How the bitter men of the MRA movement ruin things for other guys [View all]

[Katashi_itto]

One of the weirder developments of the online publishing era is the way a loose confederation of embittered anti-feminists has formed, across social media and the blogging world, under the banner of “men’s rights activism.” MRA is an attempt to reframe old-fashioned misogyny as if it’s some kind of human rights movement, much like organized racism has periodically tried to reframe itself as a “white pride” movement. MRAs, who spend most of their “activist” energy roaming around the Internet, harassing feminists and pushing misogynist myths about false accusers and gold-diggers, are clearly bad for women. But while they claim to speak for men, their rhetoric is just as bad for men as it is for women. Here are some of the reasons why.

1. They sow paranoia about false accusations. One of biggest hobbyhorses of MRAs is the idea that many rape or domestic violence accusations are false. On their blogs, forums, social media, and in any unmoderated comment section under a story about rape, you will see swarms of MRAs claiming that men are in grave danger of having women they sleep with decide to falsely accuse them out of spite.

This is simply false. The FBI estimates that only 2-8% of rape reports are false. Many, possibly most of those never result in an accusation, but instead are women claiming to have been assaulted by strangers. It’s so rare that even when MRAs get lucky and a rape story ends up being fishy or untrue (such as the recent Rolling Stone story about UVA) it never fits the model they propose. (For instance, the “Jackie” in the UVA story never accused anyone specifically and no men were ever under any legal suspicion.)

It’s clear that the purpose of spreading this myth is to sow doubts about actual rapes that have happened, since most rapists do attack someone they know and claim it was consensual after the fact. But it’s possible that young or naïve men could see all this fear-mongering online and start to legitimately believe they are in grave danger of being falsely accused, a belief that might make them fearful of women and hesitant to date with confidence. But the odds of it happening are infinitesimal and exponentially lower than the odds a woman faces of getting raped.

More
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/04/how-the-bitter-men-of-the-mra-movement-ruin-things-for-other-guys/