Over at anti-feminist site "Feminist Critics*," ballgame notes how "stymied" he's been trying to respond to the, in his words, "torrent of anti-MRA smears created to take advantage of the horrific murders by Elliot Rodger in California."
Wow, that's quite the characterization of anti-MRA writing, yeah?
I mean, what a truly profound lack of understanding ballgame shows regarding the motivations of people writing about MRAs in the wake of this tragedy. What an unfortunate, unfair, and automatic attribution of bad faith he grants to feminists and critics of MRAs. In his view, it's as though the only reason people are critiquing MRAs is not because MRAs say incredibly horrible things about women but because people just want to "smear" MRAs for no reason at all! As though most people see this event as, say, their Big Chance to undeservedly tarnish the image of the poor innocent MRA movement.
Nope!
MRAs, with their own words, smear themselves.
By quoting exactly what they say, in context, MRAs discredit their own credibility. To highlight their repulsive views is to not "take advantage" of a killer's actions, it's largely to ask, "Now? Now will people listen to us? These people are scary, misogynistic, and aggressive. Something like this will happen again, and all the signs are right there, on the Internet, in the manosphere, today."
Here, I will once again note that one of the manosphere's most prominent, adored, and popular voices, Paul Elam, has said that today's women are "shallow, self-serving wastes of human existence—parasites—semi-human black holes that suck resources and goodwill out of men and squander them on the mindless pursuit of vanity." Opining on women and rape, he has also written (link to Rational Wiki, rather than Elam's site, so as not to drive traffic to it):
"And all the outraged PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads."And, thousands of men agree with him.
It is not difficult to find, at MRA and manosphere sites, messaging like that.
In contrast, ballgame has to get his microfiche out and go all the way back to 1968 to bring up Valerie Solanas in his title, "Rodger & Solanas Do Not Represent Their Gender Rights Groups," to fabricate a fictitious moral equation whereby feminists and MRAs are just two equal and opposite sides of a debate, each heaping aggression and violence in equal measures upon the other side with equal consequence in a society in which feminists kill, attack, and threaten men just as frequently as anti-feminists kill, attack, and threaten women.
Disgusting.
Simply put, there is no major, popular feminist on the Internet today that I know of who communicates views about men that are akin to the views that major, popular MRAs like Paul Elam communicate about women. The biggest "sin" of many of the most popular feminists actually seems to be that they/we don't center men and men's concerns - which, it seems, feels like equivalent violence to some MRAs, MRA supporters, and feminist critics. (Here, for instance, ballgame lambasts popular feminist blogger Melissa McEwan for not feeling sufficiently excited about an upcoming male-centric movie.)
So, there's that entitlement theme, again.
My advice at this point is for defensive men to take a step back, broaden their perspectives a bit, and try a bit harder to understand women's fear rather than automatically attribute critiques of MRAs to a super fun bad faith attempt to "smear" the movement.
[*I have not included a link to the site as I don't want to drive traffic to it - the name of the blog, article, and author are included within this post, and thus the piece should be easy enough to find if you're inclined.]
Related:
Is it really up to feminists to create all pushback?
Reasons given for inaction of men's rights movement
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