The idea that I’m referring to is basically that MRAs/pick-up artists and anti-abortion social conservatives are the same group of people with no meaningful distinctions between them.
An example of where I’ve seen this idea expressed:
You know those left-leaning meta subreddits like r/therightcantmeme and r/shitfascistssay that are largely about posting dumb right-wing stuff and then dogpiling on it together?
Earlier this year I saw a post (now deleted) on one of those subreddits where the content of the post was a manosphere-type meme that depicted a (attractive) man who got his (attractive) girlfriend pregnant and then, with help from his male friends, fled the country so that he wouldn’t have to pay child support. And the general tenor of the meme was supportive of this; basically the conceit was “being hot and scoring lots of noncommittal sex with hot women, without any concern for their well-being, is all that matters”.
Obviously this is an offensively terrible way to think about women, so the post got a lot of interaction and comments. But some of the comments caught my attention, because they tied in anti-abortion politics in a way that I think is kind of off the mark. One commenter said “The same guys who are anti abortion are the guys who laugh at stuff like this” and got a lot of upvotes.
I replied to them with something like “Huh? No, I don’t think that’s accurate. This is not a meme that anti-abortion social conservatives would find funny. This is a meme for ‘players’ who are misogynist in a lot of other ways, but generally support legal abortion.”
My comment got heavily downvoted. There were a couple of people who agreed with me and replied things like “lol you’re getting downvoted but you’re exactly right”, but those people got downvoted too.
Overall it seemed like the vast majority of people in that comment section disagreed with me, and believed that there really is no significant difference between anti-abortion Christian social conservatives and the MRA/PUA/Andrew Tate crowd.
I still think I'm right about this, though. What are your thoughts?
Both are misogynist power fantasies and in that way they're very linked. I don't think the anti-abortion social conservatives actually hold those beliefs beyond their heteronormative / misogynistic justification and power so the distinction between the two groups is fluid with context. You probably got downvoted because it was construed as a defense of either or both though.
There's significant overlap, but a lot of anti-abortion people are part of the evangelical bloc, they mostly wouldn't be PUAs and wouldn't appreciate absentee fathers (because they like the "nuclear family". I agree with your interpretation.
Most liberals seem to have very little appreciation for the variety there is in ideologies. This goes someway to explaining horseshoe theory, because it's a similar sort of crass erasure of differences between opposition camps.
I think the mistake you're making here is believing that those people have coherent views. With enough mental gymnastics and/or a complete disinterest in analyzing the way you see the world, it is absolutely possible to end up finding that sort of meme funny while also being against the right to abortion.
And if you look at it from the perspective of someone who sees women as inherently inferior, it becomes perfectly rational.
With enough mental gymnastics and/or a complete disinterest in analyzing the way you see the world, it is absolutely possible to end up finding that sort of meme funny while also being against the right to abortion.
yeah good point, not everyone is thinking very hard about why they believe what they believe.
I think that historically you'd have been right about one particular type of guy, the chauvinist libertine who was broadly pro-liberation in general but in a very selfish and fickle way where he must be the most liberated and coddled and no one may ever tell him no, but that over the past 10-15 years that type of guy has almost entirely been subsumed into the foaming morass of secular fascists and hypocritical theocrats. Yesterday's chauvinist libertine misogynists are today's fascist treatlords who are easily led about by anyone telling them women are threatening their personal treats and so have been converted entirely into rabid reactionaries.
in some technical sense, yes they are not the same people, there is a Venn diagram that is not a circle, and it is not close to being a circle, and the borders are also blurry, and you've already over-simplified the categorizations of belief systems between those groups.
However, it does seem to me that you're attempting to bring awareness of the distinction where:
- in context, it's not that important of a distinction. It's a meme, not a wikipedia article.
- maybe most users do know, but find it annoying/derailing to point out
- you're not a principled social conservative attempting to claim he should attempt to marry her, so defending the distinction might come off as non-genuine
- might give off sealioning/wrecker/concern troll vibes
The differences are much smaller than you think. Sexual predators will often force women to get abortions, sure, but it's actually just a manifestation of the same misogynistic impulse to control women's bodies.
There are true believers in the anti-abortion sphere, so like your conservative evangelical types, but many others it's just about controling women's bodies and they don't actually care about the fetus. Predators are the same, but want a different kind of control.
But sure, there are differences.
without giving anything in return
message received, they will give conservatives the abortion ban as a token of goodwill
Now we get to talk about Freud! Hooray.
So Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but he did pick up on the "vibes" of one particular sort of pathetic manchild. That is, his idea of the "Madonna/removed" complex fits these people very well. They both expect women to be perfect ideal virgins who never do anything wrong and debased "removed" who will fulfill their every sexual desire without hesitation. This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, and they usually resolve it by focusing heavily on one side of their sexual pathology or the other.
In other words, they are functionally the same group because they basically want exactly the same thing as each other, women who have no agency and are just sex objects for men to use.
“Huh? No, I don’t think that’s accurate. This is not a meme that anti-abortion social conservatives would find funny. This is a meme for ‘players’ who are misogynist in a lot of other ways, but generally support legal abortion.”
It's different offshoots but I feel like the root cause for both is controlling women(s bodies).
Now I wouldn't trust either mentioned subreddit to have that sort of analysis on account of why would you and just blurring everything together into it's all the same does, at least for me, miss how I'd say traditional anti-abortion conservatives and the PUA-Dipshits attract a very different sort of people.
Also honestly i'm not sure there isn't some sort of RETVRN to the traditional values of cheating on your trad wife all the time á la Don Draper.
It bothers me when “comrades” do not know their enemy. I’ve even seen lemmygradders lump in different groups in a more problematic manner. Investigate how the defenders of capital conceptualize and distinguish themselves. Self crit.