Above, the unintentionally ironic MRA meme of the week, courtesy of A Voice for Men’s Facebook page, their main distribution center for unintentionally ironic and otherwise terrible memes. I’m not sure what specific week this is the ironic meme for, given that Emma Watson’s speech to the UN took place last September and this meme was posted on Facebook only this week, but just roll with it, people!
So what exactly makes this meme ironic? Well, for starters, Watson didn’t actually say the words in question or otherwise order men to talk to women about their feelings.
What she said was a good deal more subtle. She started by saying that one of the things that led her to embrace feminism was her realization, at age 18, that “my male friends were unable to express their feelings.” Then she went on to talk in more detail about the ways breaking down gender stereotypes helps to free, well, everyone.
We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that they are and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence.
If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled.
Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong… It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideals.
If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are—we can all be freer and this is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom.
The big irony here? This is exactly what a real Men’s Rights movement should be promoting, not raging against.
Adding to the irony, whoever made this meme made clear that they aren’t just unwilling to listen to women’s feelings; they’re unwilling to listen to a woman’s logical argument. Which is why they simplified her comments and distorted their meaning.
But what wins this meme the grand prize for irony this week is meme maker’s assertion that “WE DON’T NEED OR WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT OUR FEELINGS.”
Really? Because in fact MRA dudes and MGTOWs and the rest of their ilk talk about their feelings constantly, and loudly — with anyone willing to listen and some who aren’t.
Sure, it’s true that most MRA dudes and their ideological soulmates don’t like to talk about their feelings of sadness or anxiety or insecurity or doubt. You know, the sorts of feelings it would be good for most of these guys to explore and understand and, when possible, get past.
But they love, just love, to talk about how angry they are, how angry they think other men are, and how much feminists, and the women of the world generally, are going to suffer if they refuse to listen to angry men and do what they say. Hell, the so-called “father” of Men’s Rights in the UK? A guy who calls himself Angry Harry. (And he more than lives up to the name.)
The cherry on top of this Irony Sundae: the memester’s decision to use a picture of a homeless man to represent a man oppressed by demanding women.
Men don’t become homeless because some evil woman asked them to talk about their feelings. Indeed, given how many homeless people are mentally ill, most homeless men (and women) would benefit from having the opportunity to talk to a trained professional about their feelings and from better mental health services generally. (Not to mention better services for veterans suffering from PTSD and other war-related maladies.)
In the US, many homeless people who are mentally ill were dumped onto the streets by facilities that didn’t have the money to properly care for them; some of the facilities were and are so bad that their former inhabitants actually prefer the streets.
Oh, and one of the main reasons mental health services are so shitty in the US — and why, in particular, so many men are so poorly served? The old-fashioned notion that men “DON’T NEED OR WANT TO TALK … ABOUT OUR FEELINGS.”
So I award AVFM this week’s IRONY AWARD in MEMING, for once again promoting ideas that actually make the world worse for men!
@Buttercup
Slaveholders in the early United States also wanted it both ways. They wanted to steal the proceeds of unfree labor, but when enslaved people became too old or disabled to work, they would suddenly be given their freedom and told to support themselves. It became such a problem that many states passed laws that required slaveholders to continue to support freed former slaves, which had the not-entirely-unintended consequence of making it very burdensome for people to free able-bodied families and led to less voluntary emancipation.
And, of course, modern slaveholders (we call them traffickers today) do the same thing. It seems to be a common attitude amongst parasitic people.
Y’know, I’ve never seen that mentioned in all the sentimental homilies I’ve read about the Old South. Just sweet stories about how masters treated their old slaves “like family!” and tenderly nursed them in their declining years. Or how elderly slaves were so devoted to their white owners that they refused freedom from love (no mention is made about a fear of starvation or death from exposure).
You’d almost think all those reverent Antebellum stuff is bullshit propaganda…
@Flying Mouse
There are a few species of ant that are referred to as “slave-making ants.” They’ve evolved a system whereby the offspring of the slave-maker queen are specialized for raiding the colonies of closely-related species, stealing mature pupae, and returning them to the slave-maker nest. The pupae then hatch into ants that are imprinted with the slave-maker nest scent, and therefore they work for the slave-makers as if they were in their own colony.
In very advanced slave-maker species, the slave-makers are utterly unable to do anything except conduct raids. They can’t even eat if food is directly in front of them. They have to be fed by the “slave” ants.
We call these ants parasites, and there are some entomologists who think calling them “slave-makers” is misleading. I actually disagree. I think it’s an extremely apt term, because people who hold other people in slavery or near-slavery conditions are parasites. They are, in concept, not any different from a tapeworm. Slaveholders aren’t actually providing enslaved people with food and shelter – they are just returning a small portion of the proceeds of unfree labor to the unfree people who produced it. The slaveholders produce nothing. These are human parasites in a literal sense.
