Misogyny: The Men's Rights Activists, Part One
Misogyny, Terrorism and the Manosphere No. 3: Welcome to the World of Harrison Butker, Josh Hawley, and the Proud Boys
They do, of course, have other uniforms. The noble kilt is not their only fashion murder victim. I do love this one, however; it’s just as charming as the faux-military black uniform worn by the infamous Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, who is now doing 22 years in the federal slammer for the January 6th insurrection he helped plan. All that’s missing for the kilt version is a Mood Ring, and I really do fell that’s an obligatory accessory.
“MRAs are about as focused on men’s rights as defense contractors are invested in maintaining peace. … MRAs are concerned, to the point of obsession, with attacking women. And their particular target is feminism.” Laura Bates, author of the book Men Who Hate Women
The Proud Boys, as you’ll doubtless remember, are the group to whom Trump said, “Stand back and stand by.” Trump meant, as was proved beyond a reasonable doubt in 800 convictions following an attempted coup. that he would be calling on them for a little tasty violence in his quest to overturn an election and overthrow a government.
What’s not generally known about the Proud Boys is that the group began as an anti-feminist group that waxed extremely violent under the nourishing gaze of fellow misogynist Donald J. Trump. How misogynist are the Proud Boys?
“I think, ‘Who let these bitches vote?’”
Women are “less ambitious” than men, [Proud Boys founder Gavin] McInnes told a host on Fox News in 2015. “This is sort of God’s way – this is nature’s way – of saying women should be at home with the kids.” Just as he believes women are ill-suited for the workplace, McInnes has argued that the world of politics is best left to men. “When I hear women talk about politics and so often put emotional claptrap over policy,” he tweeted in early 2017, “I think, ‘Who let these bitches vote?’”
The Proud Boys are just one of many misogynist groups that fall under the term Men’s Rights Activists, which itself falls under the term Men’s Rights Movement, which includes Incels and Pick-Ups Artists and others, misogynists all.
What’s Up with the Men’s Rights Activists?
Well, what can I say? It was a good idea gone wrong.
Back in the 1970s, men’s groups began to abound in response to the rise of feminism. Many were incredibly supportive of women and the Women’s Liberation Movement—in the way that Eddie Vedder expressed it in the first post we wrote on this subject. Responding to Harrison Butker’s incredibly sexist and denigrating commencement address at Benedictine College, here’s what Veddar had to say:
And in the beginning, men’s movement groups were about liberating men, who, they rightly realized, were as trapped by chauvinism and patriarchal constructs as women were. It was a path feminists and men’s liberationists walked together.
In fact, the founder of the Men’s Rights Activists, Warren Farrell, was a member of the National Organization for Women and on the board of its New York City chapter — until he went through a tough divorce. Bitter and enraged, Farrell then he turned on NOW and on all women and did a complete 180-degree turn, claiming that it was women, not men, who had all the power—that it was men who were disenfranchised.
Farrell’s half-century ragefest features the whining martyrhood with which this movement is shot through:
“Murder, rape, and spouse abuse, like suicide and alcoholism, are but a minute’s worth of superficial power to compensate for years of underlying powerlessness. They are manifestations of hopelessness committed by the powerless.” – Warren Farrell, explaining why men commit most violent crime in his book The Myth of Male Power, 1973
And thus it was that men’s liberation groups slowly began to morph into something like grievance groups about men’s rights. And these men’s groups weren’t all bad! They had a number of good points and serious and necessary questions:
Why were men forced to pay alimony but women weren’t?
Why were men conscripted to fight wars but women weren’t?
Why did women always (or almost always) get the kids?
Why are men subject to circumcision?
They also claimed that their issues, including the following, were going unaddressed, feeling that
They are subject to false accusations of rape.
They are discriminated against in education.
They have fewer social safety nets available to them.
Health policies discriminate against them.
They are treated unequally in property distribution in divorce proceedings.
They are subject to spousal abuse, too, but it is charged less often and taken less seriously.
They bolstered some of these arguments by pointing out that men had higher suicide rates than women, some health problems women didn’t — well, try pregnancy — and that women lived at least half a decide longer than men.
