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Men's Rights Activists Call For Boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road
ideonexus writes: Aaron Clarey, author of the blog Return of Kings and prominent figure in the Men's Rights Movement, is calling for a boycott of George Miller's new edition to the Mad Max franchise "Mad Max: Fury Road," calling the film a "Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things..." and citing the fact that "Vagina Monologues" author Eve Ensler was brought in to coach the actresses on playing sex slaves who escape a warlord's possession. Critics have been applauding the film, which currently scores 98% on RottenTomatoes.
Well, I was on the fence about spending money on this movie, but this has ensured that I will. (If this is a bit of false outrage generated by someone attached to the movie in some way, they're definitely earning their pay.)
Except, well.... men aren't a majority group.
I have a hard time imagining any remake being better than the original. It little dialog, but excelled at making you feel for the characters and what was happening at the moment.
Tie that will a limited budget, it was showed they knew how to create a great movie.
This happens a lot on IMDB. The first people to see a movie are usually hardcore fans who have been anticipating it for a long time, and will enjoy it no matter what. So there's a sampling bias at the start, then normal people start watching the movie and the average rating goes down.
Maybe not in terms of the planet's population, but in many industries and in positions of power and authority, men are still a majority.
No...because they feel that empowerment slipping away, and they fear payback.
Men's rights and white power groups and other groups that "fight" for the rights of an already empowered majority exist only because they choose to ignore history.
There are no such thing as "group" rights. If a man is denied custody of his children during a divorce procedure, that isn't some how okay because his grandmother was denied a job. Whining about a movie is silly, but MRAs have some valid points about discrimination against men in family law. For instance, most domestic violence laws are written as if men are the sole abusers, when most DV is actually perpetrated by women. In California, the police can only arrest the "dominant" (physically stronger) partner, regardless of who was the initiator or the aggressor. So a woman can attack her husband, and he goes to jail.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen the movie.
P.S. have any of these idiots ever heard of the Streisand Effect?
Yes, that is what they are hoping for. You had never heard of this group before, and now you have. Achievement unlocked (for them).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For fuck's sake.
First of all, Aaron Clarey himself says he's not an MRA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Second of all, so what if he was?
I'm tired of MRAs being the boogeyman of feminists looking for someone to blame everytime a tampon slips out of joint.
Oh, was that sexist?
Or did I get to say that because I'm a woman and not "punching down"?
Feminists are allowed to "disown" or "hide" any of their own rank that doesn't play along with the narrative (such as: #killallmen or the SCUM manifesto). Do MRAs (the quiet, non-extremist variety) not get the same benefit of the doubt? Is that really equality, women?
When was the last time you actually talked to someone claiming to be an MRA, rather than just shouting them into silence before actually listening to their points of view? Or do you just blindly listen to The Mary Sue and Jezebel, because they've never shown any biased reporting, right?
This isn't because I'm an MRA (I'm an egalitarian; there's room at the table for everyone with a gender-based axe to grind). I'm just annoyed with feminism needing any enemy to latch the hate onto every time someone dare criticize a woman for anything, instead of, you know, dealing with it like grownups do.
Especially since Eve Ensler wrote a piece that is supposed to be empowering to women that condones not only rape, but statutory rape.
So, feminism, can I broad-brush blame you for that? Is that okay?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Some of the points the men's right movement are valid and worth debating, such as disparity in prison sentencing and child custody. However, this Return of Kings guy is a fucking moron.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
No, it isn't a good movie. Not anywhere near a good movie. Actually kinda a dumb movie. It does have lots of car chases and explosions to distract you from the fact that it is a bad movie. I'm sure it will be successful - nobody eats at McDonalds for quality food but they still eat there.
Why is this on Slashdot? Has Slashdot become this clickbaity? Secondly, Charlize Theron has said herself that Mad Max is "an incredibly feminist action film" and "It's a total empowerment of women,". Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wir...
I've also heard the synopsis of the film, and it sounds like Charlize Theron's character is the main character in the film and women come to the rescue in the film. It sounds like it really sidelines Mad Max in an attempt to push a political agenda, I liked the Aliens movies, but it wasn't a bait and switch like Mad Max appears to be -- we knew that Sigourney Weaver was the star.
In many courtrooms, men are there to pay the bills for the ex-wife and shut up. Nothing more. The ex-wife can pretty much do anything and nothing happens, the man, well, he is treated as guilty until he proves himself innocent.
Men's rights are alive and well.
Men's rights are alive and making progress. Slowly.
Not at all the same thing.
Um..
Just exactly when are you going to stop helping females and take your foot of the back of young men? The ratio is 60/40 now-- when will it be "enough" to stop having hundreds of groups helping females but few helping males?