@PoM – I agree with you completely. I despise that reverence for the Old South. It was a filthy system that benefited a handful of people at the expense of millions. I understand the generations of poverty and humiliation that came from the Confederate defeat in the American Civil War… but that suffering doesn’t cancel the violence and inhumanity that came before (and that continue on in different forms now).
I also usually find the people who will go to any extent to excuse and justify any kind of slavery are the same people who will excuse and justify pretty much any abuse as long as they can maintain the status quo. As long as the “right” people are comfortable, who cares?
A great deal of the poverty that came from reconstruction was largely the fault of the elites crushing down on poor white farmers to keep them from allying with the newly freed slaves. Socialist and populist farmer’s unions scared the fucking shit out of them.
In other words, I have zero fucking sympathy for anything that happened during reconstruction, because most of it was them destroying their own economies rather than letting black people participate.
A-one:
http://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/not-a-tea-party-a-confederate-party/
And a-two:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/powell.php?articleid=13035
These focus more on what it means for the modern conservative movement, but the points are largely there.
Hell, even the “carpetbagger” narrative is part of how they maintain cultural hegemony. Not to say that sort of thing didn’t happen, but nowhere near like they’d have you believe.
What’s always oozed out of MRA statements the most is the way they seem to almost recognize how all the patriarchal, toxic masculinity bullshit harms them, and so they want a form of oppressive patriarchy that has just as many downsides for women, but also has no ill effect for them. And they seem to believe that women can automagically make this happen by suffering enough. Like if women were to accept a system even more arbitrary and unwinable, then somehow men would stop having to constantly chase an impossible standard of masculinity.
And I think that really speaks to the other thing that oozes off their statements. That they are abusers. That they subscribe to holding women to an impossible standard and blaming them for all their problems and think that women are holding the keys to them feeling no longer hard done by anything in their lives, including their own internalized garbage surrounding masculinity, and that they can have that if they just hurt women enough and so will never have to change.
And unfortunately for them and fortunately for everyone else, they will have to change, if anyone wants the nasty effects of toxic masculinity on men to stop. Because no one, and I mean no one does more to prop up toxic masculinity standards and create those unwinnable bonds than dudes like this. And groups of men (or those socialized as if they were men) that can escape that are able to be a lot happier and able to start feeling and expressing a whole host of emotions and identities rather than the narrow band prescribed by these fucks.
@sunnysombrera,
the only way I can make misogynist paradox work is if their stance is that they WILL feed, clothe and protect women provided those women surrender all agency and don’t try anything uppity, like saying no to sex or having opinions.
eg:
Wife: Honey, the house is still on fire, maybe we should step outside?
Husband: Dammit bitch! Who’s the boss around here! Go get me a sammich.
True. Divide and conquer seems to be recurring tactic of those in power.
@sunnysombrera:
You’re assuming too much empathy. The misogynist paradigm doesn’t work if you look at it from a female point of view. This is because to misogynists, women aren’t people any more than money is people or cars are people. They’re just things for actual people to collect. Nobody cares about whether the money is happy, or the cars are happy, or the women are happy.
What do misogynists want? They want women to cook their food, clean their houses, suck their cock and bear their children. They haven’t thought about how the women should think in order to fit within it, because women thinking isn’t part of it. They simply want them to fade into the background during the rest of the time.
To a misogynist women are appliances, like a shower stall. If you notice your shower at all in any circumstance outside of the time when you want to use it, then that’s a broken shower and it needs to be fixed; and if all the showers in the world start talking to one another then that’s a disaster which needs a total response.
What do MGTOWs want? Ultimately, they want you to go back to being an appliance so they can ignore you when they’re not using you for something. The thought that this might be a coherent activity for a human to do only matters inasmuch as they think you’re human. Since they don’t, it doesn’t.
As someone with a history of anger management issues, it always befuddled me – not to mention coming off as quite hypocritical – how much these oh-so-macho guys got off on just being angry and (worst of all) assuming that also made them more logical.
All this, from people who – supposedly unlike myself – didn’t have anger management issues …but nonetheless went into states of blind and incomprehensible rage, acting as if it were normal.
Anger might make you feel more in control but it only renders you incapable of thinking sensibly. It almost ends up acting like a contagious disease when one is trying to act calm and collected around perpetually pissed-off individuals – because it can become so overwhelming that even that level-headed individual will just become angry themselves. When that aspect of toxic masculinity is combined with an equally toxic environment with toxic people, it further perpetuates this perspective where everything is colored by crimson shades.
It’s one of the reasons I moved away from Los Angeles County too; it’s an area filled with Type-A Personalities who seemed to get off on being stressed and never seemed to realize that shit makes other people (a Type-B like myself) tense. I was prone to having fits of rage because, most of the time, no one bothered listening to my concerns and decidedly used me as some kind of emotional punching bag or just poked and prodded me for pure shits and giggles. It was just too much to handle.
