Politics as Spectacle: Why MRAs are the real white knights

I’m fed up with giving SJWs gentle advice and hints on how to present their arguments. They generally regard doing so as some kind of mortal sin and confuse me for someone who hates them or is internet-stalking them, or both. So I thought I’d try the opposite for a change! Giving politically-incorrect MRAs blunt advice on how to present their arguments!

Oh, and when I say blunt, I mean rude.

(If you’re a politically-correct MRA who just wants visitation rights, this article is not addressed at you.)

So I’ve been wondering for years why MRAs don’t seem to care about convincing people who don’t already sort-of kind-of agree with them. Two obvious explanations suggest themselves:

1. They are all too stupid to realise how ineffective they are
2. They are just shitposting/trolling

No doubt there are some on 4chan who fall under (2), but both of these explanations are singularly unsatisfactory. They don’t really explain anything. If MRAs want to effect change, why don’t they care about their obvious ineffectiveness? And if they don’t want to effect change, what the hell are they playing at? Some kind of weird historical reenactment of 19th century sexism? It’s baffling.

So I’ve come up with two far more interesting (by which I mean, trollish) explanations for why MRAs behave this way:

1. They are the real white knights. They care deeply about women’s feelings, or at least the bad reputation they believe they would get from those who do, if they directly and robustly argued with a female feminist on Twitter or Tumblr or whatever, or they misinterpret the rules of Reddit as saying you can’t mock particular people, so they instead make vague remarks that can’t be linked back to what any particular feminist has said (at least by someone who doesn’t have way too much time on their hands).
2. Alternatively, they know their own arguments are unconvincing and in some cases weak, and prefer virtue signalling on Reddit to their ideological peers, by which I mean looking ideologically correct to their peers, over convincing the unconverted. (Don’t contradict me about what virtue signalling means. I’m telling you what virtue signalling means! It happens to be subculture-specific.)

Either way, this is just the wrong way to do politics. In the real world of politics that I inhabit, we do actually engage with each other’s arguments. Well, at least one side does anyway. We use each other’s names (or Twitter or Reddit usernames), we reply to each other, we take issue with each other’s arguments. We don’t flounce off in a huff like the subjects of My Super Sweet Sixteen did when their daddies didn’t buy them the car they wanted, as soon as our interlocutors make a point that we dislike. (Not always, anyway.) We stay the course, if there’s a genuine point to engage with that hasn’t already been made. Within reason. Yes, sometimes we ad hominem and tone police — let he who has never in his life ad hominemed or tone policed cast the first stone! — but a lot of the time we actually hone in on the meat of an argument and actually use the analytical part of our brains and put forward a counterargument in good faith, that we actually believe in.

You know, that thing that according to MRAs, men are supposed to be so good at? Analytical thinking?

Now I know what you’re going to say. Of course there are MRAs or MRA-ish men who do directly respond to what individual feminists say, point by point. Of course there are. I’ve watched some of their videos.

But somehow, like (probably) millions of other people, I’m not really convinced. Either they pick an ultra-easy target — a six-sigma SJW, i.e. one whose views are only shared by a few dozen fellow Tumblrinas. Or they fail to land a killer blow (by which I mean counterargument, I hasten to add — just in case any SJWs are reading this and get the wrong idea that I’m advocating violence or something).

Let me clue you in to something about debating which so many MRAs seem not to understand. Convincing other people is like building a bridge between where you are and where they are. To do that, if there’s a big gulf between you, you have to understand where they’re coming from, and tailor your words accordingly. If someone is deeply into the SJW worldview, you can’t start by assuming all sorts of controversial assumptions. Well, technically, you can try to do it with a barrage of propaganda — such as the infamous Gish Gallop — but that usually doesn’t work. Statistically.

To take an incredibly simple example — and I use this example because I know many MRAs are right-wing in other ways, though it might be politically-incorrect to point this out — if you are transphobic, you can’t convince someone who isn’t transphobic to become transphobic by predicating your argument on the assumption that trans women are men. That’s called “assuming your conclusion”, folks. Logic 101.

