My last couple of articles about Amanda Marcotte, one discussing her disastrous attempt to shame RAINN into supporting the ludicrous feminist notion of rape culture, and the other exploring her subtle softening of her anti-male rhetoric, must’ve hit a nerve.
Well, it might not have been me or my work, specifically, but something has put an Over 9000 tonne bee in her bonnet, and her former moderating tone has collapsed into a pile of deranged, shrill, and incomprehensible lunacy. And I mean, even more so than usual.
Marcotte begins by characterizing “men’s rights” as code for being anti-women’s rights, claiming that men’s human rights activists oppose:
- women’s right to be free of violence,
- women’s right to be autonomous in their sexual and relationship decision-making,
- women’s right to be treated as equals in education and
- women’s right to be treated as equals in labor.
All of these claims are lies.
Violence. Contrary to feminists who call for violence and even genocide against men, Men’s Human Rights Advocates and AVfM have always condemned violence against both women and men alike. Noting that men are more likely to die of violence than women, AND that women who kill are rarely seen as criminals does NOT equate to calling for violence against women.
Sexual Autonomy. Contrary to feminists who seek to dictate absurd standards of consent that turn innocent men into rapists, MHRAs recognize that human consent to sexual relationships can be a complex and subtle process and that women and men alike have the agency to consent to sex even when they have had a glass of wine with dinner.
Also, contrary to feminists who seek to undermine efforts to expand the options for effective male contraceptives, most MHRAs support reasonable contraception access for everyone, men and women alike.
Equality in education. Contrary to feminists who STILL think there is discrimination in education when a large majority of university students are female, MHRAs seek to address the factors that lead to men being discouraged from pursuing higher education – factors like the feminized educational norms and the epidemic of false rape claims and general rape hysteria on campus.
Equality in labor. MHRAs have no issue with the idea of equal pay for equal work, but once you correct for the lifestyle and employment choices of men and women, the so-called pay gap touted by feminists evaporates. Men overwhelmingly take on arduous and dangerous jobs that few to no women are interested in, and those men are compensated accordingly and justly.
MHRAs also point out that, if the pay gap actually existed, it would unfairly advantage women seeking employment, since employers would be keen to hire less expensive employees (women in this scenario), in much the same way that outsourced and immigrant labor tends to accept lower wages than other workers they may displace.
Bricks of Logic
But all these bricks of logic are dismissed by the loopy Marcotte because she found a survey on reddit that supposedly shows that most MRA’s (on reddit, anyway) are young, atheistic, and yet, somehow conservative in their politics – according to the survey, the vast majority of MRAs – 87% – are between the ages of 17-20, and 96% of us are 25 or under.
Marcotte then goes off on a wild tangent, claiming that those vast number of boys will leave atheism as they grow up, have sex, and moderate their views under the harsh tutelage of Christianity and feminist housewives:
The big question here is where do they go when they age? MRA blogs and forums have been around for awhile,[sic] so where are the older ones? They’re clearly growing out of it. I’d like to say they are going to grow up and grow out of misogyny, and hopefully some will. Unfortunately, I do think a large chunk will probably just drift into the Christian right and abandon their atheism. You get a little older and start craving an orderly house and stop feeling oppressed by shaving and showers. The possibility of having a wife who indulges you with regular sex, housework and nightly cooking starts to sound much better than the hamster wheel of hitting on women out of your league and getting rejected and turning online to blame feminism.
Marcotte’s failures here are manifold, for she is still too blinded by her own female privilege and notions of “misogyny” to recognize that advocating universal human equality – as MHRAs do – is NOT misogyny, and that it is, in fact, a stage of moral enlightenment that is more permanent than she can appreciate, because she has never experienced it. Feminism’s role in silencing men and their advocates is invisible to her, as is the bravery of the men and women who are finally standing up to that crap.
But Marcotte’s biggest failure is that she has been trolled and fooled by an obvious feminist troll – a detailed examination of the individual responses to the survey (available here and also through the reddit.com link above) indicates that a large number of the responses were automatically generated – for example, responses 443 through 525 are nearly identical and were submitted milliseconds apart, a process only possible through an automated effort to sabotage the results.
When you are a feminist who has been fooled repeatedly by the debunked wage gap, wildly inflated domestic violence claims and the infamous 1-in-4 rape lie, I guess it is easy to screw up further and believe other fake statistics touted by feminist liars and pseudoskeptics like Stephanie Zvan..
While overall statistics on the demographics for MRAs/MHRA’s may be lacking, Marcotte and others might consult this and this to get a better idea of the real distribution of ages and other demographics on men’s rights. If she cares at all, of course. The growing number of female MRAs must also trouble Amanda, which is probably why she likes phony statistics that erase those women and silence their voices.
Someday, Marcotte may actually start reporting the truth. Until she does, employers in the media like Slate.com and RawStory.com would do well to steer clear of a gullible fabulist like her.
