Comments

1
Wow, surprisingly it's a demographic that has very little in the way of life experience; who'd have guessed?

I wonder what the demographic of equally passionate Womyn's issues activists is (not just equal pay advocates, but something like the "all sex is rape" set)? Probably just as narrow.
2
I mostly agree with you, but as a counterexample I'll offer up George Harrison, who was 20 when he wrote "Don't Bother Me", which may not be your favorite Beatles song but is certainly covered under "anything of value". Of course, that was fifty years ago.

And, you know, these men's rights redditors are right about one thing: they're severely socially disadvantaged, because no woman (or man) would want to come withing 500 yards of them. Imagine what happens when they get to join a frat.
3
Also, this is just Reddit's demographic. You'll probably find MRAs are pretty prevalent on divorce message boards, and they're probably all mid-30s to 50s and paying child support.
4
What if, uh, you aren't a young white male but you are concerned about the future of men in America? I'm probably not anti-woman buy the standards of r/male rights or whatever, but I look at school discipline data, college enrollment data; and come to the conclusion that, "the patriarchy" is simply a dying relic, and the past forty years or so we haven't been solving the problems of sexism in our society, but just replacing it with a new kind of sexism. Sorry for being an r/idiot or whatever. I have two stepchildren, and the youngest will be entering the school system this fall. He's sweet and loving and loves nothing more than to climb things, run around, and so on. It's how he expresses himself. I'm pretty concerned that the school system will squash essentially 100% of his wants/needs/desires. Meanwhile, the campaign du jour is to "ban bossy", robbing him of his only non-violent response to the girls in his class that are significantly more socially advanced than him but aren't old enough to understand that taking advantage of people is wrong. R/sigh.
5
So, that's right about the age they'd be investigating college scholarships and observing the the number of them that are restricted to women/minorities but not restricted to white men ?
6
Wrong. Martin Luther King Jr. was in his 20s when he led the Montgomery bus boycott, and he was black, so this means that every white male in this demographic is just like Martin Luther King Jr.
7
@3 Yep. Surveying the active members of ANY subreddit would probably produce similar results. But the truth is, everyone of that age group *feels* disenfranchised, and young white men look around and everyone else has a scapegoat that looks conspicuously like them, and it doesn't seem fair. THEY didn't do all that stuff, and yet are being judged as though they had (by women, who they want to sleep with, but who won't do it = THEY HAVE ALL THE POWER!). Maybe OTHER asshole dudes are worthy of ridicule, but to take it out on them is just WRONG.

TL;DR: When you reverse-engineer your philosophy based entirely on your own personal complaints about the world, you're going to be the martyr of the story.
8
@5 Oh god, please show me the data that indicates straight, white men have a difficult time getting into college.
9
I think my favorite thing to watch--and I've actually seen this a lot--is when an MRA shows up in a feminist-oriented thread to rant about men's rights and shit on feminism and then ends up just whining about not being able to get dates. I've now seen two of these threads devolve into women giving these poor schmucks advice on how to date women without being a whiny entitled jerk. It really says something about these MRA kids.
10
I'm going to pull a Mudede and blame suburbia here.

Urban youth (even the white males) are typically so much more interrogative of themselves and their experiences that, even when they're doing and saying stupid shit, they at least know they're doing and saying stupid shit.

Most suburban boys don't seem to have the slightest clue. I feel sorry for them, really, because their world's are so dismally, pathetically tiny.
11
As the father of a white male, who is only nine at the moment, I wonder how others have helped their sons to be empathetic and caring young men?
12
@8 It's not about how many white men actually get into college. They don't have the perspective to empathize with that kind of bigger picture. It's about THEIR EXPERIENCE of looking for scholarships and finding so many that are restricted to demographic groups they're not a part of. NOT FAIR! And for those who are sufficiently outraged, MRAs are groups dedicated to pseudoscientifically rationalizing your kneejerk emotional reactions. QED.
14
@8,
http://www.ibtimes.com/why-are-more-wome…
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education boldly declared: โ€œwomen now account for a disproportionate share of the enrollments of higher-education institutions at every degree level and are likely to become an even more dominant presence on campuses over the coming decade.โ€

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201…
Even though college enrollment rates among young people have risen in recent decades, a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows that females outpace males in college enrollment, especially among Hispanics and blacks.
15
Yeah, these survey results make a lot of sense... I was just thinking about how a lot of MRA types are probably - why mince words? - guys who have a hard time getting dates. (I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with being a guy who has a hard time getting dates - Lord knows I've been there - but it is bad when it congeals into anger.) I haven't read a ton of MRA stuff, but from what I have read, it seems to be a lot of bitterness about how much supposed power women have over men; it feels like a sort of politicized extension of the frustration that so many young men feel when they realize that they have relatively little power to realize their own romantic or sexual fulfillment on their own terms. As someone who was once a lonely, horny, male teenager himself, I can attest to how crappy it feels; honestly I can easily see how that crappy feeling, combined with the inveterate anti-feminism of American conservative discourse and with the soapboxiness of the Internet, could lead to, well, MRA.

