Undead Sexist Cliche: Feminism is tyranny

The Daily Beast looks at the Men’s Rights Movement, which it describes as a loose alliance of multiple causes: activists who want to change child-support laws, rape apologists (“If I encounter a rape in progress, what am I going to do, stop it? No, I’m going to walk around it.”), activists who want more shelters for abused men, all of them united by a life feminism is tyranny, oppression, and bad, bad, bad.Men are the oppressed!
Not surprising. The conviction men are the oppressed ones ranks up with the belief it’s anti-gay activists and white people who are oppressed. But it’s still bullshit.
That’s not to say men don’t have it bad, or that they don’t get screwed over. However, the guiding drive for Men’s Rights activists is that they’re screwed over by women. Feminists won’t let heroic men appear on television. When mass shootings happen, it’s because women take men’s jobs. When a Canadian group runs ads telling men not to be a rapist, some MRAs (men’s rights activists) complain (in the Daily Beast article) that it’s sexist. Others run a parody ad telling women not to cry rape just because they wish they hadn’t had sex (false accusations, for some MRAs, are a much more serious issue than rape. Even though there’s no evidence false charges of rape are more frequent than any other crime).
We have right-wing pundits and preachers declaring women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, or that women shouldn’t have rights, period. Women get targeted with death threats and rape threats for what they say online. Or being told sexual harassment is a myth.
And it’s easy to find articles like this one (not a direct link) in which blogger Matt Forney reveals women’s self confidence is bad (self-confident women make his dick go limp, he says), undeserved (women accomplish nothing) and that the best thing we can do for America is destroy women’s self-confidence.
I don’t see men suffering anything comparable. In reality, as John Scalzi says, if life were a videogame, straight white men would have the lowest level of difficulty. Not that they’re guaranteed a win, but it’s easier than any other character class.
And when it’s not, women are probably not the cause. Consider one of the classic stats MRAs love to throw around, that the most dangerous jobs in America are overwhelmingly male, which is why women don’t get paid as much. In the first place, that makes no sense: If it were a factor in people’s pay, miners would be millionaires, stockbrokers would work for minimum wage.
In the second place, I’ve never seen an MRA who jumps from this to “Therefore, our top priority should be improving safety conditions for miners and steeplejacks” (in fairness, I don’t browse men’s-rights websites much, so maybe they do discuss it a lot). Instead, the conclusion is “therefore women who say they aren’t paid enough because of sexism are wrong!”
It’s true men can face discrimination too. But I’ve read plenty of feminist articles in support of men who want to be the primary child-care giver or work in female professions. Getting past “you are your gender” views of what you can do benefits both sexes.
I suspect a lot of MRAs don’t think so.