I wouldn’t say those are purely male traits, nor that there aren’t people who quit things. Half of the most tenacious people I’ve ever known are women. I’ve walked away from plenty of things.
But speaking in broad generalities, tenacity and perseverance are generally regarded by everyone in this society as positive traits, while quitting is generally considered a negative outcome. Men are, I think however, more likely to be influenced by societal definitions of success and accomplishment- again, see every criticism ever of the patriarchy.
The point was, that “not taking no for an answer” tends to be viewed as a good thing in so many matters of business, law, and personal growth, that some men have trouble understanding why it doesn’t apply with relationships.
‘Bacon’ ‘Burgers’. /shudders. Though the military-industrial complex is the only source for spangles these days, so you take the rough with the smooth I suppose.
See this is the thing that always trips me up tho…
Sexism in the judicial system is not the fault of feminists. Its the fault of sexism and patriarchy!
Feminists want to address sexism in the judicial system not just for themselves, but for everyone! That includes the men who have to deal with abusive women or mothers or sexist old white men judges who always give custody to the mother. Feminists want to deal with that too! This idea that we’re fine with an unjust court system is erroneous! Feminism wants custody to be in favour of the CHILD, fuck the parents, I want the child to take precedence.
Its just such narrow minded bullshit to say “because the sexist culture we live in is sexist is why I’m an MRA” - circular logic is circular! UGH!
It depends on the MRA, I’d imagine. They seem come from a diverse range of beliefs on gender (including a significant number of self-identified feminists), so it may be that they think many feminists are not overly concerned with dispelling the presumption that the mother is the primary parent, and are likely to conflate the interests of the mother with those of the child.
I agree that most genuine grievances are with sexism in society and feminism is generally vocal in its opposition to injustice whoever it affects. YMMV though - feminists are human beings and can be expected to support their own interests.
In the same way that we have TERFs and RadFems - MRAs have members who believe in “hypergamy” and spanking their wives. Its all a spectrum because people.
This all said, I do get it. I understand them. Its the same when you feel sorry for deposed royalty or say after the Vanderbilts lost all their money. I feel sorry for them because their way of life is gone and its all they ever knew, so expecting them to know better is pointless. But for MRAs… they never actually were royalty or a Vanderbilt, they’re raging against the fact that they’ll never BE one. And thats… thats just childish and wrong, and very very dangerous.
Literally one of the reasons I never had kids was I knew that when we split up I wouldn’t want to be the primary parent, but likely I would have to be, and I would hate it and resent the child and be a bitter twisted version of myself. No thank you.
Also poverty. I grew up in a food insecure home. Because my father left. I do not want to repeat that, ever.
Yes. I respect and share some of those feelings, partly from personal reasons, partly from working to help gender violence survivors in the context of various proceedings, including divorce.
So much harm is not prevented. Too much is wrongly accepted … wrongly explained as natural, unavoidable or … most wrong and cowardly … the fault of those harmed.
The Green Party of Canada has some MRA bullshit in their political platform (don’t ask me why), primarily around divorce and child custody. There were two things they said they were going to do that MRA’s advocate: end no fault divorce and write a presumption of joint custody into law. So I don’t know if these are common MRA positions, but I at least have some reason to think they are somewhat representative.
Ending no fault divorce means ending people’s right to leave a marriage unilaterally without their spouse doing something divorce-worthy (e.g. cheating). This is absolutely insane. No fault divorce gives abused partners a way out without having to prove abuse (if they could prove abuse they could have their spouses arrested). The question is, who would want to stay married to a person who didn’t want to be married to them? If your partner comes to you and says, “That’s it, I’m out of this relationship,” then sure, try to talk it out, but if that’s their decision and you want to use legal tactics to prevent them from leaving? It’s hard for me to imagine you aren’t an abusive asshole.
On the custody thing, stories of child custody are crazy on all sides. But the current issue-ridden system is based around the best interests of the child. The MRA position is to shift that balance away from the interests of the child and onto the supposed “rights” of the parents. That’s total bullshit. Are sexist old judges still assuming the best interest of the child is always going to be to be with mom rather than dad? I’m sure they are, though how anyone could look at that situation and not notice that it is just another manifestation of the gender roles that feminists are fighting against I don’t know.
But on the subject of MRA’s more broadly. The idea that life is a zero sum game with winners and losers is part of capitalist culture (along with the safely compartmentalized idea that somehow a zero sum game makes everyone better off). Trying to make things better from women necessarily means trying to make things worse for men, so why not turn the tables?
I internalized that idea really early on, but I did it with self-loathing. Anything I did that was good just meant bad things happened for someone else. I have a distinct memory of being in grade one and realizing that the kid who was bullying me was bullying me because I was smart and he had been held back a grade. I thought to myself, “Well, what good is being smart if it just makes other people feel bad?” It’s very hard for me to see things as win-win, so I generally try to make myself the loser.
