Elon Musk admittedly has a hard time staying out of the news. Ever since the Tesla and SpaceX CEO purchased Twitter, there's been constant buzz about the steps he has taken as the current CEO of the social media platform.
Apart from his capitalistic conquests, Men's Rights Activists (MRAs) across the globe look upto him as their emblematic role model...for mostly being an anti-feminist billionaire.
The latest evidence of MRAs' unbridled obsession with Musk is a 'puja' organised to worship the CEO in Bangalore. Taking to Twitter, the group shared the video of several men chanting 'Elon Musk-ay namaha' with one worshipping a picture of Musk with incense sticks.
Take a look:
Needless to say, MRAs online poured in to extend their support to Musk for amplifying the voices of men through his ownership over Twitter.
With the billionaire reinstating accounts of divisive personalities like Donald Trump (who was banned from Twitter after his hateful tweets violated the platform's community guidelines), he positioned himself as a champion for "free speech".
But recent suspensions of accounts critical of Musk's actions, quickly exposed his hypocrisy.
Nevertheless, men who look up to Elon Musk as the ideal model for masculinity primarily do so because their own misogyny is often validated and enabled by the billionaire.
They have no intention to spark discourse about male sexual assault, the stigma surrounding men's mental health or several other ways toxic masculinity restricts them.
Instead, MRAs' sole objective is to mock the feminist movement and bring up instances like fake rape cases as a form of whataboutery. In most cases, their claims are plain inaccurate.
Exhibit A:
Now let's be clear: The very idea of gender equality is to challenge the systemic power imbalance that favours cisgender, heterosexual men.
This challenging of the status quo may often be viewed as rights being "taken away" from the majority, but they still continue to dominate (and in several cases, oppress) all mainstream spaces.
Here's another comment under the viral clip:
(Trigger warning: Mentions of sexual assault)
While innocent men being incriminated in false rape cases is an unfortunate reality, the percentage of that happening is still minuscule - especially compared to the ever-ballooning rates of male-driven assault on women and gender minorities.
The men behind organising the Bangalore 'puja' are the same men that don't believe in the "concept" of marital rape. In another words, they expect women to be eternally available for their sexual pleasure, purely because they're married to them.
At a time when India has lodged a daily average of 86 women being subject to rape, men literally treating Elon Musk as God to further their own ideology of male superiority - is laughable, at best, but dangerous, at worst.
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