Today in Straw Feminism: Why they chuckle at male suicide figures — explained!
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are getting worked up about imaginary feminists again. Well, I suppose that’s pretty much all they ever do. But these two have managed to get even more worked up about even more imaginary feminists than they usually do:
![flying_downwardss 12 points 22 hours ago (18|6) I'M SORRY FOR BEING BORN MALE, I'M SORRY! Is that what the feminists and manginas want to hear? permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]Maschalismos 7 points 18 hours ago (7|0) You know full well it is. And the only way for you to atone for your sin -making a woman feel bad by existing- is to kill yourself. Thats why they chuckle at male suicide figures: they think its justice for the vast, infinite, undefined bulk of crimes against women since the dawn of time.](../../../../2014/02/sorry.png)
Upvotes for everyone!
Posted on February 23, 2014, in antifeminism, imaginary oppression, manginas, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, playing the victim, reddit, straw feminists and tagged anti-feminism, antifeminism, manginas, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, reddit, straw feminists. Bookmark the permalink. 67 Comments.
HOW DID THEY FIGURE IT OUT?
Wow. Just not treating females like shit or using the fact you’re a male to act the fool? This never occured? *smh*
BWAHAHAHAHA what a pair of idiots.
Don’t apologise for being born, fellas. Apologise for being wilfully stupid, misogynistic, and less mature than when you were two years old.
Idiots.
I love the sheer amount of self projection, and lack of self awareness. I love particularly how they cannot conceive of feminists as anything other then ‘laughing at male suicides’ when even cursory research into feminism proves that most are not doing that. (Mra on the other hand, laughing about female suicides? you know it.)
Maschalismos accuses feminists of unfairly blaming men for imaginary “undefined bulk of crimes against women” while simultaneously accusing feminists of something that is completely unfair, unfounded and imaginary.
It amazes me how many of these MRA’s lack a sense of irony.
MRAs belittle women and girls who attempt suicide all the fucking time!
How can we gold dig men’s money for bonbons, shoes, and child support if they have committed suicide?
That’s why we’re mocking them for it, you see: they aren’t living up to their duty of providing bon-bons and Scented Fucking Candles.
Yes, dudes, we are laughing at you. Not for suicide rates, but because you’re immature shitheads who think you’re smarter than you are and constantly display (and are proud of) your lack of knowledge about the simplest things.
Kittehserf, I’ve wondered this for a while, being here and all. What happens if I like SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES and I’m a man? Does that mean I’m a self-hating misandrist?
Funny aside, Firefox doesn’t recognize misandrist as a properly spelled word. It only suggests Dristan as an alternative.
AIT, it means you’ve been brainwashed into the
FurrinatiFeminist Hivemind and are now a MANGINA!!!Using the male suicide rate to score rhetorical points against feminists and win asspats from fellow MRAs: totally not misandry.
Not to mention showing how MRAs really do totes care about actual problems men face.
Sometimes, I confess, I feel stupid reading this MRM stuff. I keep mentally going like “what? why? what does that even mean? how can anyone even think that?”. I just don’t get it. It is so… bizarre.
Where do they even get this shit from?
Where shit usually comes from, at a guess.
No, we don’t want you to apologize! We want you to weep so that we may bathe in your tears!
Possibly from a tapir. My girlfriend used to work a zoo, and apparently tapir diarrhoea is amongst the foulest of the foul.
Also. ALL HAIL THE FURRINATI!
It’s true. MRA tears contain selfpitiosin, a protein that keeps our skin supple and beautiful, that we may continue gold digging and seducing alpha males and cuckolding beta males, and all our other nefarious misandrous doings.
(I’ve said too much, haven’t I. Oops.)
You have given away our secrets, Lady Mondegreen. We shall have to kill you.
And that Earl of Moray bloke, too.
I’ve seen white guys write that they think POC want them to apologize for being white too. What a stupid, douchey thing to say. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a guy write that someone somewhere wants him to apologize for being male, even though no one asked him to. It’s kind of a common thing to see in a comment section about privilege of any kind. They seem to think that their choices are A. deny that privilege exists or B. Put on their hairshirts and start self-flagellating. What sort of twisted thinking is that? Does it have a name? I know it’s a false dichotomy, but I’m referring to when someone from a privileged class thinks they are somehow persecuted and assume efforts toward equality as some sort of personal attack on them.