Now men’s groups were really starting to be a collective grievance culture. And their concerns were becoming a mixed bag in terms of legitimacy. For example:
There is at any time roughly 200 times more research being done on men’s health issues than so women’s, so health policies do not discriminate against men. Also, because medical research most often uses men subjects, the results of that research benefit men—but often don’t translate to women’s health. For example, heart disease research focused on men completely missed the fact that women’s heart attacks often don’t look anything like men’s do, so their heart disease goes unaddressed until massive attacks serious debilitate or kill them.
MRAs claim they are discriminated against in education. It does turn out there are more women accepted to elite universities than men, but it’s not gender bias—in either direction. To cite IvyCoach.com:
You might be looking at this data and thinking, “See, I knew that there were more women at elite universities than men! This proves that men are being discriminated against!” But not so fast. Women apply to elite universities at higher rates than men, and as such men are considered to be rarer, more highly valued applicants. For example, The Brown Daily Herald recently reported that “for first-years admitted [to Brown University] in the fall of 2023, Brown’s acceptance rate for male applicants was 6.9%, and the acceptance rate for female applicants was 4.2%, according to the University’s Common Data Set.” In other words, male applicants were 64% more likely to get into Brown than female applicants!
Girls consistently outperform boys academically at all grade levels. It follows that this gender disparity would be reflected in elite college applicant pools.
Though some men are falsely accused of rape—and that’s a heinous crime against good men, a crime that should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law—the truth is that while there are nearly 9,000 crimes against blacks, the perennially most-targeted of all the minority groups, attacks on women dwarf even these. RAINN estimates that a staggering 90% of all sexual assault and rape victims are women or girls among the staggering half a million assaults and rapes that occur every year.
Meanwhile … Factoring in unreported rapes, only about 6% of rapists ever serve a day in jail. Most get the “Brock Peterson Pass.” And whereas forcible rape used to carry the death penalty, now many get “counseling.”
So some of what MRAs complain about is real and absolutely actionable. But much of it isn’t, and much of what is real is fallout from a patriarchal system men profit from in thousands of ways—from more safety, more freedom, more money, to more opportunities and no interference in their sexuality or procreation—and men do not have to suffer pregnancy and childbirth—and many walk away from the pregnancies they co-create and dump all the responsibility on the women—which situation creates some of the safety nets MRAs complain that women have and they don’t.
The MRAs Create a Toxic Male Supremacist Culture
MRAs, taking their laundry list of often-specious complaints and using them to pretend they, not women, are the victims of discrimination, created a movement in which they targeted not laws, not conventions, but women themselves.
They blamed women, and said that it not women who are oppressed — but men,
They created a zero-sum game in which everything that negatively affected men was a result of feminism—the MRA movement’s only target—and advocated for the dismantling of feminism and the reinstatement of a male-supremacist society that put women “back in their places”—and that’s always the home, always out of politics
And the degree to which they did this, the militancy with which they expressed it, and the threats to women’s freedom they espoused landed them in the sites of the United Nations and multiple government and social watchdog groups.
To its credit, the Southern Poverty Law Center starting have a long, hard look at the shift of men’s groups from support of women to rank misogyny. They offer a number of insights:
In the late 1980s and 1990s … according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, this critique of the traditional male role “morphed into a celebration of all things masculine and a near infatuation with the traditional masculine role itself.” The problem was no longer oppressive gender roles: “The problem was, in a word, women – or more accurately, women’s equality, women’s empowerment, and feminism.”
As women gained ground in the workplace and family structures loosened, some men’s rights activists started blaming feminism for all of men’s ills. The traditional masculine gender role was seen as either worth reestablishing, or – rather than being limiting to both genders – actually benefiting women. Men’s rights activists decided to blame women for taking away jobs, for the decline of the family or for alimony and child custody issues after a divorce, rather than focusing on larger political and structural issues.
It get much, much worse than that.
Writes SPLC:
The foundation of men’s rights activist ideology is rooted in misogynistic generalizations about women. MRAs typically view women as stupid, narcissistic, conniving and manipulative.
Adherents assert women are hypergamous by nature, a misappropriated biology term male supremacists use to insist women will seek out and mate with men who have a “higher status” than themselves and will quickly dispose of a male partner when a better one comes along.
Some of the misogyny of such groups classifies as “soft misogyny” in which the seeds of a woman’s doom lurk inside a pretty-looking package:
According to an Australian father’s rights organization, the Men’s Rights Agency, women need to accept their biological differences from men: “Women are innately more nurturing. They are also, generally, better with children, the elderly and the infirm. Most do not aspire to become generals, CEOs or heads of state.”
