Male Feminists

MRAs are whiny little bitches:

Let's stop right there.  These men are, as Hugo says, aggrieved and clueless.  Enraged, sad and bewildered.  He calls them pathetic and infuriating (mostly because of how many of them prefer women with shaven legs, apparently).  He even actually questions the morality of mocking them.

 But if you think Hugo's about to show the slightest concern for his fellow men over, say, the obsequious fawning he does over his feminist handlers, you would be wrong.  The rage and pain of these losers -- and Hugo doesn't hesitate to mock them as such -- is, indeed, a fair and moral talent for public bullying according to Hugo . . . because they're just dudes.  And dudes don't matter.  (Until they start buying firearms -- then they matter).

Now, what’s interesting about this excerpt is that it is basically a male version of the type of writing that is generally found on feminist sites.  It uses us-versus-them language, and never once stops to consider whether the other side may be right.*

Now, it is true that Hugo Schwyzer is an insufferable leftist mangina male feminist.  And it’s also true that Schwyzer should be punched in his insufferably douchy face for being such an insufferable douche.  But none of this is relevant to considering whether Schwyzer’s arguments have merit.

Instead of asking whether Schwyzer’s characterizations of nice guys is correct, instead of asking whether Schwyzer correctly identified nice guys’ motivations for interacting with women, instead of asking whether Schwyzer is correct in asserting that the fulfillment of sexual desire is not a right, instead of asking whether Schwyzer’s assertion that alpha traits are not distributed evenly is correct, instead of asking whether Schwyzer’s assertion that nice guys have a sense of entitlement, and instead of asking questions relevant to Schwyzer’s assertion, Ian simply attempts to rip Schwyzer a new one instead of asking whether Schwyzer is correct.  Again, Schwyzer is an annoying feminist prick.  But that doesn’t make him wrong.

Indeed, the whole failure of the excerpted post, which is itself indicative of the general failure of the MRM, is that it is fundamentally predicated on the assumption that Team Men is always above reproach, and is therefore never wrong, and therefore never needs to engage in quiet self-examination.  Just as feminists will defend Team Woman to the nth degree, no matter how wrong or irrational the case may be, MRAs will likewise defend Team Man even when Team Man is incredibly wrong.

The sad hypocrisy in all this is that MRAs will generally complain about feminists constantly defending their own, even when it’s wrong.  But then, basically everything that MRAs hate about feminists tends to be true of MRAs.  MRAs are whiny, they defend their own at all costs, they constantly talk about how government can solve their problems, and so on.  The only difference between MRAs and feminists is that they play for different teams.  Other than that, the goals, tactics, and behaviors are basically the same.

* Although in fairness to Ian—whose writings I generally find insightful—he does note later on that Schwyzer is correct in one thing:  sex has to be won.  Of course, Ian’s post implicitly reinforces Schywzer’s point that nice guys are manipulative because Ian’s advice in this post is that men basically need to get better at manipulating women, which involves being a dick instead of a nice guy.  I digress.