Who laughs at suicides? Do these MRAssholes not realize that the only place that’s happening is in their imaginations? Do these guys have any idea how high the rates of suicide are among gay, bi and transmen? I’ve never noticed them caring about LGBTQ equality. I’ve never seen them show support for men with clinical depression either. In fact, they seem pretty bigoted against all those folks too.
I can’t decide if they are lying outright in the hopes of convincing someone that they are actually victims of some kind or if they are really so terrified of losing unearned status and privilege that they imagine strides toward equality to be some sort of abuse.
Either way, what a bunch of fluff for brains whiners. I’m not buying that they care at all for anything other than rape apology, shit talking about, harassing, and abusing women. I get that with goals like that they have to pretend to care about something worthwhile in order to seem remotely legit, but in the end they never seem to be able to commit to the act.
Comedy routines and satire. Except they don’t recognize them as comedy routines or satire.
That is where they get their ideas from.
Seriously! 1950′s snark. Excuse me for living!
“Never able to commit to the act” sums them up perfectly. Caring about real problems men face isn’t part of their tapirbowelmovement at all. It is about hating women and lamenting their loss of complete legal power over us, with the occasional excursion into racism and hating men who don’t fit their narrow, nasty definition of Acceptable Men.
Even if the laws returned to what they were in, say, 19th century England, these guys wouldn’t stop complaining. There are after all Indian MRAs whining about how hard it is to be a man in the country identified as the worst place in the world to be born female.
Spectacular timing, in the wake of the suicide of an Antipodean celebrity whose problems included being hounded by Twitter trolls, many of whom revelled in misogynistic slurs. But of course it’s the dudes of the world whose very existence is begrudged.
If there’s not a name for that, there really should be. I’be noticed this too, a lot, and it annoys the hell out of me. It’s playing the victim, but in a very broad sense (rather than in a personal relationship context). It’s like playing the victim of society when the opposite is the case. I’m having some problems putting what I’m trying to convey into words, I think. But it’s a very passive-aggressive tactic; and I can’t tell if those who use it are intentionally and consciously using it, or if they truly do believe that they are being persecuted by equality. It seems like the people who use this tactic also like to pride themselves on being “anti-PC.”
To clarify: By “playing the victim” I mean people who are privileged and haven’t been victimized. Not people who have actually experienced oppression or persecution or violence.
Maybe instead of saying “god, I’m SORRY about this thing I CAN’T CHANGE ABOUT MYSELF that you INSIST I apologize for” you can stop with the diversion tactics and actually work on the things you can change, like being a misogynistic pile of crap!
@leatapp:
Yeah, it’s one of Those Things. There was a article at some point earlier that someone linked (hah, so specific), which showed some ongoing research into perception and how highly privilege people tended to take it as a personal attack when they were asked to account for it.
It is that people of a certain somewhat myopic bent skip straight from “Don’t care” to “Oh, so I’ll just self flagelate some more, then!”.
way personal opinion - I know several people who do kind of the same thing, and I wonder if it isn’t just a way to sort keep the attention focused on them. Either it’s “Oh, so tell me all about the ways in which I am better than you” or it’s “Oh, so tell me all about the ways in which I am a horrible person”… both results being you still talk about that person. But that’s people I know. It can’t apply to the entire world, right?
They should just change their names to Link considering their “argument” can be boiled down to “well, excuuuuuuuuuuse me, Princess!”
@maggiesausage, you are so right omfg.
Ugh, the white guilt stuff annoys me. In my sociology class some guy got offended when we learned about racial profiling. He just said she was being “biased” since police officers “choose” who they arrest. The professor just said “but they choose certain races more”, and he just replied “but you’re biased”.
Wut.
If he made that circular argument any tighter he’d disappear up his own arse.
Fibinachi,
This mentality sort of reminds me of when a stereotypical spoiled kid on a sitcom can’t have cookies for dinner so they say something like, “I never get to have any cookies! I just won’t eat anything! You want me to starve!”
Feminists definitely stole these guy’s ice cream.
Is it really so unbearable to behave decently towards women that they would sooner kill themselves?