First, how the hell would you know what a woman aspires to? This is a perfect example the pontifical viewpoint assume by these men, who self-elevate their own thinking to the level of God’s eye view.
Second, this is Manosphere Speak for “stay at home, don’t compete with us, we’ll make all the decisions and take all the money and have all the control. Please just do go ahead and take care of the kids and the elderly adn the inform so we don’t have to do the tough, unpaid work for which some capacity for compassion is required.”
And it gets far, far worse still:
If you get raped or beat to a bloody pulp, you had it coming.
One of the most virulent of all men’s groups is the for-profit group A Voice for Men, founded and operated by Paul Elam. It produces podcasts, articles, and publications and is the largest of all the MRA groups.
How bad is it? Take it Elam himself:
“There are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though [sic] life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”
Or take it from misogynist Matt Forney:
“Slapping a girl across the face isn’t just about hurting her, it’s a kind of neg. It says, ‘I can crush you like an insect, but you aren’t worth the effort.’ It’s a tacit acknowledgement that she’s weaker than you, beneath you, and if she crosses you again, you’ll put her in the hospital. You treat her like she’s a child throwing a temper tantrum, not an equal. ... Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.” – Matt Forney under the pseudonym Ferdinand Bardamu in Mala Fide blog in an article titled “The Necessity of Domestic Violence.”
Or …
“Make rape legal if done on private property. I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds. … If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone. … After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied.” – Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh in an article on Return of Kings titled “How to Stop Rape,” February 2015
Of course, this last one is only one of the versions of “If you get raped, it’s that you didn’t take proper precautions.
And this comment, by W. F. Price was posted after Ray Rice beat his girlfriend Janay unconscious and an elevator and was caught by CCTV:
“I know people instinctively and reflexively sympathize with the victim of a brutal attack, but there comes a time when one has to ask whether or not the victim bears some responsibility for putting herself in this situation. Does Janay really think that will be the last time Rice gives her a beatdown? And even if she does, what statement is she making marrying a man willing to treat her like that? The statement is clear: she thinks the violence is a reasonable tradeoff for whatever she gets in return for her relationship, whether it’s sexual gratification, status or money. Women make that statement all the time. … Maybe, just maybe, the only way to really cut down on intimate violence would be to restrict women’s sexual freedom.” – W.F. Price, discussing Ray Rice’s assault of Janay Rice, in The Spearhead blog, Sept. 8, 2014
Is that a fact, Mr. Price? The logical fallacy is so thick in this one, and indictive of such a badly functioning brain, that it’s amazing this man can get a spoon to his mouth without help. And vile beyond belief.
It’s at times like these it’s good for me to remember that what I’m looking at is a heavy dose of mental illness—but it’s also a choice. Andrew Tate has a million followers on the Manosphere. That’s a choice.
That, I am really sure, is as much of this as I can take in one day, so I’m assuming that you need a break to go see if you can save your democracy. We are back soon with how Harrison Butker and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) figure into this, We’ll deal with Josh Hawley down the road, and we’ll be paying Harrison Butker another visit, but for now we’ll refer you to the first one with which we honored him—and a couple of his tow-the-line-masculine-brotherhood buddies:
NOTE: MEN ARE DEEPLY, WARMLY WELCOMED TO THIS DISCUSSION. There are great men out there everywhere—men are who are spectacular fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, and we welcome every one of you.
This series goes paid after this article. There are three reasons why:
(1) Every time I post something like this I get attacked by Radical Right Christians aligned with Project 2025, or
(2) I get attacked by Incels, MRAs, Pick-up Artists, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, or White Supremacists—who have racism and misogyny joined to anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism—who start off by calling me the C-word and move lower from there, and
(3) People like this aren’t going to want to give me a valid credit card number because it makes them easier for the FBI to arrest in the event I get knee-capped at some point. …
And,
(4) It would definitely help us out to have a little more financial support. 95% of our folks are free subscribers, and we actually love that, but writers have rent to pay, too, so it’s definitely time to ask for a little help.
Language nitpick: The Trump direction to Proud Boys was "stand back and stand by," which is an instruction of readiness for future action, not "stand down," an order to end an alert/militant posture.
I've been paying attention to the mra meatheads for a long time now and they are some of the most disturbing and disgusting individuals imaginable. Such seething hatred that it makes you wonder if they've ever even met a woman in real life.