I think a lot of MRAs did too, but one day someone says to them, “Hey, why are you taking all the blame. If it’s a dog eat dog world, why not go out and eat some dogs?” They find a community on reddit of people taking that approach. Next thing you know they are MGTOW (except they never really go away, do they?) or PUA’s and a recruit of Milo Y.'s or Roosh V’s army.
So sometimes I just can’t stand MRAs, they are deeply infuriating. Here I am eating my losses rather than externalizing them, and I see MRAs as a bunch of babies, crying about their situation in the hopes that someone will come down and fix it for them, or worse yet turning into active seekers of wins that only feel like wins if they can identify who lost.
It’s not a productive point of view on my part, and it’s playing into the same win/lose myth that spawns MRAs in the first place, but I’m an old now so I’m probably not going to stop thinking that way and the world will just have to wait me out.
Exactly. So if you want to get along with people AND you respect that you cannot change other people by willing it to be so, then you had better hope you can change the stimulus you are providing. Since it’s all you can control, what you put out is your only responsibility.
Arguing when you get a stimulus response you did not expect, rather than altering what you can control (your stimulus or your proximity), is seeking discord and putting the responsibility for it (yours) on others for having unhealthy or unsuccessful reactions.
You can call that inevitable (objective), or you can call it your own judgement (subjective) of what methods you see other people using to achieve the goals you think they have.
Can you see how much easier it is to not get so involved, to not substitute your imagination, or in the parlance, judgement - for that of another person
I have to ask how many people in the funding portion of philanhthopy are dedicated to it and ALSO self centered, entitled, and thinking everyone else there is there to serve their needs? Specifically the need for admiration.
I don’t meat to pick on you, but you pose some absurd strawpeople on your way to explaining how other people are so simple to understand on some level… but that level is the one where you have imagined what they want, and then imagined you know their burdens and headwinds, and then imagine you know everything they did… on the way to using words that minimize other people (lacking health/success).
Just… maybe it seems so simple because your models aren’t really accurate? There are more dimensions. The earth goes around the sun AND the sun goes around something else which orbits something else and actually, as scary as it is, people are not predictable and change their mind faster than your imagination can comprehend… and the only real surefire way through it, together, is kindness and communication.
So, please, a lot of the assumptions you’re communicating don’t seem so kind.
Sure, but the billion other stimuli in each of their lives are beyond your, or my, comprehension. You can say each of them had something inside or didn’t - but there are also a billion other external things involving other people with a billion things going on outside them, to consider. Surely internal mechanisms matter, but also the lead pipes in Bobs house, and Jims deep involvement in the Civilian Air Patrol may have to be considered if you’re looking at internal drive and behavior. Looking at one more than the other, forgetting that they interact, will not yield a holistic view.
know what makes it all so much easier?
TL;DR Tolerance.
I learned it by learning to respect myself, then it was inevitable I could choose to respect other people, or not, and own it, rather than looking for stimuli to blame or genitals to react to.
Just FWIW, I remember it from the very early 1990s. Occasionally they’d have a 'zine, or even an ad, in Factsheet Five. But yes, like you say, that was pre-Internet. Flash forward 20+ years, and I’m hearing about it again (mainly via BoingBoing), and thinking to myself “this shit again? Really?”
Point taken – now that you mention it, I used to listen to an AM radio station in Austin, until it switched from a music format to all-talk – I distinctly remember it being “men’s talk” but I’m not sure if that was only the show I happened to hear, or the whole format. The portion I heard had the hosts speculating about a young entertainer’s virginity, and getting really pissed off about not knowing, to a degree as if we’d just been invaded or something.
You hit the nail on the head. Its all about being an abusive asshole. Asserting a privilege to treat someone like crap.
MRAs are like every other reactionary movement. They are seeking to reassert some undeserved privilege which has been lost due to things like recognition of civil liberties or courts/lawmakers being fed up with harmful bullshit. They are no different from the Christian Dominionist types who claim “religious freedom” as an excuse to discriminate against gays, Muslims and atheists, or white supremacists who lament the idea that they have to treat people of color with the same degree of respect they treat anyone else.
We could almost ignore the “Men’s Rights” part as a smokescreen. They’ve appropriated “rights” language from it’s inventors and earnest users and tried to turn it to their cause, like Will Smith flying an alien spacecraft into the mothership in Independence Day. But they don’t actually think in terms of rights - a framework that is fundamentally about giving dignity to everyone - it’s just a weaponized usage of the term to try to paint those who oppose them as hypocrites. Sort of like a kid saying “it’s not fair” that they don’t get what they want. It has nothing to do with actual fairness, they’ve just learned that appeals to fairness have power.