On that note, I think it's worth mentioning that it's easy to get a skewed perspective of sexuality among American youth, and if you're an American youth yourself, it's easy to think that you're doing it all wrong. Like, when I was 17 I thought that everyone was having sex except for me (and maybe some losers like me); it would be a while until I learned that really, lots of people don't start having sex until their 20s, and I've met a number of people who weren't sexually active until their late 20s or their 30s, even (and yeah, some people start even later). Not that everything about MRA can be explained by misplaced feelings of romantic inadequacy but, well, maybe part of it can be explained that way, you know?
16
I am relieved to hear this; makes the whole Men's Rights phenomenon more understandable.

There are real, actual reasons to be concerned about boys and men in this country, and none of them will be addressed by spewing hatred about women.
17
... and 100 percent are stupid fucking navel-gazers, and some of them may even pull their heads out of their asses some day and do something good with their lives.
18
This is a very soothing post. Thank you.
19
(and I see that @9 has even mentioned some real (Internet) world examples of exactly what I mean...)
20
Still apologizing for my 20s... :-(
21
Survey Reveals Men's Rights Activists Are Trolls.

(You didn't need a survey to tell you that.)
22
@14,

And yet most colleges intentionally admit less qualified male candidates to retain some degree of gender balance. So thanks for proving #8's point: it's not particularly difficult for a man to get into college, even when he's less qualified than a female candidate.
23
Wรฏth all due respect Paul, I learned that when it comes to relationship arguments, using superlatives is only going to escalate the situation. So when you say "no white man between the ages of 17 and 20 has ever said anything of value", Like anyone could even know that. I don't know who your comedian/wise-man/guy is, but ha-ha-yawn.

This is funny: "87 percent of them believe men are socially disadvantaged compared to women", but in fact, 100% of them actually are socially disadvantaged compared to women, because they are selfish & myopic.
24
#1 the "all sex is rape" set, exists only in your imagination.

There's no "set", there's just you.

I have to Paul Constant here: "Sometimes, I try to visualize who racist, sexist internet trolls are in real life. I find it makes hate speech feel a little less violent if I picture the kind of person who would waste their time writing something awful on the internet to make themselves feel a little better."

Although I'll pass on visualizing you, I'm not into horror stories.
25
@4: Microaggressions, the inability of our society to combat rape or even recognize it when it happens, giant rape kit backlogs, and oh, studies showing that the exact same resume with a female name on it is rated lower in competence, hireability, mentoring, and suggested salary.

That's women. Your concern about your son is the same concern parents of girls have, that school will crush out the desires. It's a symptom of a broken school system, not of a problem for boys.
26
@25: "That's what women have to deal with" is how that second paragraph should read.
27
@22, are you trying to say "intentionally admit fewer male applicants" or "intentionally lower the qualifications needed for male applicants" ?

I both cases, I don't think that agrees with @13's linked story/stats.... 2% higher admissions rate for men at GW with the same standards (or 3-5% for some other colleges) vs MIT/CIT/CMU's of the world being 8-10% in favor of women ?
28
#24: They do exist, but they're such a minuscule subset of women/feminists they might as well not exist.
29
Did anyone else read the part about 94% of them being atheist? I may be totally misreading this in which case I apologize. If atheism is one of the 4 commonalities of the subreddit how come everyone is talking about the ethnicity, political ideology, age, and gender but not the other common factor? Is this bias in favor of atheists or am I missing something?
30
@27,

If I meant "fewer", I would have written "fewer". The reason women outnumber men in college across the board is due to the fact that women are applying in greater numbers and are more *qualified* for admittance. If colleges didn't tip the scales in favor of men, the gender disparity would be even greater.

Are you in favor of affirmative action for men? Y/N?
31
Reddit on the whole skews young, white, male, and libertarian. But sometimes they post cute cat photos, so that's nice.
32
" The reason women outnumber men in college across the board is due to the fact that women are applying in greater numbers and are more *qualified* for admittance."

