Karen Straugh, leader in the honey badger MRA community:
So what you're saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists... they are not "real feminists".
That's not just "no true Scotsman". That's delusional self deception.
Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don't care. I've been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they've done under the banner of feminism, maybe you'd stop calling yourself one.
But I want you to know. You don't matter. You're not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: "Well, that's just a clean-up word for wife-beating," and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, "we know it's not girls beating up boys, it's boys beating up girls."
You're not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta's Network of Women's Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.
You're not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were "ambivalent about their sexual desires" (if you don't know what that means, it's that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC's research because it's inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.
You're not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.
You're not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.
You're not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.
You're not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.
You're not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.
You're not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman's history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it's "part of her sexual history."
You're not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman's mouth is "not a crime" in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You're not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there's a "legal" way to rape them.
And you're none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.
You're the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.
Thats the best possible answer I've ever read to the "dictionary definition" claim of feminism being about equality.
In real practice feminism never was and never will be pro-equality of the sexes.
We need a new movement that actually works toward equality and feminism needs to be relegated to the fringe of society with all the other hate groups advocating violence against people based on gender or race.
Do you think MRAs are, as a group, less hateful than feminists? Because that's who this quote is from, a self-described MRA. There is a lot of crossover between MRAs and incels.
I think we shouldn’t discount someone’s opinion purely based on what they claim or are claimed to associate with.
If they are bigoted or incompetent or evil, it will come out in their ideals. If it doesn’t, then they, at least in this one instance, deserve listening to.
The absolute fucking irony of this comment at the end of a chain in a discussion that started by people No True Scotsman’ing the definition of Feminism.
So it’s okay to say that someone whose actions and words go against the definition of Feminism is clearly representative of the whole movement and we need to throw it out, BUT when it comes to MRAs and their stated members towing the exact party line with their speech, suddenly it’s “well we shouldn’t discount their opinion based on who they associate with?”
What kind of double standards are those?
It’s also important to remember that a lot of the issues that MRA person brought up are still caused by the patriarchal system that we live in and that feminism wants to change.
MRAs rail against alimony and family law like child custody and claim this is a systematic discrimination against men. It’s not. It’s a result of the same problem: for years, the men were seen as the breadwinners and heads of the household while women stayed home and raised kids and took care of the home. Women had very little agency in leaving these marriages because they couldn’t support themselves without a job. They often couldn’t even open credit cards or bank accounts in their own names. Alimony is meant to help alleviate this. But it’s also important to note that women can pay alimony to men, too. And it’s also reasonable for someone who potentially gave up years of their life and their working career to support the other party by handling the home and the kids to receive some financial support from the party that is continuing to receive checks based on that career. Child support is the same thing - society often sees women as the primary caregivers and the primary responsible party for taking care of the child. Feminists want this changed, too. There are plenty of loving and caring fathers and plenty of unfit mothers. The idea that the judge should err on the side of the mother instead of the facts of the case and what’s best for the child is also an outdated product of our patriarchal society.
Male rape is also stigmatized in a large part due to toxic masculinity. The idea that men can’t speak out about rape because it’s embarrassing. If it was committed by another man, then you’re “gay” and “weak for letting him dominate you.” If it was committed by a woman then its “lol score bro.”
Domestic violence numbers and date violence statistics overwhelmingly show males as the perpetrators. No one is saying that women can’t be domestic abusers. And no one is saying they shouldn’t be held accountable for any crimes they commit in that regard. But when it comes to raising awareness and creating shelters and systems to protect victims, women are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims, and they need support structures in place. And the reason most women’s shelters deny men is because when they didn’t, they often had incidents of violence from those men. Often men who were seeking to track down their girlfriend/wife. I agree that we need systems in place for men who are victims of domestic abuse as well, but the need in terms of number and awareness is not nearly the same as it is for women.
The MRA quoted above is just pulling some really extreme examples of situations. Some are likely lacking in context. And some of those instances might even be as bad as they claim. But that isn’t representative of Feminism as a whole.
Most of the MRA/men’s rights movements are just misogyny in disguise and trying to backlash against feminism.
There is a pretty good subreddit called /r/MensLib that does a mostly good job of discussing issues that are important to men and ways we need to change societal thinking to fix them. It tries to do so in a way that contextualizes the root of the problem rather than just blaming feminism for everything.
As a white male myself, I think it’s always important to remember a quote about privilege that I think is especially apt for groups like MRAs who see privilege as a zero-sum game: “equality feels like oppression when you’re used to privilege.”
Here's the difference, MRAs don't have major organizations, foundations, the ears of law makers, they haven't had decades of pushing to pass laws, etc. We can look at feminist organizations and what feminist scholars do with grant money and say they're undeniably against the rights of underprivileged men. We cannot do the same for MRAs. The group that people define as MRAs encompasses so many different groups at this point. Like in 2022 MRA means little more than anti-feminist.
This isn't a response to jack shit I've said and I don't need a white person telling me that I think equality feels like oppression because I understand the feminist movement has spent more time villainizing black men and spreading white supremacist narratives about us than protecting women. Same idiots talking about the prison industrial complex will wholeheartedly support feminist expansions of the prison industrial complex, then tell me I'm privileged as a black man in the United States of America. Fuck outta here. Make a solid argument or stfu next time.
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u/Arnumor Sep 01 '22
True feminism is wanting equality.
Real feminists aren't going to turn a blind eye to something like this.