A lot of MRA arguments are pretty hilarious. If you unpick them and try to put them into some kind of logical schema, oftentimes they amount to “Let us assume, as the wicked feminists wish us to believe, that men and women are exactly the same. But we clearly observe X, Y, and Z in reality, showing that women do not in fact want to be treated the same as men. CHECKMATE, FEMINISTS!”

The reason this is hilarious is as follows: Why should we assume that men and women are the same, or indeed want to be treated the same in each and every way? This is really the whole issue, yet too often it is simply glossed over by the MRAs.

Could it literally be that MRAs are simply confused about what feminists believe? I think that it could! Feminists, after all, are buttressed in on all sides by political correctness, and frequently cannot speak plainly about what they believe, for fear of being savaged for stepping out of line by an SJW who is more extreme than them on a particular issue (the most extremist feminists in the world reportedly live in communes separated from men, so while they are presumably an exception to this principle, not having anyone more extreme than them to worry about, we don’t often witness them). That SJW could possibly be their own future selves — so they might not want to commit to a belief which their future self might regret having committing to. In many ways, feminists should thus be much less free than MRAs. They therefore have to be circumspect about what they believe, and may resort to only saying or hinting at what they don’t believe, leaving the rest of us puzzled as to what precisely they do believe.

Nevertheless, the broad outlines are often generally pretty clear, if you think rationally and with a cool head.

For example, when feminists complain that there are not enough women in tech companies, they are generally not complaining that women are ignoring some kind of putative biological or political “imperative” to be exactly like men and try to do the exact same jobs as men in the exact same proportions. They clearly do respect the right of other women to choose not to be tech workers — not least because most of the female feminists who complain about the lack of women in computing aren’t themselves computer programmers, despite the high salaries on offer to programmers, and therefore it will be fairly intuitively obvious to them that women should be free to choose whether to be programmers or not. After all, if they chose not to be programmers, for presumably legitimate reasons, why shouldn’t other women likewise do the same? And surely that applies equally to any other tech job, if it applies to programmers?

It is only the Soviet Union that forced the engineering profession to be composed of 50% men and 50% women — and that stopped when the Berlin Wall fell. (It was probably actually men who thought up the idea in the first place.) So let’s dispense with this idea that modern feminists want to enforce equality by compulsion in the most “mannish” of jobs. It simply isn’t true. That’s an idea that died with Communism.

No, what today’s feminists are complaining about is alleged brainwashing from society — pink toys and dolls and such things, leading impressionable little girls’ minds down certain paths, forever locked into certain thoughts about possible careers, apparently. Or teachers supposedly telling girls that they aren’t suitable for certain jobs (but how often does this actually happen in 2016? It’s current year!). Or lack of female programmer role models, or some such things.

Those who are less hardline feminists might even admit, privately, “probably most women will never want to be computer programmers no matter how many female role models are promoted in schools and magazines and doll sets, but at least more of us ought to want to be marketers, or office managers, or managers, or executives in tech companies”. Those are more realistic goals, they’d say — privately, of course, for fear of being tarred and feathered for being “sexist”. Publicly, they can only hint at this view, by promoting those jobs in tech, and pointedly ignoring programming. Which they frequently do — so it’s reasonable to infer that they either believe that themselves, or are trying to appeal to other women who believe that.

So why do some MRAs seem to believe that feminists think that men and women are “exactly the same” — whatever that means? Whatever gave them that idea?

I really don’t know. Maybe it goes back to early childhood.

Well I’m sorry if your kindergarten teacher or your mother was an extremist feminist who told you lots of incorrect things about there being no difference whatsoever between boys and girls — but maybe you should be criticising her, and not every random feminist that you happen to encounter as if she was her. Projection — it’s a real thing.