If that's true, then why is it that way?
33
@30, I think there should be more scholarships encouraging men to go into nursing, teaching younger children, paralegals, psychology, and social work with the same fervor of efforts to encourage women into engineering, computer science, and surgery. Affirmative action perpetuates broken ideas.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2012…
34
32: There are a lot of possible causes. One may be that they're simply driven to go to college. If you're told that college will give you an advantage and increase your pay down the road, doesn't it make sense for women (who already face workplace discrimination and persistent earning gaps) to increase their chances of academic and professional success? Personally I think a lot of white dudes feel so entitled these days they simply don't make as much effort in school or the college admissions process. But I also think there is a crisis going on the male population related to the decline in industrial jobs that used to define much of masculinity in the US. A lot of women are attracted to the kind of professional jobs associated with college education. A lot of women may feel they need the boost conferred by a degree in order to gain parity with men and other women, and so are willing to eat the debt. There are a lot of factors.
35
@29

There's a huge narcissist, libertarian "objectivist" wing of atheism. It grew out of atheists' sense of intellectual superiority ("I am objective while you Christians and socialists are not! Ayn Rand forever!") and attracts those who, while attack religion, still very much want religion in the form of a highly dogmatic philosophy.
36
And really, women making gains shouldn't be automatically seen as a threat to men. Instead of asking "why are men are failing?" maybe we should consider asking "why are women succeeding?" A relative decline of confidence and achievement among men doesn't automatically mean that women are gaining at their expense.
37
STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES. REDDIT USERS ARE 17 TO 20?!!? SWEET JESUS, HOLD ME. NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS BOMBSHELL!!!
38
I think most MRAs are divorced me in their 30s-40s who are pissed because they are expected to contribute to the support of their minor children. Because the divorce was not only their wife's fault, it was the fault of all women, everywhere, and also society's fault for allowing all those women to oppress them. And their wives took their children away from them, so why should they pay their wives to take care of them?
39
It's good to see young, white middle-class males for whom the world has so long been made to serve begin to feel just a little what life is like for the rest of us.

Perhaps, when they're done whining, bitching, moaning and complaining that the world isn't easy for them, they can finally grow the fuck up and learn to be just another minority like the rest of us.
40
ugh. Can't we dispute things based on the *content* of the argument at hand and not based on who is making it? This is not to say that the points that MRAs are making are worthwhile. Rather, the points are not inherently irrelevant simply because they come from a certain class of person. This is boring old western enlightenment shit.

The extent to which we allow ourselves to discount an opinion based on the person who is making it is the extent to which we open ourselves up to that same threat when we are not in power.
41
Hey, where's Raku? She's missing her thread.
42
As much as I want to believe this survey, according to this it's fake: http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/828047… Awfully short on details about how we know it's fake, but if you can't trust Wil Wheaton then who can you trust?
43
@29: Amanda Marcotte's got you covered.

@33: I think there should be more scholarships encouraging men to go into nursing, teaching younger children, paralegals, psychology, and social work...

One of these things is not like the others.
44
There's a group who thinks there is a bias against men. But we can ignore them because they're all men, and everybody knows that men are idiots. Excellent argument
45
@43, you're right, grammar. "being paralegals" As for teaching, I meant the primary and secondary schools. K-8 have abysmally low percentages of male teachers.
46
@45 Actually, I missed the parallel construction entirely. I don't see what paralegals have in common with nurses, primary teachers, psychologists, and social workers.
47
@46, it's on pdf page 61. 84.6% of paralegals are women and there is a pretty small gender gap (women earn 92% of what men earn in that profession).
48
Where I work (large intellectual-property law firm) most of the paralegals are women... but so are most of the associate attornies.
49
Personal anecdote. After my divorce, and experiencing the way the court system in this state IS biased towards men (yeah, it's documented, no I'm not taking time to look), I went naively looking for a support group to talk. I found the typical MRAs. Women-hating, women-blaming middle aged assholes. I ran away as fast as I could.

There are men's problems to solve, but it shouldn't come at the blame or expense of women, or our children. Women and children have it worse than men on the whole (privilege, yada yada)
50
@48

Attorneys.
51
@50, lol, thanks. I realized as soon as I posted.
52
Most teenagers say something of value now and then if you are not too much of a snob to listen.
53
The day that women (as a group) make more money than men, and leadership positions are mostly held by women, is the day I will agree with that MRAs have a beef, but not one day before.
54
@4 If only we had more male elementary school teachers. Every guy who wants to become one gets hired instantly because demand is so high. Unfortunately, that job pays shit, is considered unimportant and feminine, and so little boys in elementary school lack role models in the classroom. Once formerly "female" jobs garner equal respect to "male" jobs, this problem will fix itself and kids like yours will be fine.
55
@4 And if you've got a female stepchild, prepared to be a lot more afraid for her. The world is going to be out to crush her spirit, not just the mere school system.
56
I always feard that young, sexually frustrated guys who never even had a good girlfriend would readily eat up the screed from the old bitter divorced guys. It's sad because they might otherwise be empathetic and happy. But imagine being too attached to your computer to engage with real women. To these dorks, it's easier to have the internet confirm their bias.

Most active redditors I know are unemployed, too. It is a community of people who have nothing better to do (in their own opinion). Gotta wonder what the MRAs average annual income looks like.

