MRAs

[girlwiththeflaxenhair]

This has maybe already been posted but couldn't find anything.

I've been trying to learn more about feminism and mens rights/anti feminists/mgotw/whatever and had a question or thought. Probably not an original one by any means.

It seems to me that a large part of the MRA agenda is driven by a feeling of rejection, they feel that women are the gatekeepers of sex and that if a woman wont have sex with them, but will with other men, that is a direct message that the other man is better than them.

Leaving this rather ugly stuff to one side for now, it seems like for this army of bitter young men to exist, there must be a corresponding number of young women who are single. Either that, or all the young women are going after the same "alpha" type males (I think this is the explanation that would be accepted in the MRA sphere)

I then started looking at whether there really were more single men than women, and it seems there are at the age a lot of these men seem to be (I assume most of them to be 25 or below?). However once you get to over 45 there are many more single women than men.

So how can this be ? The only explanation I can come up with is that it is more common for young women to date older guys that the other way around. Looking around at my own friendship group there are a few age gaps of 10 years plus with younger women/older man - I don't know any the other way around.

Is anyone interested in discussing this ? Are age gap relationships more common now than they used to be ?

These silly women who go out of their way to criticize feminists annoy me even more than the men actually.

What are they getting out if it?

They get a lot of male approval and also to feel superior to women who don't get approval from men such as these.

Don't understand it myself. Many of the difficulties throughout my life have come about because I'm not interested in male approval

Yes I thought as much.

When I was married to my violent cunt of an ex I was amazed by the so called friends and silly women in our religious community that would still flirt with him, knowing he was a violent MSN. Some daft bints seem to have the attitude of'im so pretty and so special he would never treat me like he treats her'.

Or they have mother issues and just can't be friends with other women.

Fuck them all is what I say. I'm 40 now, not the sweet naive timid girl I once was and no longer give a shite about male approval either. So long as I like myself. Women like this play a dangerous game. The mra's can switch on them just as quickly.

Violent man not MSN, sorry my phone won't stop ringing as I'm typing.

Came across a blog post couple days ago by a 'judgy bitch', not being carry, that is what she called herself, and some MRA guy had switched on her with his dangerous friend, but she was still falling over herself to defends mras as a whole and the movement, with some very complicated twists in her thinking. Instead if just admitting that yeah, maybe these feminists have a point. Can't link on my phone. But will try.

OK can't link, its a blog post, 'what to do with an entitled whiny MRA asshole 'by judgy bitch if anyone can be arsed.

I got it Titania
judgybitch.com/2015/05/12/what-to-do-with-an-entitled-whiny-mra-asshole/

Ooh! Thanks Zsazsa!!!

Yes, probably it's the necessity for male approval that leads those women to criticise feminism and join groups like the MRAs. More than annoying, I think it's even sad, because it shows low self esteem and it's sort of betraying your own gender, considering the misogynistic views about women that at least some of the MRAs have.

It is sad, but I can't pity them because they are so willing to throw the most vulnerable women under the bus. Watched a YouTube video of a feminist debate with that MRA Karen wotshername and Naomi wolf, Naomi was getting more and more pissed off, and my inner bitch happened to think (I'm not proud) any sane man would definitely prefer the gorgeous soft spoken Naomi to this Karen what's her face, maybe insecurity motivates them. This Karen bird has also made a point about not asking her child's father for child support, because it was her choice to have a child or some such tosh. What about the child's right? And how much of a doormat can you be?

Ooh! Don't tear me apart! Just reread that.

