Reddit MRAs, heeding the call to service, once again prove what dedicated activists they are. Check out the upvotes on this baby!
Today Urban Dictionary, tomorrow the world! (Also, check out those tags!)
Category: reddit
Men’s Rights Activists have a new hero: a Cleveland bus driver who punched and choked a belligerent female passenger who had apparently refused to pay her fare.
The top post in the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, with more than 500 upvotes, links to a petition urging the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority to reinstate the bus driver, Artis Hughes, who was suspended after video of the incident leaked out. (See videos here and here.) According to the petition,
As a bus driver, mr. Hughes was lied to, insulted, threatened and eventually attacked by one of the passagers. He was clearly justified in striking back. Were he to suffer any negative consequences to his employment as a result of defending himself and striking back, this would set a disasterous precedent: he and other employees would legitimately believe that their workplace expects them to put up with harrassment, and that they will lose their jobs if they choose to stand up for themselves. …
As well as being a bus driver, mr. Hughes is a man, and [Shidea N. Lane, the passenger] is a woman. We continue to live in a world in which some people see fit to scold men for fighting back against the women who abuse them. After mr. Hughes struck ms. Lane, a woman could be heard protesting about it, saying “That’s a [censored] female”. Mr. Hughes responded by saying: “I don’t care. You want to be man? I’m going to treat you like a man!” This is a healthy attitude: if men refuse to strike back, fearing that the law will favour their female abusers over them, we create an environment in which women can harrass and victimize men with impunity. Instead, a man’s decision to fight back against a woman should be respected.
It is for these reasons – the fact that the bus driver was the real victim and was justified in hitting back; that he and other bus drivers should not fear the legal consequences of responding to attacks by passagers; and that men in general should not fear the legal consequences of responding to attacks by women – that we urge you to reinstate mr. Artis Hughes following the investigation on the incident, and hope that future policies will safeguard him and other bus drivers from legal assault whenever they respond to a passager’s physical assault.
You may have read about the heartbreaking story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who recently posted a much-watched YouTube video (posted below) detailing the bullying and harassment she’d endured online and in real life. This past Wednesday, she was found dead, the apparent victim of suicide.
There’s drama on Reddit again, with a veritable army of Redditors rising up in righteous indignation to fight off those evil man-haters who’ve challenged their ineffable right to free speech to post creepy and intrusive and possibly illegal pictures of women and girls.
I don’t have the energy to catalogue the whole murky mess so let me just point out a few of the key events here, all of which have inspired multiple mega-threads full of sound and fury and lots of misinformation.
Let’s take another quick trip over to the Men’s Rights subreddit to learn the dirty secret behind the superior performance of girls in schools these days: the machinations of unmuzzled feminists!
Funcuz, could you please show your work, as they say in school.
So this weekend I attended an interesting conference on the future of feminism. I’d like to present some of the most insightful papers from it.
Clarification: When I said I “attended a conference” I meant I “took a look at the Men’s Rights subreddit.” By “interesting” I meant “tedious” and by “insightful” I meant “ridiculous.” And by “papers” of course I meant “comments.”
So here, without further ado, are some of the pearls of wisdom I found in a thread asking the twin questions “What, in your opinion, is Feminism’s ultimate goal? When do you think they’ll consider their job ‘done?’” (Each yellow comment is a direct answer to one or both of the questions.)
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Men’s Rights activists spend more time discussing women than most women’s studies majors. Heck, they might even qualify for honorary degrees in women’s studies, if we expand the term “study” to mean “make shit up.”
Here a couple of dudes on the Men’s Rights subreddit offer their new but not-exactly-improved version of “difference feminism.”
Seems legit.
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UPDATE: AVFM has taken the post down.
Men’s Rights Activists have had a serious hate-on for the Southern Poverty Law Center ever since the hate-group-monitoring watchdog wrote about the misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement last spring.
Since the SPLC devotes its time to ferreting out bigots and exposing them to the world, this has put SPLC-hating MRAs in some interesting company. While not everyone who’s criticized the SPLC is a bigot – both Harper’s magazine and the Nation have been critical of the group and its fundraising methods – many of the most virulent critics of the SPLC are far-right racists. On Reddit, for example, the anti-SPLC subreddit, called simply SPLC, is dominated by white nationalists; indeed, at the moment, one of the top links on its front page is titled “Interest for White Student Union grows.”
Oh, ladies, you poor, deluded ladies, so unaware of the basic facts about yourselves. If only you had an objective source for information on the mystery that is you! Happily, a Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of nigglereddit has decided to throw a giant clue your way:
You may want to step back and take a look at the entire thread here, especially nigglereddit’s original post about the different ways he and his wife have responded to being new parents, in which he mocks his wife for what sounds very much like undiagnosed postpartum depression, blaming her misery not on brain chemistry or sleep deprivation or any of a zillion other things that tend to stress out new mothers but on all those terrible women’s magazines and books and TV shows she reads and/or watches.
Also, he pats himself on the back for being a totally cool and awesome dude who handles both his job and his duties as a father in a super awesome way — way better than his wife handles her new motherhood — because he’s a man, damnit, and totally able to see the world in an objective way.
Needless to day, this meaty slab of misogynist shitthatneverthappened got dozens up upvotes from the r/mensrights regulars.
Thanks to r/againstmensrights for pointing me to this terrible post.
EDITED TO ADD:
Speaking of which, the good folks at r/againstmensrights have assembled these handy guides to the shittiest comments in the shitty r/mensrights thread. A-one and a-two.
MRAs, forever exploring new frontiers in victimology! The latest revelation: Apparently men are being intimidated into hitting on women in bars due to the mysterious, malevolent power of their femaleness.