Nothing too horrible about men in their 20s. Sure, they're at peak arrogance. But all people in their 20s are generally vain, exclusive, and convinced that everybody is doing it wrong but them. Hopefully we all chill out.
57
99.9% of everyone in their early twenties is an insufferable tosser with little to add to anything and is best ignored.

This is why you do not treat everyone on the internet as equals, and consider that the anonymous loon yelling things on reddit should just be ignored as the individual nobodies they are.

Paul Constant falls into this trap as well when he takes three of the worst comments from Redstate or TheBlaze and treats them like they are leaders of the GOP and represent most conservatives.

I mean, its good for a laugh, but let's not pretend we are doing anything other than laughing at the villiage idiots.
58
Self-selected participants in a Reddit survey were predominantly college-age white males? I am shocked. And I'm sure the Fox News crew will be happy to know that self-selected surveys now provide meaningful statistical information, although they apparently didn't not know that already.

@36: The women/girls succeeding part has been celebrated, where it has been acknowledged. The men/boys not succeeding part has only recently started to get real daylight. It's important to distinguish between misogynists who are angry that women are doing better, and the people pointing out the very real phenomenon that the U.S. education system of late seems to serve male students less and less effectively -- on average. In the past decade or so, I have worked in classrooms ranging from elementary school to university, and in my little anecdotal and probably not completely representative corner of the world, the most engaged students getting the highest grades are almost always girls and women. I am teaching a university statistics class this semester, and women have the top 11 grades in the class. Maybe my teaching style somehow clicks with women more than men? It's possible, but I'm not the only person to notice this.
59
@57: Am I the 0.1% or am I a weird jerk?
Trick question: that's an 'or' statement, not an 'xor' statement.
60
I beg you to take a stats class before you post anything about surveys again. The size of a bad sample doesn't make it good. A bad sample is bad if it is a sample of 10 or of a million. It is irrelevant what percent of the data the sample is (unless it is very close to 100). To take an example. I could construct a sample of 5,000,000 or even 40,000,000 or for that matter 70,000,000 where Romney won in 2012 instead of Obama.
61
@32 Because from birth we're encouraged to submit more than boys to authority and to do what we're told to do.

Tell a girl to study and do her homework and she'll study and do her homework. Tell a boy to study and do his homework and he'll go climb a tree and proud stepfather will gloat "Er, that's my boy's own way of expressing himself".

Years of studying more, because parents did not indulge our lack of willingness to study as a cute "boys will be boys" normalcy, makes us better students, though we have equal birth abilities. But then, white boy priviledge means that them who had all the fun while growing up and who have become just lazy overindulged idiots will have a place they don't deserve in college, and will earn more than us.

No wonder they fear and hate women, who had it harder than them, who became better than them, and whom they hope will never amount to anything, because they don't have a fleshy pink sausage dangling in their panties - if girls were allowed actual equality, it'll be out with the overindulged lazy bunch.
62
You know I was gonna get all knee jerk on this, but I really was a useless piecee of shit in my early 20's.
63
I teach elementary school. There are probably a thousand interconnected reasons why girls tend to do better in elementary school than boys do. One big difference that I've noticed, though, is what kids say that they do in their free time. Obviously this isn't true for every kid, but if you ask a girl what she did last night, she's much more likely to tell you what book she read, and a boy is more likely to tell you about video games.
By high school, but the way, girls are taking fewer math and science classes than their male peers, even though they do better in math and science classes in elementary and middle school.
64
Maybe that's what makes them right.
65
Enough of women,there is strong need of Men Empowerment
66
This article is insanely unprofessional crap. I keep hoping that people will just treat each other good, but obviously we wont be doing that anytime soon. Rights groups including feminism ALL need to be concerned with the rights of everybody in the community. If I were to join a men's rights group I would be concerned about women's rights as well. We need real equality for all people, and that does mean we all need to stick up for each other as a whole. Sometime women hurt men, and sometimes men get raw deals, and men have the right to discuss their rights and freedoms amongst themselves if they choose to. Abuse, Rights, Sexism, Equality, etc..., are not women's issues, they are not issues for people over 29, they are human issues.

Think of the outrage if an article like this was printed about a female rights group. What if Paul Constant said "no white woman between the ages of 17 and 20 has ever said anything of value."

Men and women have the right to equality, freedom, and equal equity in relationships. End of story. Again, just amazed at how stupid this article is...
67
Sometimes, I try to visualize who racist, sexist internet trolls are in real life. I find it makes hate speech feel a little less violent if I picture the kind of person who would waste their time writing something awful on the internet to make themselves feel a little better.

Just Look In The Mirror,,,
68
"Sometimes, I try to visualize who racist, sexist internet trolls are in real life."

Just Look In The Mirror,,,

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