Policy Of Madness – Glad you mentioned the Utah thing. One of many situations in which it’s far more cost effective to actually help people unconditionally than it is to pay for the results of not doing so.
Another situation of this kind is, surprisingly, the idea of Universal Basic Income. People who’ve crunched the numbers have found that once you account for the bureaucratic costs of determining who does and doesn’t qualify for various forms of government assistance, it would actually be slightly cheaper to eliminate social security, disability income, food stamps, Welfare and other entitlement program and just replace them with a guaranteed 30k a year for every single citizen. Small experiments done with such programs show that no, in fact, doing so doesn’t make people lazy, but lets them go to work for the benefit of their communities without worrying about what makes money instead of what actually needs doing. Seems like a no-brainer in a world where technology is increasingly making human labor obsolete.
You’d think MRAs would be all about this, since it would eliminate child support worries…
Universal basic income severely harms industries which rely on low-paid, unqualified workers, to the point of killing some of those industries. This sounds great if you’re a worker, but not so much if you’re an investor, and three guesses which of those two classes has the most political clout. As such, it’s sadly not a no-brainer.
@EJ
But if women are appliances, women are appliances that need maintenance every day or else after a month they will stop working forever. It’s the maintenance part that MRAs constantly whine about. They want a submissive female for life but somehow
sheit must cost nothing to buy OR upkeep.Upon final thought, the only way these guys might be happy is if they get government assistance to pay for their females’ (and possibly their children as well) sustenance. Or they agree to take care of the women but only by giving them as little as possible, as cheap as possible.
@sunnysombrera
That’s probably why they throw out their blenders when they get a little dirty or old. Only the NEW appliances people have never used are worthy of them! And it takes a lot of money to replace a blender if you throw it away after using it once.
…
Oh, wait, that’s PUAs, isn’t it?
Eh, I don’t fucking care.
@Miss Andry
I was actually thinking about that line today when I reread the meme. XD It’s, like:
“I want you to talk about your feelings.”
“No! Stop treating men like piggy banks! I don’t like it!”
“Very good! That’s wrong, but we’re getting someplace!”
I am totally stealing “mantrum”
@Pandapool
Oh God, when you try and figure out an utopia that would suit both MRAs AND PUAs…now that’s impossible. The MRAs would lose their shit because the PUAs have “deflowered” all the women before the MRAs can marry them. But being MRAs they’d only blame the women for it.
That reminds me. In the MRA utopia they are also free to use and discard other appliances that don’t have an owner, at any time, anywhere. Also the appliances-on-the-side must be new every time, for every man that wants one.
…no wonder these guys are angry. They feel entitled to he impossible.
This seems to be the MRA/adjacent whine of the day.
http://imgur.com/gallery/1CFmP9I
So apparently men DO want to talk about their feelings, but meaniehead feminists make fun of them when they do.
Translation: Meaniehead feminists tell me that “I feel like hot women should be obligated to date me” isn’t really an emotion.
I second the rest who want to see more unconditional helping. Sure, if we have universal basic income, for instance, then some people will just cash in that money and play video games all day long. But that’s a price I’m willing to pay. As it is, with all these control systems to make sure that only those who really honestly totally need it get any kind of welfare money, so many people spend their days in agony over whether they will have any income at all the next month, or the month after that… It’s almost a no-brainer that most people would be more productive if they didn’t have all that economic anxiety to deal with.
They don’t understand the difference between derailing a conversation about misogyny with “what about the menz” and having honest conversations at appropriate times and places with people who care about them about their emotions.
Or, they do understand and are being disingenuous little shits on purpose.
Plus, with automation and computers, less labor is needed. There isn’t enough demand for labor anymore to sustain a 40 hour work week and have full or close to full employment. So, why should it be such a bad thing if some people choose to take the money and not work? As long as enough people choose to work that everything gets done that needs to be done, we’re good.
The fact that a guaranteed minimum income would allow people the choice to quit their jobs at any time would mean that employers would be forced to treat their employees respectfully and in exchange, those that employ low skilled positions, wouldn’t have to pay that well, they would just have to be more respectful.
“Sure, if we have universal basic income, for instance, then some people will just cash in that money and play video games all day long.”
Honestly? I think even the ones who do this will mostly get bored with it, eventually. People are so much more prone to engage in constant addictive behavior when the external pressure is for them not to. It’s a defiant sort of thing and an escapist thing. When the external world isn’t putting that pressure on you, things change.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying these guys would be out building charities and solving world hunger, but they’d probably do things like organize local gaming events, write walkthroughs and reviews, etc. People like to be useful in the areas where they can be, it’s human nature.