I certainly agree the internet has facilitated this. The PUA movement was a late 90s thing which gave rise to negging and men trying to persuade other men to spend money to listen to them teach seduction techniques which were frankly weird. This has morphed with broadband and smartphones into a much darker MRA movement and some really dark misogyny with excrescences like Elliott Rodger. As a man I will say I did read the PUA stuff at the time and was way too shy to put it into action, thankfully. For my money ISIS/Trump/MRAs/Brexit all have roots in a massive sense of fear among a certain kind of man who is essentially terrified of not being able to attract women. I could I suppose have been drawn into this myself, although I hope not but for 2 things. Firstly I was poleaxed by depression in my late 20s which destroyed every shred of my male entitlement, also I became platonic friends around this time with one or two immensely kind and bright women who truly opened my eyes to what women go through and pulled me back from self obsession. One day, somewhere, somehow a group of men will work out that feminism is their ally and patriarchy their enemy. I suspect this may start on the fringes of a mental health movement or even a new form of music or neo environmentalism. When this takes off and men see that women don't hate them, they just hate the patriarchy's bitterly destructive effects on all humans, the game will finally be up. I can't wait.

What seems to have happened I think is that to many men sexual relations and dating have become a kind of market in which there are perceived winners and losers. Hence this crude calculus MRA's/Incels use of alphas, betas and scores out of ten etc. In some ways they're right: dating has become a form of shopping in which people are reduced to commodities (think of the very superficial premise of Tinder and other dating apps). But they fail to see that generally it is the women who are still being commodified -- by them.

In other words if male entitlement is combined with this sexual marketplace, then the result is lots of unattractive middle-aged men feeling entitled to have sex with a very small proportion of the female population: namely, conventionally attractive 18-25 year old females. If they can't have sex with these women then these men feel like victims. They actually feel pique and self-pity because a teenager won't have sex with them - as they have been wronged. It is quite extraordinary.

Add porn and a marketing culture that presents attractive young women as prized commodities to the mix then you do have a bit of a swamp.

A society seems to be developing where there are thousands of ordinary looking, older women looking for partners, but a lot of the men are online trying to get off with women half their age.

In Japan the population is actually taking a nosedive because of this issue.

The internet is changing everything. It commodifies women, but at the same time gives them sexual power - a power to which these tech-subcultures of men are a counter-reaction.

The culture of monogamous love and the family in which they had power is breaking down, so you are left with an ugly, ageing, possibly economically disadvantaged man thinking 'I am not the head of the family, but neither am I desired by the women I want to have sex with'; and conversely there are ugly, ageing women thinking 'I just want a man to love me and not behave like like an emotional imbecile'.

It is funny old world we've ended up in.

From my reading there are two prevalant strands of thought. The first is that women are somehow protected from the rigorous standards that are applied to men, either because they are pretty and men fall over themselves them to help them, or because of quotas/special treatment given to women because they are women. The general idea here is that men have harder lives because they are men and women are protected from horrible manual jobs and etc.

The second strand is that all women basically go after the same guys, evidence of this is cited as being obsession with boy bands and film stars and some idea of "alpha" males. This means that once most women realise that they are not going to get together with Ashton Kutcher they instead do their best to find a "chump" who will pay for a house for them which they then spend all his money decorating...evidence of this is the fact that women apparently spend more money than men but earn significantly less, who chooses all the decor in your house etc ?

So the solution to this situation which significantly disadvantages males is to totally avoid entering into a trusting relationship with a woman.

Incredibly depressing stuff, but it is born out of somewhat the same stuff as feminism - it involves gross generalisations about women and their behaviour (see - e.g. on here the desire to get away from men and have female only spaces) even though many of the characters on these forums apparently have direct personal experience of women treating them unfairly (apparently) the problem is that when a group of people get together and share many similar stories it suddenly looks like it is a massive issue.

I sadly do not see things getting better only more polarised in the short term at least, especially if the economy nosedives.

From my reading there are two prevalant strands of thought. The first is that women are somehow protected from the rigorous standards that are applied to men, either because they are pretty and men fall over themselves them to help them, or because of quotas/special treatment given to women because they are women. The general idea here is that men have harder lives because they are men and women are protected from horrible manual jobs and etc.

Well I think a certain class of women have certain economic and advantages. Young, middle-class, conventionally pretty women have a burgeoning service sector economy at their disposal while traditionally male dominated jobs are disappearing all the time. Also they probably have lots of men queuing up wanting to have sex with them. Whether the latter is empowering or not is obviously very debatable. As I am not a pretty young woman who people want to have sex with, I'm not qualified to comment. Certainly, I would think it a povertous form of power, because it means being valued as a sexual utility first and a human being second. But some women do claim to find being sexually desirable or utilised empowering. If you consider many people date via corporate interfaces in which they select partners as they would an item on Ebay, being a young, pretty women does give you the pick of the crop. Many of the crop will transpire to be abusive arseholes of course, and if they are seeking a man who loves them for something other than their body, they're swimming against the current.