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07...
Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.
"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.
Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College.
---
seriously--- I'm retired and don't really give a shit- I'm not a "men's" activist-- but I see in my gaming groups and in my in-laws relationships how the males are suffering while the females are still getting assistance and help even tho things are well past 50/50 (i.e. "fair") now.
At the last place I worked before I retired, 70% of managers were females and they openly discriminated in favor of females for team leader positions the ratio was 80% female to 20% male. They did things which would be illegal if a man did it. The law wasn't being equally enforced.
People hire people "like" them unless the government gives them a reality check. Women are equally able to discriminate, behave in a prejudicial fashion, and abuse the power of their positions.
The area where it is imbalanced in favor of males is at the very top. Among 60 year old males- the percentages are m ore like 80% male and 20% female. Where we need affirmative action is at the top- not in the bottom or even in the middle any more.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Maybe not in terms of the planet's population, but in many industries and in positions of power and authority, men are still a majority.
...and those men comprise an exceedingly miniscule percentage of the male population. The rest of us in the 99.999th percentile aren't as "empowered" as those guys.
BTW, males DO outnumber females worldwide, but females outnumber males in the vast majority of the developed world.
Good grief, dude. Not everything has some deep underlying 'message'.
Well, I would agree with you...except, they brought in the author of the 'Vagina Monologues", Eve Ensler, to consult on making the film. You do not bring her in unless you are putting in some deep underlying message which she would approve of. For that matter, Eve Ensler would not have consented to consult on the film unless she agreed with the message.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
yup
the arc of history is clear: progress is real. it wasn't long ago the idea of gay marriage rights or marijuana legalization seemed distant and impossible
bigots, sexists, racists: they may whine and bitch, or go full douchebag and do immoral things, but their fate is clear and certain: the dustbin of history. they are losing, and they will lose in the end
don't get me wrong, sexists, racists and such losers will always exist. it's just that they will no longer dominate the social, legal, and political status quo like they used to. the fact that they no longer do is, like the arrow of time, proof of the march of history and progress
you will always encounter sexists and racists. a moronic comment on slashdot. a throwaway comment by a loser coworker. a catcall or a tweet from who knows where that momentarily catches your eye
ignore them. they hold no power
such shitbags will always linger like a fungus in a dank basement, the socially malformed pathetics of any society. serious civilization has moved on without them, and will continue to make them more and more irrelevant
like cannibalism and slavery, things that also do still exist, and always will exist, in the dark cracks. but are now an exotic shocking fringe, and no longer dominate our societies
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But even though he's a moron, when it comes time for clickbait sites to start posting about them, guess who they're going to pick. Right--they're always going to pick the morons, because picking the morons is social justice clickbait and picking men who have problems with child custody isn't, thus making any movement that opposes social justice look like morons simply by choosing who to focus on.
(And Slashdot seems to have a gradually increasing number of clickbait social justice stories lately.)
I bet only because their mother is junkie, prostitute and serial murderer at the same time or something like that. Anything less would result in custody for her..
I go to see Mad Max movie for Mad Max.
If you go to see John Wayne in Chisolm, you expect to see cattle barons fight in the west you don't expect to see the little girl from True Grit. So is this a Mad Max movie (Hard to do without Mel Gibson to begin with) or is it Tank Girl.
I think this is the first time I've seen "MRA" in a slashdot headline (I could have missed some, but I do check reasonably often). It's certainly the first time Return of Kings attention-getting trollish posts (including stuff like "why girls with short hair are damaged" and "why to date a girl with an eating disorder") has baited slashdot, that I'm aware of.
But the bigger concern is- is slashdot going to really enter this territory? This is hugely controversial stuff. We've already seen "feminism Friday" become a thing- normally some genderwarrior-bait story near the end of the week, normally told from a feminist perspective- sometimes legit, sometimes not. One piece that is largely controversial on slashdot is the "should we bend over backwards to get girls in tech" thing, obviously built in controversy for a bunch of professional tech people, and we see it *over and over again*.
But this is beyond that. You would expect people to have differing opinions on that stuff, and whether you are opposed or in favor, it's pretty relevant. Random gender warring stories, such as this, are not.
I'll also point this out: the editorial staff seems to be pretty strongly on one side. It may be difficult to give MRAs a fair shake, but certainly, by calling RoK an MRA website, and by linking that as the first thing ever, they aren't even fucking trying. This would be like calling out "feminists" and then linking to some really ludicrous 70s-edge position as being the standard-bearer. A Voice For Men's website is probably a better place to start if you want to actually go find non-strawmen points to analyze / refute- they at least self identify as some version of MRA, not some reactionary / PUA crossbreed like RoK.
