Are MRAs always angry?

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Sephardic Male (and other MRA's), I have doubts about any of you being serious, but incase you are, I'd be curious to know what you think about this (If you don't already know what this is, read Wikipedia before you make a judgement):


A MODEST PROPOSAL

For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a
burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to
the publick.

by Dr. Jonathan Swift


1729

(excerpt)

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will
not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in
London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a
most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a
fricasie, or a ragoust.

I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of the
hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand
may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males;
which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my
reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a
circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will
be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand
may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and
fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them
suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat
for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for
friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will
make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will
be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh 12
pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, encreaseth to 28
pounds.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for
landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem
to have the best title to the children.

Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful
in March, and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave
author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolifick dyet,
there are more children born in Roman Catholick countries about nine
months after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because
the number of Popish infants, is at least three to one in this kingdom,
and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening
the number of Papists among us.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_modest_proposal

Last edited by Stannis on 19 Apr 2014, 8:11 pm, edited 11 times in total.

Hopper, that was a Jewish website that I pointed you to, talking direectly about circumcision as a religious issue. I hardly avoided the connection there, nor did I "drag" feminists in.

I live in the US, where we have to deal with AIPAC. I can get a lot of crap for what I say, much more than you or starvingartist would have to worry about in the UK or Canada.

Angry MRAs are equivalent to radical feminists.


However, I agree that male circumcision is a fine example of double standards against males, it is not caused by women but much of the society take it as a natural standard procedure, which it should not. However, I've encountered a lot of women who prefer circumcised penises and get offended by the idea to stop the procedure, this attitude is purely cultural, Americans and Muslim societies encourage male circumcision hence why most of their women prefer circumcised penises for their partners and their sons (they find the idea of natural penis gross) while most European women find circumcision gross and backward.

No, "health benefits" and appearance benefits don't justify it, male circumcision is a mutilation too! It would be like saying that removing breasts from female infants has health benefits regarding breast cancer. Like the FGM, the custom had originally the same reasons: Controlling male sexuality and "preventing" boys to masturbate easily.

A skin product founded by Oprah contains male foreskin cells, just imagine how Oprah would respond if a skin cream for men went on the market that was made from parts of the genitalia of little girls. That would be an outrage and rightly so.

I am even against piercing ears of baby girls, let alone removing a whole foreskin, hmm that would be a hard conflict with any future partner who happens to be somehow even moderately religious; I don't know a single mother in my surrounding who wouldn't pierce her little daughters' ears or go against her boy's circumcision. That's another serious dating issue I didn't think about before! lol.

It was meant to be a probing question. I wanted to see if you were truly offended or if you just wanted to debate. There is a very important difference and it matters.

I was trying to understand where you are coming from.

Tch. With my image to maintain? [Straightens tie, walks into doorframe]



I think the radical* feminists get the edge, though, as they put effort and structure into their thinking, however wrong one may find it. Whereas for MRAs it's the equivalent of very basic comprehension learning - you know the kind of thing, where a paragraph will have three sentences, one of which is 'John's kite is red', and the question is, 'who has a red kite?'. It's like that, only everything is the fault of feminists and/or feminism.

Otherwise you make sensible and agreeable points.

*Do they designate themselves so, or are they designated so by others?

Sure



My movement can't analyze or critique?

Let's recap:



So yeah, you feminists were totally on target there.



Yeah, calling my argument "stupid" is a much better way to "analyze or critique," especially when you guys get your facts wrong:



And again here:





You may not like this argument, and you may not agree with it, but you haven't offered a better one.

For a sideshow, the US president was fibbing on gender-issues here as well: "Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns…in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fac ... _blog.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fac ... io-rating/
http://spectator.org/blog/57588/obamas- ... m-debunked



Yes, so back to the first issue:



I'm not going to accept that any more than second wave feminists accepted 'normality' as an excuse for patriarchy or FGM.



Where did you find "blocking" (or any synonym) in what I wrote? I'm obviously not going to answer for what you wish I'd said.

I guess its easy to conclude that both feminists and MRAs are always angry!

MGM is normal Hopper? Just because most do it?

Guess what, enslavement was done by most, was it normal?

Your argument regarding MGM is very weak.

and starvingkid, I *really* want to hear your opinion regarding MGM.

[Citation Needed]

Yes, it's normal. You used the phrase 'much of society take it as a natural standard procedure'. I used the word 'normal'. It is a social norm. It shouldn't be, but it is and, as I say, it being normal does not make it right. My pointing out its normality, and explaining why it was normal, was to explain part of the reason most people don't think about it the way they do FGM.

This is the full post he took the quote from:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp6018352.html#6018352

I am against MGM, but that's not really the issue under discussion. That issue is/was MRAs using MGM to have attack feminists. Which I am also against.


ETA: on that note, NobodyKnows: I am working on wider considerations in terms of work and power and class, and will come to them in time. But to respond on your points about circumcision:

I said critique, not criticise. They think these things are bad - well, great, but why? What is their analysis of the situations they find so wrong? Important questions like: what is being done? To whom? Why? By whom? Under whose say so? Whose interests does the situation serve? How? Whose interests does it go against? How? Etc. To be answered as fully and richly as possible.

I asked in what way were feminists blocking the ending of male circumcision, as it is the only thing that could justify the dragging of feminism into the matter. Otherwise it just comes to look like the most important thing is having a go at feminists, rather than considering and working on putting a stop to male circumision. And from this it comes to look as though putting a stop to male cirumcision is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of attacking feminism. That question was my clearest way of asking: what has feminism got to do with the matter? My post was the sketching out of the various answers I've come across, and responding to them.