They’re just a Mobius strip of stupidity.
Part of me wants to think that people who get defensive when asked to acknowledge their privilege have good intentions and just can’t think critically and are genuinely hurt because they think they’re being called bigoted.
The much bigger cynic me is pretty sure that they just enjoy having whatever privileged status’ they were born with and want the additional privilege of being able to say offensive things without getting called out. I’ve just had too many frustrating online conversations with people like this to think otherwise. They seem to purposely misunderstand some points and deliberately ignore others.
The more years on the internet I accumulate, the less of a crap I have to give for people act who confused and hurt when their ignorance and bigotry is pointed out to them.
Why do these shitstains think they speak for me?
leatapp - maybe that’s where this “laughing at male suicide” bit comes from. They’re still at the level of saying “I’m gonna hold my breath till I die!” and women* around them are saying, “Fine, go ahead.”
*And everyone else too, of course, but they wouldn’t mention that.
I just read that Piers Morgan’s CNN show got cancelled. Don’t anybody be surprised if transphobic people try to blame it on Janet Mock.
I think that is called the false dilemma fallacy.
What’s that all about, WWTH?
They think that equality is a zero sum game - if women (and people of color)have more equality, then white males have less. (This is not my own thought -I read it somewhere recently, and cannot remember where, sorry.) So when we ask/demand equality, we are trying to take what is theirs from them, and this is going to damage them forever.
I suppose this explains at least some of the rage some of these guys exhibit - they see us as trying to hurt them.
MRA equality: men have the right to fuck any woman they want; women have the right to be fucked by any man who wants to fuck them, except if he’s not the MRA in question.
What could be more equal than that?
kittehserf, Morgan brought her on the show to discuss trans issues, During the whole segment there was an infographic on the screen saying that she had been a man until the age of 18 when she transitioned. After the interview she called out the show for it on twitter. She’s always identified as female and doesn’t wish to be called formerly male.
Piers Morgan could have just apologized and made the correction and everyone could’ve moved on. But no. He doubled down and got defensive. He accused Mock and her supporters for bullying because apparently wanting to be labeled correctly is a terrible oppressive thing. He even tweeted that he was a victim of “cisphobia.”
It was a pretty big debacle and he was a huge asshole.
My eyes are rolling so hard now …
weirwoodtreehugger,
Those of us with certain privilege have been told in so many ways, our whole lives that the world is for us and we are “normal” and everyone else is some deviation away from us and we are literally entitled to take certain things for granted. I think it is possible not to see it, and to be protective of the privilege we can’t see, but know on some level we don’t want to lose. It is sort of like the Upton Sinclair quote,”, It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Maybe there is a scale from “Just don’t get it” to “Get it and like it this way” and difference people are on different points on that scale. I’ve been guilty of it. I’ve gotten offended at being called out, only to realize later that I was ignorant and wrong. I’ve had to apologize a few times because the thing about being blinded by your privilege is that you can’t see it. It’s just something that is and has always been. Ignoring it is as normal as breathing until something or someone snaps you out of it. I’m grateful to the people who took me to task. They saved me from a lifetime of being an asshole.
Allison Kilkenny of Citizen Radio has talked about how movies she liked before she was progressive are horrible to watch now. I’ve had the same experience. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, but you know that for years you watched bigoted portrayals of people, (in my case even women, of which I am one) and did not see it. It’s spooky and it’s humbling.
That is excellent news.
I don’t think that is quite right Weirwood TH, according to her book.
@leatapp: I have never really had the experience of going back to a piece of media I liked that is… questionable and no longer liking it because of the bad bits. I mean, the reason I enjoyed it in the first place is not because it expressed bigoted/outdated views. :\
I’ll just leave this here:
“Suicide is the biggest killer of young men. Arguably good riddance to the privileged.”
http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=605#p6326
Piers Morgan was an astounding asshole about the Janet Mock thing; he just kept doubling down and doubling down again and posting these awful infantile tweets about the people who were calling him out on his transphobia.
That said, I don’t think that’s going to be a big part, or maybe even a part, of the media spin on the story. Looking at the NYT story about it, the angle seems to be that he was a prickly Brit who didn’t connect with Americans and he talked too much about gun control. His ratings were terrible. The quotes from him in the NYT story seem to sugggest that he fully expected his show would be cancelled.
