Real meninists, otherwise known as men’s rights activists, should believe and support the women’s movement.
Real meninists are men who want equality for all, which includes political, social and economic equality for women.
However, the reality of the men’s rights activist movement tells a different tale.
The meninist Twitter hashtag was created by Ti Balogun. The Twitter account “Meninist Tweet” has 495,000 followers. The account started off as satire, to make fun of “the way feminists express themselves, which is a turn-off.”
So is a woman’s sole purpose is to turn on men?
We live under our First Amendment rights to free speech, but spouting obscenities and making jokes at the expense of women holds no comic value, nor is it impressive.
Under the meninist Twitter handle, and other lesser accounts, people are taking their immaturity and sexism to a greater level.
The meninism movement on Twitter hurts all, regardless of gender. To take something as serious as the plight of women, mothers, sisters and daughters and relegate it to a joke, trivializes the struggles women go through.
Meninist twitter knocks the feminist movement back years. By promoting parody accounts about “meninism,” it makes feminism look like a joke, devaluing and discrediting everything women activists in the past have worked so hard to establish.
“The Twitter account making fun of women isn’t meninism at all,” said computer engineering junior, Louiemark Ambata.
Making fun of a group’s struggle when you haven’t known the struggle yourself is privilege in the purest form.
These tweets, twitter handles and photos are not funny. On the contrary, they are insulting and immature.
They objectify and over-sexualize women. It relegates women to being only good for sex and further subjugates them to conform to social norms.
This account refers to both men and women in derogatory terms — suggesting that the users are uneducated and ignorant.
Other men are playing victim.
“I need Meninism because the movie “Magic Mike” promotes an unrealistic expectation of how men’s bodies should look,” one supporter of the movement said on Twitter.
Tired of being objectified?
Try living through it very day, and you’re complaining about one movie making you feel like a piece of meat? Try thousands of years of being oppressed, being relegated as a second-class citizen and being held to unrealistic body standards.
It’s these very tweeters that mock abortions, domestic violence and rape. How will anyone take them seriously?
And better yet, how these meninists be so cavalier about sexual assault? How can such serious and violent crimes be mocked?
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, one American is sexually assaulted every 107 seconds. One in six women are victims of attempted or completed rape. In stark comparison, one in 33 men have experienced the same.
When tweets such as, “If a girl pulls a knife on you during an argument, pull out bread, ham, & mayo. Instincts will kick in & she’ll make you a sandwich” are the ones that dominate the Twitter-sphere, we should be offended by the light manner in which we approach sexism in the modern day.
On the other hand, men do want to take the movement seriously.
“It’s enough to get any self-righteous feminist choking on their quinoa and checking to make sure it isn’t April 1st – except that the meninist movement is actually happening in the real world,” Mark Daubney of the Telegraph said.
He believes that 2015 could be the year of meninists. However, 2015 will not be dedicated to meninism. Every year is the meninism. Nothing will change.
Change can only happen if we allow it to. Spreading hate and mocking an entire gender will get us nowhere,
As long as there is a stigma about being feminist and a true meninist, there will never be equality.
Being a feminist doesn’t mean you are less of a man, in any case it makes someone more of a man, because you don’t feel emasculated by giving women equal rights.
Feminism is not only a women’s battle, but it’s everyone’s battle.