The people who discuss these gender things online tend to be full-on soldiers, on both sides. They will do or say anything to slam the other side, they will dox, they will make false claims, they are fighting a fucking war. And you want the slashdot commenters to be in on this? Gross.
They seem to get laid once, after which the woman runs away. Or she smells the dork long before something happens. And hearing the stuff that comes out of MRA's mouths, I can't blame her...
How was it a "bait and switch" if the fact that there are important female characters was widely publicized before the film's opening?
And by "widely publicized", I mean in every single media outlet in the world.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, it isn't a good movie. Not anywhere near a good movie. Actually kinda a dumb movie. It does have lots of car chases and explosions to distract you from the fact that it is a bad movie. I'm sure it will be successful - nobody eats at McDonalds for quality food but they still eat there.
People like you always crack me up. Mad Max: Fury Road has an audience approval rating hovering around 90% and in the end that's what counts and it's what makes a movie good, when most of the people who watched it liked what they saw. Anything else is irrelevant. Some of the best movies I have ever seen got dumped on by critics even though the audiences loved them. I'm sometimes tempted to hypothesise that in order to judge the watchability of a film the best way is to find somebody like you or some opinionated snob of a film critic like Leonard Martin and watch only the stuff you guys don't like.
That's funny, but you make a really important point.
If there really is a "femininization" of culture going on, what does it say about masculinity that these men are pissing themselves and crying like giant titty babies?
Of the qualities that are traditionally thought of as "masculine", is throwing a tantrum because an action movie has important female characters among them? Is crapping on the floor in fury when a woman is hired in your department among them? How about completely losing your shit for eight months because some woman criticized your favorite video game? Is that masculine behavior.
I have to wonder what kind of role models this relatively young group of MRAs grew up with.
Let's look at how one of the best-known MRAs, Paul Elam, describes his own conversion to the cause of "men's rights":
Got that? His mother forced him to take his diarrhea medicine and he realized it was a woman's world. Jesus wept.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That sounds kind of awesome, tbh.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When we stop belittling of half of earth's population down to the level of a bedroom/stove/pushchair accessory from their early teens; when we start equally participating in said things and give them a generation or two without ramming our perverse ideas of women down their throats as soon as they reach 12, only then can we start making comparisons. Before then, a big F**K YOU to everybody who even tries. This is as unfair a fight as it gets.
It would be so if only MRAs actually cared a fig about discrimination or violence against men.
If you follow the movement, you'll see it has a lot less to do with making anyone's life better and a lot to do with attacking women.
Ah yes, the classic "pay no attention to the rationality of the argument, I can assure you that somehow it's all about invisible oppression."
This appeal to emotion is something I've never understood. Does logic warp in the presence of such accusations? Do valid points become invalid if countered with claims of misogyny? Is 2 = 2 somehow not correct because the author was accused of being an MRA (and therefore bad by association)? How do you rationalise away the valid points about discrimination against men by claiming that arbitrary persons attack arbitrary women?
What is a reference for movie quality, if it's not a site where movie reviews are aggregated?
Do you have some machine that measures movie quality?
You are welcome on my lawn.
And yet, there's a big to-do over transwomen wanting to participate in girl's/women's sports and doing well enough that they're accused of having an advantage.
Oh stop.
To suggest that being dismissive of some wuss whinging about a MAD MAX movie contributing to the gynocracy somehow means that I would therefore not care about a son (or anyone) being falsely accused of rape is the sort of histrionics that one might have, 60 years ago, attributed to an overreacting woman.
I'm not saying that the militant feminism hasn't gone too far (it has, but I submit that's symptomatic of the overwhelming force of political correctness generally, actually). What I'm saying is:
I directly dispute our culture's determination that "anything the feminine way" is the "right" way and anything "the male way" is some sort of pathology that needs to be corrected ASAP.
Part of classical masculinity is, to me: ...none of these are exemplified by men crying about the latest Mad Max film.
- if shit bothers you, you go fix it, you don't piss and moan over the fence to other people trying to gin up sympathy.
- lead by doing, not by "calling" for leadership
- there's nothing wrong with feeling emotions; there are places where displaying them is ridiculous or inappropriate
- be strong; understand some shit is trivial and not worth regarding. You give it power by whinging about it.
- understand that you are not a special snowflake
- you deserve only the respect you earn
-Styopa
Do all MRA cucks tend to write in the style of movie supervillains?
Instead of coming up with some diversionary snide remark, you should have just apologized and acknowledged that "You're right, fey000, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. As usual."
