Astral Codex Ten

MRAs

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MRAs

Article

MRAs is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Mansplaining? NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs?”; “how come as soon as anti-racism became more popular than feminism on the left, the MRAs vanished”; ""MRAs and redpillers and alt-righters trying to prove that they were wrong"". It most often appears alongside 4chan, CIA, feminism.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: May 18, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"? Mansplaining? #NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs? If you're in your early 20s, you might not even know what half these terms mean; if you're older than that, you’ll remember them with a sort of cold dread. But they're gone now - you'd have more luck looking for recent discourse about Osama bin Laden. Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them. Everyone just stopped caring and moved on to race.
Earlier eras of social justice had their enemies. Around 2010, some people who didn't like feminism banded together under the umbrella of "men's rights advocates" (MRAs). Pickup artists (PUAs) were originally a totally different group - guys who talked a lot about the best ways to pick up girls - but many of them merged into the generic anti-feminist current for complicated reasons. "Red Pillers" were a third group, vaguely related to the previous two, whose main contribution to the discourse was giving us the terms "alpha male" and "beta male" (I guess these became "Chad" and "virgin" at some point). Sometimes all of these groups together called themselves "the manosphere".
The MRA brand never went corporate - no corporation wanted them. For a while, geek-feminists-turned-journalists tried to interest mainstream society in their project of hating MRAs more than anyone has ever hated anything ever before, but mainstream society didn't bite. There are still some remaining MRAs on obscure subreddits. And some of the few surviving bastions of early internet feminism are the people obsessed with fighting MRAs, still running a few scattered blogs, like ghosts who refuse to leave the mortal world until their weird grudge has been discharged.
Inline links: a few scattered blogs
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
The part where I think you're wrong - dangerously so, is in the response. It's not that MRAs appeared to combat feminism, the whole thing culminated in Gamergate, and when feminism lost mainstream credibility, MRAs faded too.