All the stuff about women wanting money and boy band looks is obviously rot, but at the same time finance does come into it - although not in the way MRA's say it does.

It strikes me that these men hate the kind of women they want as sexual partners not because they prefer monied Alpha males over them, but more because they don't need men at all. And it's not so much that men do all the horrible labouring jobs, but that the horrible labouring jobs are vanishing. The whole economy is slowly drawing away from them. That is what they're really afraid of, and why they hate and fear women with sexual and economic power. The most of vile of these kinds of men (and I've know a couple) will vent their frustrations downward onto poor, vulnerable women or prostitutes - women who have no value in their eyes.

In a funny kind of way, some women do have power over these men - because in a paradoxical reverse dynamic the disempowered always have a hold on the powerful.

Patriarchy is predicated on a value transference from female to male. Ownership of a woman gives a man status, but there is always the fear on his part that she might withdraw that status, or confer it on someone else.

This is why tyrants so often go insane with paranoia in that Richard III kind of way - because the fear that the people over whom they rule will cease to recognise their power never leaves them.

Obviously the institution of the family was questionable, but now it has been undermined sexual relations have been opened up to market forces. I don't think that's been good for feminism or our sexual culture as a whole. The whole Red Pill thing is a symptom of a vestigial patriarchal culture that has got mixed up with market capitalism, giving gendered power relations a whole new messed up expression.

This is a really good piece on the whole phenomenon by the way.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/14/the-red-pill-reddit-modern-misogyny-manosphere-men

I just wonder what will happen when the unattractive middle aged men with their sense of entitlement and grievance realise that no amount of whining will make the young women they desire go near them. So either they adapt and look at themselves, or they grow old and die alone, unloved and defeated. There is I think some evidence of this happening in America already with increasing death rates among the middle aged without college degrees. Opiate abuse is apparently a big culprit. On reflection male depression and suicide rates may go up and up and up before the focus switches from the MRA drivel to a genuine, mens movement which is a brother movement to feminism and which is focussed onto the real issues which are changing roles, the social stigma around men not being able to show emotion and a whole generation, maybe 2 generations of some of the most broken and defeated men that have ever lived.

It is about attitudinal change, darkness, but it also comes down to economic change. A dirty little secret of the last thirty years is the way men and women have been played against one another in order to depress pay. Women's wages are up to 80 percent of men's because male wages are down, which evens things out.

So while tensions between men and women increase, some one up there is laughing all the way to the bank.

Anything approaching harmonious gender relations is only possible in the context of some form of socialism, or radical redistribution of wealth. Otherwise it ain't gonna happen.

Agreed qwerty. Supposedly if all the world's wealth were divided between all the people everyone would have £20k a year. Sounds OK to me. I really feel we are in the End of days for neo capitalism. I could easily see a situation where ISIS or whoever take on Russia with a targetted terror campaign, Russia hits back, America wades in and before you know it there is World War 3 with hundreds of millions dead. I can also see the world stepping back from the brink but I think this will happen at a local, quiet, grassroots level. A website for lonely and vulnerable men from all around the world, and anti Breitbart, anti 4chan, anti MRA, anti misogynist would be a start. I wonder if the churches or even a humanist or druid movement might also work?

Agree with you too. It's not looking good. I'm hoping to God that Trump will get himself impeached and some baseline sanity restored to the world. You can easily imagine him goading ISIS and other dangerous factions into a sustained attack on Russia and/or the US. He's so mental he won't be able to help shooting his gob off.

It seems like the world is realigning itself along Cold War lines but in an almost scarier way than before - because this time the US is aligning itself with Russia/Syria/Iran. Which is mental.

