The Anti F-Word Series: Meninism

If you are reading this a quick hi 5 to WordPress for posting this as I’m currently without internet in the south of France (first world problems) and have had to schedule this to upload today, if not then technology has failed me once again please don’t cry in my absence. Remember to follow/like/comment and I’ll reply ASAP (or ASAIC as soon as I can. Why has no one made this a thing? It summarises my situation so much better).

Over the next few weeks I will be posting a three part exploration into antifeminism starting today with Meninism, the belief that – if I’m honest I’m not really sure. There are almost a million followers to the main meninist twitter account, so many in fact they’ve opened an online shop where you can buy labelled merchandise which keeps selling out (hopefully because feminists are buying it to fuel their fires over the coming Winter months) but their actual political views are clouded by their unnecessary meanness. I don’t think they work completely against gender equality, but deny the feminist label and the idea that Western women need help. Funly (great word) ironical fact: when the group started expanding in 2001, a Meninist was an abbreviated version of male feminist and they even had a totally 00s looking website discussing their kick ass values. Now we have a moment of silence for the death of Times New Roman. And the niceness of original meninism.

Because the ‘movement’ (if you can call it that, although if it was a move I feel it would be more of a shuffle- so they can stare at girls in gym wear while preaching whatever it is they stand for) isn’t like that anymore. It describes itself as a parody and regularly reminds us that its tweets are sarcastic- even congratulating female members who recognise the ‘humour’ by replying with ‘tap dat’ or ‘she knows’- however continues to mock feminism in a way that discourages people from supporting the movement. Some women- the ones with such low self-esteem that they need the 13 year old who thinks FGM is the latest model of BMW to tell them they’re wife material- realise they can get more flattery this way; it’s shocking to see how many girls have posted photos of them in Meninist hoodies. (Although they’re probably only wearing them because they wanted to take a selfie but weren’t wearing any clothes and didn’t want to get banned from Instagram again so they had to grab the closest thing to cover up their toplessness.)

When you see the worryingly high amounts of people favouriting/retweeting this material it’s not hard to see how it’s spreading so quickly. Sadly, men make up the largest percentage of supporters- or more specifically, men with no idea what feminism is, consistently putting themselves first instead of doing what is best for humanity, despite recognising that there are global issues. Check out this tweet for example:

It makes no sense. Feminism is the belief that men and women should be equal, so Western Feminism is western women believing that men and women should be equal- what’s the problem? So because a person can identify their privilege, they lose the right to help other women gain theirs? Tweets like this also ignore the fact that every country has different inequalities and spending time comparing them is never going to start progression, it’s like refusing to help the family with a leaky roof because at least they have a house- when do we stop telling them that? A broken window, still a house. An internal flood, still a house. A hurricane, by now the house it’s gone and it’s too late. Maybe if we’d helped at first instead of waiting until the problem escalated we could’ve saved a family.

Granted, it’s great that their movement is considering the lives of women in other countries, but after they’ve mocked feminism to the extent that they have, what empowerment is there for girls to join it? Imagine, for example in Saudi Arabia where women can’t vote, reading that feminists are liars, hypocrites and simply ‘a joke’ is enough to become sceptical enough of the movement to want to steer clear. (And yes I use a car metaphor to reinstate the disgust that it’s the only place in the world where it’s illegal for women to drive.)

What shocks me the most about the Meninist movement is their lack of respect for women in general, degrading them to sex objects and then describing our offense as ‘whining’ reminding us that IT’S JUST A JOKE JEEZ FEMINISTS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOUR  in a classic pre-menstrual-esque bitch fit. And yes he said JEEZ unironically. During the recent Women’s World Cup (can we take a moment to appreciate the hype!) people were finally taking women’s participation in sport seriously, until the Meninists came along judging them, not by their talent but, by how much they wanted to shag them.

It was a similar story for this tweet about a weathergirl simply doing her job only to be ridiculed and stored in some kind of early morning wank bank along with Susanna Reid’s shoulder pads and that rather arousing bowl of Shreddies.

So, what is the purpose of Meninism? Because so far guys you’ve already given us about 62 more reasons why we needed feminism in the first place. Maybe we should consider the impact of that kind of material before plastering it all over the internet and basing your campaign around a medieval stereotype of ‘man-hating.’