“Misandry”—literally, the hatred of men—is an accusation that’s been flung at feminists since the dawn of the women’s movement: By empowering women, critics argue, feminists are really oppressing men. Now, feminists are ironically embracing the man-hating label: The ironic misandrist sips from a mug marked “MALE TEARS,” frosts her cakes with the phrase “KILL ALL MEN,” and affixes “MISANDRY” heart pins to her lapel. Ironic misandry is “a reductio ad absurdum,” explains Jess Zimmerman, an editor at Medium and the proud owner of a “MALE TEARS” mug. (“I drink them to increase my strength,” she notes.) “It’s inhabiting the most exaggerated, implausible distortion of your position, in order to show that it’s ridiculous.”
.. “The feminism they grew up with was the feminism of snarky blog posts, and this is a natural extension of that.”
.. So young feminists have taken to deploying the claim of “misandry” like a parlor game, competing to push the idea of a vast, anti-man conspiracy to its most gleefully absurd limits.
.. “I enjoy that it bothers the men who don’t get it,”
.. “It’s a good way to weed out cool dudes from the dumb bros.” As Zimmerman puts it: “The men who get annoyed by misandry jokes are in my experience universally brittle, insecure, humorless weenies with victim complexes,”
while the “many intelligent, warm, confident feminist men in my life … mostly get the joke immediately and play along. They’re not worried I actually want to milk them for their tears.”
.. It can be freeing, then, to instead adopt an ironic stance that allows women to identify against what they clearly are not:
.. it allows women to criticize “patriarchal ideals without also shitting on your fellow gal-identified types.”
Make no mistake about it: the alt-right is a cult, and this is how its members lure people in
They have created an esoteric private language with terms like cuck, red pill, deus vault. People are seduced by a combination of humour (everything is ‘ironic’ so it has plausible deniability) and a secret language
the alt-right is a moving target, able to tease, and able to deny the authenticity of their content because of its comedic packaging; in the words of Jason Wilson, “the alt-right have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponising irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrongfoot their opponents” . It is rare that they advance a straight argument, or in fact any argument at all.
But they are indeed a cult. Their power comes from a series of social media sites such as Elders of the Black Sun; Stop Degeneracy; Nazi Tinder; Art of the True Right; Strictly Ubermensch; Men Among the Ruins; Trumpenreich. The subcultural and cultist elements effectively disarm potential critics via their very oddity.
.. This occurs precisely at the point in American history where the nation is poised to lose its white majority, a critical juncture.
.. African Americans are a particular target. One crime of a black person is the crime of all black people everywhere, a familiar Goebbels-style rhetorical trick. The alleged mannerisms and culture of African Americans are caricatured in parodies which are beyond crude. They also mock the aspirations of African Americans to their own heritage: “we wuz kangz (kings) and sh*t”.
.. Yet the alt-right is not an organisation but a disorganisation. The process is essentially crowd-sourced, originally via the message board 4Chan. Exactly like Isis propaganda
.. Here then is the gathered harvest of personal bitterness. Lonely individuals map onto these causes their own frustrations. Underlying it all is an appeal to solidarity, the community of shared views and values.
.. The common denominator is a hatred of American and European liberalism
.. It seeks neither to harangue with argument nor beguile with rhetoric, but to ridicule, and to elude the scrutiny of conscience by virtue of its levity and lack of seriousness.
Trump Ruins Irony, Too
I’ve been mildly obsessed with air quotes and their cousin, scare quotes, for years. They are typically used when a term appears in quotation marks for reasons other than being a direct quotation
.. they indicate “epistemic uncertainty.”
.. We use air quotes for many reasons. There’s the conspiratorial use, as when Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Obama’s legitimacy by referring to him as the “quote ‘president’ ” during his campaign. That, you might say, is old-fashioned, street-fighting politics.
.. If everything is air-quotable, then what does anything really mean?
.. The writer Greil Marcus argues that such scare quotes “are a writer’s assault on his or her own words.” They signal writers’ fears, he says, of the very words they’re using.
.. He and Mr. Spicer are employing ironic techniques not comically but cynically — to destabilize meaning.
.. “Air quotes eliminate the responsibility for one’s actions, one’s choices.” In the president’s hands, air quotes are apparently a way to push an alternate reality — one that’s often defined after the fact.
.. Mr. Trump’s most recent air-quoting supports his basic critique of elites — that we in the media, or in cities, or in blue states, take things too seriously. Of course he doesn’t really grab women’s genitalia. That’s just locker room talk. He “grabs” women’s “genitalia.” Of course Mr. Obama didn’t wiretap. He “wiretapped.”
.. The paradox is that President Trump has turned an invention of the urbane and educated against them. He has weaponized irony.