Wow. You wonder how these guys manage to actually deal with the real world (outside of the forums), imagining all of these evil feminists/women hiding around every corner. Do they really suspect that every other feminist they meet wishes death upon them? I can’t imagine what it must be like thinking like that. It must be miserable.
And is it just me, or is their various, er, theories about women totally inconsistent?
Victoria: they’re totally inconsistent. If us women have hamsters running our brains, how are we ruling the world?
It’s not you. Sometimes, they manage to contradict themselves within the same sentence
@aleprechaunist
That is indeed a reprehensible statement; I’m rather stunned by it.
But then again so was everyone else in that thread. You’ll notice that everyone else there told the person who posted it that it was utterly reprehensible, and that the person ultimately withdrew that part of the comment.
@A-leprechaunist, The other people calling that person out are also discussing how patriarchy negatively affects men, which is a feminist idea. So you have evidence of 1 feminist saying that, but they got called out by a bunch of other feminists pretty fast.
Also they cleared up their horrible wording(though they might have just done that since they were called out. Still, that example is the weakest sauce).
aleprechaunist: not quite the “gotcha!” you think it is. Sorry.
But but but one person on a discussion said a bad thing, so that person must: 1. be a feminist; 2. speak for all feminists everywhere.
Even though that person apologized, retracted and clarified zir statement. So that person wasn’t really wasn’t gloating over men commuting suicide. And which was stated in the same post a-leprechaunist quoted and linked to.
I guess it’d be misandry to point out the many times MRAs say women should be beaten, raped, killed en masse …
I was reading the Guardian the other day, the stats on male suicide in the UK are WAY up, disturbingly so, whereas suicide rates for women have declined almost by half over something like a ten year period? It was shocking to me, and I read through the article, much talk about how men need to be reached more effectively without much mention of how, or what the cause of this might be, and THEN:
I got to the comments. And lo, the very very few self identifying feminists who posted in the comments were are horrified as I was, and the self identifying numbers of men who posted seemed to hit on the following three themes:
1) if women would just go back home and take care of us, we wouldn’t kill ourselves, because in order for suicide to go down we need to go back to the fifties, where everyone knew Their Place;
2) MAN UP YOU BUNCH OF WHINERS, or the British equivalent of that statement, and;
3) um, maybe this is happening because people are always telling us Being A Man means you suck it up and take it and never complain or discuss mental illness/depression (the leading cause of suicide, obvs.), and perhaps what we need is maybe, um, some feminist strategy and theory to help us get past this notion that to be a man you can’t express your…
And then an uproar of angry commentators, yelling at whichever poor guy popped up to point out reality. Because yeah, as feminists often point out, patriarchy victimizes men too, and I think in no arena more often than in getting help for mental illness. The track record isn’t stellar with women either, but it’s a bit better.
(Apologies for using such extremely binary language to make my point.)
Lili, There was a study that radio host Thom Hartmann cites often that showed a correlation between higher suicide rates and conservative government in the UK and Australia. Rates were lower in liberal governments. Perhaps the people in group have it colossally wrong when they blame liberalism. Of course correlation =/= causation so who knows? It’s an interesting find though.
And, of course, since (white) men are more equal than everybody else, they deserve to have more equality! As if that even makes sense.
@lili
This is an interesting topic. What astounds me is that the Manosphere hates women and feminism and then co-opts feminist theory and lexicon without knowing that they use it properly sometimes. There was an article on AVFM written in a social constructivist feminist lens regarding sports culture.
They’re pretty desperate to do that and we all know why they’re desperate: they don’t have a case for any of their rage.
It’s just another part of being part of the Manosphere. One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. It’s one contradictory statement after another.
Urgh, I’ve noticed the whole “sorry for existing.” Frankly, I don’t CARE about your damn feelings, I care about your actions — for instance, treating my existence like it’s there to inspire guilt.
Because irony is women’s work otherwise it’s MISANDRY.
IME, the “do you just want me to apologize for being male/white/straight” people have usually just been pretty thick and insulated and honestly can’t wrap their minds around “you have privilege” having any implications other than “you should feel bad.” When I’ve heard it it wasn’t really meant maliciously or anything other than stupidly.