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If women wanted jobs in IT, they would go get them, like the women who HAVE jobs in it did. The women you hear bitching about wanting jobs in It don't actually give a fuck about it, which is why they are gender studies and communications majors who spend their time tweeting and making YouTube videos, instead.
Paying child support in two states for a child he has sole custody of? What the hell are you talking about? A college age kid his ex is beating the hell out of? What are you on?
> Return of Kings is not MRA. Return of Kings is anti-MRA. That's a pretty big difference.
Only if you're one of the assholes in either of the those groups. From the outside it all looks the same. Forgive us if we don't distinguish fine gradations between misogynist camps. You can all go your own way for all I care.
And more than three women are killed every day by their husband or boyfriend in domestic violence incidents in the US.
So what's your point?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Part of being an adult is, to me: ...none of these are exemplified by anyone crying about the latest Mad Max film.
- if shit bothers you, you go fix it, you don't piss and moan over the fence to other people trying to gin up sympathy.
- lead by doing, not by "calling" for leadership
- there's nothing wrong with feeling emotions; there are places where displaying them is ridiculous or inappropriate
- be strong; understand some shit is trivial and not worth regarding. You give it power by whinging about it.
- understand that you are not a special snowflake
- you deserve only the respect you earn
FTFY.
There's no reason why men should be considered as the only sex to be able to exhibit these traits w/o detracting from their identity as male or female.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The recent revelations in the Sulkowicz/Nungesser case made it necessary to find an MRA boogeyman to beat up on for a bit, since they didn't actually have anything they had to make something up. Hence claiming that people who outright despise the men's rights movement are "MRAs".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
No what's your point? Apart from (possibly) one or two nut jobs everybody in the MRM is opposed to husbands or boyfriends killing women too. Even if they weren't what does the one have to do with the other?
The problem with men's rights activitists is that they blame feminism for the fact that women are advantaged in family law (specifically regarding children).
The truth is that MRA people are wrong. Some argue that we need to go back to the masculine "roots" and whatever. They warn about the "feminization" of boys and the "insecurity" they face in society. The thing is, it is the values traditionally attached to masculinity which makes men lose out in family law. Traditional gender roles have it that women are better parents than men. Women don't win because of some feminist agenda. Women win because traditionally women are seen as better parents even if they beat their own kids.
Even people who proclaim to be feminist can fall prey to this line of thinking (though hey should know better).
Trying to go back to more traditional gender roles or whatever is just going to be counter productive.
Action movies with female leads have been a recipe for a while now.
Look at Tomb Raider, Ultraviolet, Salt or many others. They are basically a Steven Seagal movie with a sexy chick instead of Steven Seagal. If that's the price to pay to see an action movie without being a dinosaur, I'm okay with it. Long live feminism!
And thinking of it, if Steven Seagal was to star in a chick flick instead of Jennifer Aniston, that would be a sign of true gender equality. I don't think we are there yet, and it's probably better that way.
lucm, indeed.
Fair enough. Let's let RoK speak for themselves, shall we? From their own website's ABOUT page:
I don't know if you've been around long enough, but we used to have a Slashdot user named "ThirdWay". He used to push antisemitic and racist propaganda and link to a site called "third way dot org" or something like that. The site was full of white supremacists and antisemitics and holocaust deniers and would have article after article about racial purity. "ThirdWay" used to swear up and down that he wasn't a neo-nazi and the third way site wasn't a neo-nazi site.
You can say anything you want about yourself. But when you look like a duck, and quack like a duck and waddle like a duck and you've got fucking webbed feet and a flat bill, I don't know about you but I'm gonna start looking for the orange sauce, capisce?
You are welcome on my lawn.
My point is that the anecdotal example of a guy who had to fight for custody of his kids is pretty well trumped by the statistical example of 1500 women killed by their husbands/boyfriends each year.
Do I have to take you by the hand to some of the MRA forums where you will find apologia for violence against women? No friend, not everybody in the MRM is "opposed to husbands or boyfriends killing women".
Here is RooshV, a well-known MRA celebrity (and one of the guys calling for a boycott on Mad Max), on why rape should be legalized:
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/0...
And here's the same guy on why there should not be laws against domestic violence:
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because it looked like the sort of thing that could generate 400+ comments and have people looking at the advertisements on the page.
Yes, and the increasing number of things framed as MRA vs SJW fights are part of it. It's the new bitcoin article of the week.
And here is an upvoted comment from that same subreddit:
There is your MRA in full. Strip away the sad attempt at public relations in the FAQ, and you find some violent, hateful motherfuckers.
You want me to post some Men's Rights subreddit threads that talk about how rape needs to be legalized? I've got some if you'd like to see them, but my guess is that you've already seen them.
You are welcome on my lawn.