Yes, really! I’m pretty sure no feminists go around saying “There are no differences between men and women. There are no differences between men and women.” 24/7. If you think that, that’s a figment of your imagination. Yes, some of them may seem to imply it, by making frankly disturbing claims like “women should be able to fight on the front line of wars”, but that’s a different issue. It demands a different approach. You generally can’t argue against something that hasn’t been explicitly stated, and you especially can’t argue against it obliquely. Otherwise you’re tilting at windmills, and it’s no surprise when you fail like Don Quixote.

(It’s a mystery to me why the same MRAs who think women’s brains are hardly capable of analytical thought, simultaneously seem to think that two levels of obliqueness — hinting at something your interlocutor has not explicitly stated — makes for an perfectly understandable argument — but again, they’re probably virtue signalling and/or trying to signal cleverness to their fellow men, rather than intending to genuinely convince a woman.)

There are two other possibilities:

1. If you’ve somehow become an MRA while still believing that men and women are the same, and you genuinely believe that women are just pretending to be different to get special privileges… what a bizarre person you are, and you should probably meet some actual women to find out what they are really (statistically) like. But surely you must be trolling — surely no-one actually believes that, not even a homeschooled son of a single father from Nowhere, Alabama.
2. If you don’t actually think that feminists believe that men and women are equal in every way, but are pretending that they do because they “sort of kind of” do in order to hoist them by their own petards — that’s not how hoisting someone by their own petard works! Straighten up your argument, man — have some higher standards. Your argument is the rhetorical equivalent of sagging pants — embarrassing and not in the least bit professional.

The SJW feminist movement — I don’t mean Planned Parenthood, I mean Tumblrinas, Hillary Clinton etc. — and the MRA movement are remarkably alike in some ways. Both are disorganised, lack a focus on convincing the unconverted by rational argumentation that would be utterly normal and unremarkable in most other political spheres, and appear to prefer virtue signalling. Both seem unfazed by their lack of success in persuading people of their feminist/anti-feminist points.

In fact, even that is not remotely accurate: feminists (mostly first and second wave feminists) have convinced the general population of a number of moderate things. It’s only MRAs that have utterly failed on that score.

This proves that it has nothing to do with gender (or if it does, that it’s not due to some supposed “female inferiority”). I think it’s more about tactics and how the participants think of their ingroup and outgroup.

I think the worst parts of the feminist movement and the MRA movement feed on each other and reinforce each other. That is actually the problem. The whole thing about “male tears”, “emotional labour” and all the rest of it, is the most perfect antidote to rational argument ever devised. Isn’t it? It stops rational argument in its tracks, and one can only continue by being incredibly rude. Moreover the whole ill-defined notion of “the patriarchy”, encourages a conspiratorial mindset and not listening to men at all because of their identity — and the MRAs have in turn developed their own notion of a mirror image of “the patriarchy” which works a similar way, but in reverse. So it seems that the feminists certainly have something to answer for here.

Yet let’s go back to the principle that MRAs want us to admit — that, as I’ve argued, feminists already do admit — that men and women are in fact different in some ways. Statistically, maybe, rather than “all men are like this and all women are like that”, but statistical differences are still gender differences, if they are on the order of 90% vs 10% or 99% vs 1%.

I put it to MRAs that they believe that women are emotionally weaker than men, so they should act like they believe it. (I don’t believe that, but MRAs do.) And therefore they should resign themselves to the fact that feminists are probably going to carry on saying silly things like “male tears” and “emotional labour” and so on, and argue in illogical and emotionally-driven and conspiratorial ways, at least until someone from their own side talks to them and makes them see sense, because they are too emotional. (Again, MRA beliefs — not mine.)

It is therefore, by this argument, incumbent on MRAs to up their game, to break this impasse, to raise the tenor of the debate, even if feminists won’t, to exit this foetid swamp of arguing based on insults and ad hominems and conspiracy theories and vaguely worded criticisms that no-one can or will argue against because they don’t know who or what is being argued against.

Your move, MRAs.