Most of us have hear the phrase Paper Tiger before. for those who haven't, it a term used to describe someone or something which seems powerful and threading but in reality is powerless when challenged.
This best describes most reactionary ideas, all bark no bite, but for this journal entry the ones I want to talk about are the anti-feminists who inhabit much of the internet these days.
Right wingers have taken this motif up with gusto and sadly so have many people on the left.
To my mind, anti-feminism started out largely as part of the far right, when I used to argue with supporter of the BNP (British National Party) many of them attacked women's rights (along with LGBT and worker rights) as part of some giant communist conspiracy to bring down western civilisation. Somehow the ideas of people who could hardly spell their own name has spread far and wide and now has become almost mainstream.
In my personal experience is the wonderful comment sections of youtube. Two example of this are:
One: Sandra Fluke's Congressional testimony [link] . Fluke made a soiled case for why health care providers should cover birth control. scroll through the comment section of this video and you'll see that most of it is people calling her a slut or a dumb bitch.
Two: More or less any Video The Young Turks where a women commit a crime against a man: Much the comment section will be flooded with people claiming that feminists support what the woman did with nothing to back up what their saying.
I know people will say you can't take what people say on the internet seriously, but I do. Much like when someone is drunk, a person doesn't care what other think of what they say online by of the anonymity this environment gives them means they say what they really feel about something.

In many ways it's not that different  to the backlash to the civil rights movement The organization Restore Our Alienated Rights was a textbook example. it  claimed that it was fighting  "vanishing rights of white citizens" when in reality it was a racial segregationist group which sort to tear down the gains of the Civil Rights movement.
MRA Ideology work in very much the same way as ROAR did, they claim to be the victim of a man hating system that feminists have set up, while in reality they simply attack the gains of women's rights over the last hundred years  because they fear losing privileges granted them by a long history of patriarchy.

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