Shitposting for the Fempire
‘Female supporters: check. Supporters of colour: check. Disabled supporters: ???’
After I viewed a video of a progressive taking down the International Conference for Men’s Rights, it got me thinking on the topic of the MRM and ableism.
Men’s Rights Activists (or ‘egalitarians’ to be politically correct) will sometimes strut around men of colour and women in order to give theirselves a rosier view, but secretly they’re equivalent to beer cans: items to be used once and then thrown away. Now, the fact that Blokes’ Rights Activists don’t really care about men is hardly news to any frequenters here, but in my experience they at least sometimes pretend to care about the marginalized. The disabled do not get that treatment at all. Okay, I kid… they do it once in a blue moon.
Whilst I would hesitate to connect ableism with misandry, it still seems to me like many men are affected by disabilities, and consequently disability issues are also men’s issues. This report suggests that approximately 530,000 of English men have a learning disability, whereas they believe that only 375,000 of the women do. These sources suggest that more men have autism than women do. There are also chromosomal disorders that impact the learning faculties of boys & men. I personally would take the statistics with a grain of salt (I suspect that girls & women are underdiagnosed), but that certainly wouldn’t stop MRAs from calling attention to these. Whatever the case may be, disabilities still affect men.
I had yet to have seen any MRA or egalitarian make even a passing reference to the oppression of the disabled. On AVFM, this slur gets thrown around casually, and they have little positive to say for autists.
For comparison’s sake, here’re the equivalents on a site called Everydayfeminism: a slur and references to autism. The former gets only one result (technically two, but it’s kind of a reprint), and the latter gets loads of articles discussing autism and selfsters. (Ironically, they even have an article that condemns the ‘neckbeard’ stereotype. Many leftists are not only critical about the stereotypies amongst their opponents, but also amongst their allies.)
There seems to be a consensus amongst Blokes’ Rights Activists that racism is wrong. They certainly don’t always show that, but they seem at least aware of the concept and its unacceptability. Their attitude towards ableism is less clear. This result features only a few articles specifically about the topic. In an almost amusing twist, my first(!) result is ‘#AbleismExists! (No it doesn't)’ and the one right after it says ‘... ableism is still very much a problem.’
To be fair to them, there actually are a few articles on the subject (I was expecting none at all, not even one), but they feel like an afterthought; they spend some of their precious time bashing feminism, women, or both. It almost seems like Blokes’ Rights Activists can’t have a conversation about anything without the nearly omnipresent menace of communism feminism coming up.
The most frustrating thing about this movement, to me, is that sometimes they do indeed bring up valid points (circumcision, drafting, high suicide rates &c.), but every time they do so they piss in the soup by mentioning misandry, matriarchy, gynocentrism, or (modern) feminism. The most accurate way to describe the so-called ‘Men’s Rights Movement’ is antifeminism in a cheap tuxedo, and one that they hardly ever even bother to keep clean.