Both sides are bad. Western liberal capitalism is corrupt to the core, but. these strongmen like Putin and Assad are brutal autocrats commanding Shia death squads. And I think what the whole thing comes down to is a last ditch battle for dwindling natural resources, with ancient tribal animosities and Cold War tensions that have never fully dispelled thrown into the mix. It constitutes one hell of a tinder box.

Completely going off topic there - sorry. :)

I think we need to bring men and women back together somehow. The internet has depersonalised them into rival blocks at odds with each other.

I would have thought that the idea this is all driven by pudgy middle aged men feeling they are entitled to a string of 25 year old beauty queens is false.

Also - the internet gives these things far more credence than they deserve I think. It's only a small number of women who identify as feminists and I suspect a tiny tiny amount of men who would publicly admit to being in agreement with the drivel pumped out on MGOTW. As noted previously (by me!) it doesn't make sense that statistically there are legions of young men who cannot establish relationships with women because women are all chasing a handful of "alpha" males. This just doesn't seem to be borne out of any evidence.

Taken from this standpoint MGOTW is nothing but an attempt to establish that failure to find a "life partner", if that is what you want, is not your own fault but the fault of the "system". More generally it is a way to say - if you life appears to have gone down the shitter - you can blame society rather than accept any personal responsibility for it. I do see elements of overlap with feminism there e.g. women saying "There are just no good men out there" and etc.

Slightly OT - but i was listening to the radio last night and a young black man was explaining how he documented "micro aggressions" - now i'm not sure i would call these all aggressions, but it was basically how people would cross the street to avoid him, move away from him etc.

Now, if you were to take a rational approach to these behaviours, young black men in tracksuits near council estates in London are statistically more likely to be involved in criminal behaviour than more affluent white college kids. No one would argue that this is stereotyping and unhelpful behaviour. However - if you replace the black youth with "any man" and the other people as "women" - it would be said on here I have no doubt, that the avoidance was justifiable and experience based and that moreover, the young black man was partly to blame for his predicament for not stopping other black men from being criminals. This is the sort of unhelpful garbage that I think polarises the sexes.

Yes women and men, and black/white, affluent/poor do need to come together. It makes me sad to see how far apart we have all grown. To throw a few things into the mix I could see music whether political protest or mental health related and also comedy/film coming to the rescue.

I would have thought that the idea this is all driven by pudgy middle aged men feeling they are entitled to a string of 25 year old beauty queens is false.

Sure, a lot of them are young. The point is that lots of men all feel entitledto those women. Of course, if you look round you you see lots of men in happy, equitable relationships with women of their own age. It's more that....some men who lack the skills needed to establish a relationship, or are otherwise disadvantaged, identify their loss of status with failing to have sex with the women they see in porn and elsewhere in the media, and then feel aggrieved at an imagined system that has deprived them of that status within the sexual marketplace. Because in patriarchal cultures male status is inextricable from sexual 'success'.

I only refer to pudgy, middle-aged men because they best illustrate the point. If you are a pudgy, middle aged man a young attractive woman is unlikely to be interested in you. For an emotionally intelligent man that would not be a problem; but there are some men who, rather than go out and form a relationship with a woman within their own demographic, will rancorously rage against an imagined system that favours 'hot' women and hunky Alpha's with sexual opportunities. These Incel groups in the manosphere exemplify that phenomenon perfectly. It's noxious bullshit of course, but that is how I would explain it.

But as I say underpinning all this is the marketisation of sexual relations as expressed in internet capitalism: the reconceptualisation of dating within a paradigm of consumer choice. There is, or was, a hook-up app in which people could give people they have sex with a rating out of ten.

Because love and sex are going their separate ways, sex is being converted into another consumer product. And some men who lack the 'capital' to 'afford' the more scarce 'product', feel deprived of power within that socioeconomic system.

All power relations, even the ones that are manifested in the most private spheres, come to down to economics.

"I can also see the world stepping back from the brink but I think this will happen at a local, quiet, grassroots level."

Interesting Darkness. But will this be allowed to happen? And in our democracy, given that the masses don't, perhaps, react rationally...