By 'normal', I mean as The_Face_of_Boo put it: 'much of society take it as a standard natural procedure'. Many a cultural norm is contested, but that doesn't mean the contestation makes much difference or impact on the culture. People don't begin to question something 'normal' until they have cause to. It takes a shift in perspective, either come to in one's own way or circumstance, or for that new perspective to be succesfully communicated by someone else. It would be interesting to see how the numbers (pro/anti/no issue) of those who identify as feminist compare to the population at large on the matter of male circumcision, and to have similar numbers on FGM for comparison. Because feminists, as we all are, are socially and culturally embedded, and are primarily concerned with the status and experience of women qua women. So if men-at-large and medical practitioners don't raise the issue of MGM - and these are the people who, first and foremost, should have an idea if there's a problem with it - I don't see why it would be expected to occur to feminists-at-large, nor why anyone would single out feminists for not considering it.

I'm surprised you haven't gone for the imperialist-racist charge: FGM is something weird foreigners do, and they have funny ways and crazy beliefs, so it's bad. MGM is something we rational westerners do, and we have science and enlightenment, so it's fine.

And I still contend that, if there was a concerted feminist effort to put a stop to MGM, it would be met with anger, weary eye-rolling, derision, name calling and resentment by both society-at-large and many MRAs ("meddling feminists, it's a male body issue - what right do they have, it's up to the parents - how dare they interfere, it's political correctness gone mad" etc).

Exactly!

And furthermore, 21st century feminism is not a monolithic movement. It is a fragmented ideology with many competing schools of thought. The so-called "radical" feminists had their heyday in the late 60s and early 70s and they are by far the most angry.

Do I believe that men and women should have equal rights? Absolutely. Am I a feminist? Hell no. I've met too many modern feminists who espouse conspiracy theories about "the patriarchy" and believe that it's okay for women to be selfish just because they are women. I attribute the later to a sense of entitlement.

Can we for once define feminism right. If you are for equal rights, then you are a feminist, my friend.

You may be against "modern" or "radical" feminism or other branches, but in the core feminism is nothing but ensuring women are treated equally. It was a big issue before, maybe not so big nowadays, but it's still there.

And then there are lots of nutheads that turn people against feminism. But that's radical movements should NOT be mindlessly blended with feminism. That just shows how people are ignorant of the true issues and the whole movement itself. This line of thinking and divide is a perfect example why women had less rights in the first place!!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I'd never posted anything about men's issues to WP or any other site until early March. I'd also never even heard the term "MRA" until LKL took a swipe at them, accusing them of keeping women out of the military.

(She's actually been the most interesting feminist to debate on WP so far, and the only one with the balls to go point-by-point and respond to rebuttals with counter-rebuttals.)

I replied to LKL that the entire local NCFM chapter had signed the petition to equalize draft registration, and they were the only people I'd known of either gender who were even aware of it.

The best that she could come up with was a list of mainline social conservatives, saying "These guys aren't feminists." So? She also presented as "actual MRA perspectives" three links from a site that described men's activists as:

"A loosely defined, but largely retrograde, collection of activists and internet talkers," who, unlike the (obviously-cooler) "original Men’s Movement, which was inspired by and heavily influenced by feminism" are "largely a reactionary movement." (And on, and on...)

Let me qualify my "MRA" credentials:

I'd never heard of A Voice For Men until Symantec blocked them as a "hate site."

I'll have to go back and look, but I don't think that I posted any negative comments about feminists until after starvingartist made a swipe against men's rights activists:

(She went on to demand that men treat women and women's activists as individuals.)

It was also after several feminists on this board ragged on "nice guys" for somehow asking too much in return. Hey, at least they asked in the first place. When women have wanted something from me, they've often painted is as a one-way moral obligation - like working three-times the amount that's actually needed to maintain infrastructure, while not bothering to make sure that schools work. By the way, women dominate education by 69%.

My total activity in the local NCFM branch: I've given them a couple of $20 donations over three years (which got me on the e-mail list), and I've read some of their material when it was interesting.

MRAs also aren't the only groups that I've spoken up for. The spectrum ranges from a lesbian couple that I knew who were suing my state for the right to get hitched to unjustly accused Catholic priests. (I'm straight enough to make Euclid jealous, and atheist.)

You chicks and man-chicks need to lay off of men. Then we can talk about treating you fairly.

feminism is female superiority and entitlements. equal rights is humanism and egalitarianism






the radicals have taken over the movement. "not all feminists are like that" excuse is common among feminists who sit by and not doing anything to remove the radicals






feminist actions like censorship, threats of violence, getting men fired, using false and bogus statistics, painting men as pedophiles, potential rapists, using shaming tactics, trying to label consensual sex as rape like they are doing in California, etc has done more to turn people off from feminism

did you ever consider that the reason the rest of us don't go through each of your posts and take them apart piece by piece is not because we "don't have enough balls", but because we feel it's not worth our time? your debating style is reactive, vitriolic, hostile, personally insulting, and rude. it doesn't exactly encourage lots of people to participate and put in the time and effort to try to reach you as a person. you make that impossible and the attempt unpleasant by your attitude.

Last edited by starvingartist on 20 Apr 2014, 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

the following is a post of mine from page 7 of this thread: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf255862-0-90.html