cis as well as trans men and women, and if your gender fluctuates you go to the men’s room when you’re a man and women’s room when you’re a woman. And it’s TERRIBLY RUDE to break this rule of etiquette! (I can’t recall her saying anything about genderqueer people – maybe those should determine which gender is closest and go by that one.)
She’s acquired kind of a fanbase among HBT people, and also held the installation speech at Stockholm Pride a couple of years ago, since despite being an old rich blue-haired aristocrat who takes etiquette super-seriously, she’s completely cool with HBT people. Hopefully she does exert some kind of influence over, eh, “her people”.
I’m not sure how pairing yogurt with taut, sweaty man-abs in low-riding jeans is supposed to entice the bros to eat it.
Kim – let me guess, kid’s being sent to private school because they’re not constantly having funds cut like state ones?
Were you thinking of the books Where Did I Come From and What’s Happening to Me? They weren’t bad, as I recall (purely hetero of course). Looking back, I like that the adults were all chubby (and the man in the first book bald) and that sex was definitely about Mummy and Daddy feeling very warm and loving in bed. Oh, and that in the puberty book it was very much “variation is normal” whether it’s circumcised or not, or having different coloured pubes and head hair (“See? You can be a blonde and a brunette at the same time.”)
FYI, everyone: I’m reporting our dear friend Government Girlfriends to WordPress for violating their terms of service (the “does not contain threats or incite violence” clause), so if anyone wanted to archive any choice posts, now’s the time.
Oh dear, that’ll cause another tantrum. I wonder where he’ll post it if he’s not able to use WordPress.
Not Tumblr, that’s for sure. WordPress is about the most lenient platform out there. (Of course I don’t know if they’ll take it down, and if so if they’ll take down the whole blog or just the post ranting about mutilating women.)
I’m still not sure if he’s a Poe or serious and in need of urgent psychiatric assistance, but either way his online presence is toxic.
If he is a poe he is a damn dedicated one. I also have a hard time believing that someone could be that un-self aware. I keep thinking he’s going to post a “gotcha” one day and rant how all the “dumb feminists” believed him, or some nonsense… But that is way preferable to him being actually serious.
I’d far rather he be a Poe than the next Sodini.
Ummm, I’m pretty damn sure that, at the age of 12, seeing a consensual sex scene in Lucky Number Slevin was not nearly as traumatizing as stumbling upon extremely graphic photos of an 14-year-old Iraqi girl being brutally gang-raped by US soldiers. The former was kind of interesting to me for obvious reasons, whereas the latter was so horrifying that to this day I can never bring myself to joke about sexual violence.
That’s a very interesting (read: horrific) aspect of rape culture you pointed out.
Honestly, that post make me think he’s a Mr. Al sock. Remember how Mr. Al would always pretend to be enraged to the point of incoherence and he’d post a keyboard mash with correctly-spelled swear words carefully interspersed?
I’ve had that suspicion before, honestly. GGGs obsession with this place is a bit odd for someone who didn’t have any history here prior to that one thread where GGG first appeared.
There’s also the dithering about posting a picture. Al also seemed to really want to post a picture, but was afraid to, but thought we wouldn’t believe it was him, etc.
In which case the answer to “is he a poe?” is “yes and no.” Yes, none of the stuff he describes actually happened; it was all invented to make him sound even more pathetic, but no, he’s not joking; he actually believes all the stuff he says.
@katz
Good for you! I’ve mostly been relying on what everyone says about it because my one visit creeped me out too much.