Reading comprehension: a bit of a problem for the angry dude crowd. So in my post earlier today I wrote about a Redditdude who got so angry reading a relatively innocuous Forbes column by a WOMAN ON TEH INTERNET that he called her a “cunt” and threatened to murder people and got more than a thousand net upvotes. All based on a complete misreading of her article, of which he obviously only skimmed the first paragraph.
Well, now the Men’s Rights subreddit has gotten hold of the Forbes column, and they too are pig-biting mad – not so much at the column itself, which it’s clear not many of them have actually read, but at a straw column they’ve written in their heads which is nothing but EEEVIL MISANDRY.
To reiterate: Kashmir Hill’s column in Forbes notes that some people have come to regard people without Facebook accounts as somehow suspect in our hyper-connected world. Hill finds this a bit silly, and writes:
The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).
Note to the painfully literal: that parenthetical “too much” in the last sentence is what’s called a “joke.”
Naturally, Reddit’s Men’s Rights squad, not having read much beyond the sarcastic title of Hill’s piece (“Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are ‘Suspicious.’”) has concluded that she’s an evil misandrist who’s demonizing men without Facebook as creepy psychopaths. Yes, in addition to getting the argument of her piece completely backwards, they’ve also decided that it’s all about men.
MauraLoona, who submitted the link under the misleading title “Men without Facebook: You’re suspicious and potential stalkers, creeps, and psychopaths” explains in a comment:
While the article uses gender neutral pronouns in some places, the message is obvious: This suspicion is directed at men.
I suspect this might be a case of xenophobia: “I am a woman and love technology, so if you’re a man and don’t share that love for technology, you’re suspicious.”
JohnTheOther, a virtuoso in the fine art of getting things wrong, offers this take:
Forbes, apparently is now in the business of creating boogiemen. No evidence of anything equates to evidence of sinister intent. What utter fear-mongering drivel.
And our old friend Liverotto concludes that when Hill says she doesn’t hold her boyfriend’s lack of a Facebook account against him (much), she’s just lying, like women do:
Yes, of course, she doesn’t hold it against him, that’s why she wrote a full article about people without Facebook being suspicious.
Women are just liars, that’s it, that’s all it is, liars and dissimulators, if you trust what a woman says you are naive.
MRAs really do live in imaginary backwards land, don’t they?
lol wut?
Um, no. You really know nothing about women. Stop reading MRA/PUA blogs to learn about women. Would you read Mein Kampf to learn about Jewish culture?
conservatives, sorry ‘libertarians’ are absolutely pigfucking awful at satire, that’s what
Christ, CC’s blog is like a humongous slippery slope fallacy wrapped up in an army of straw men.
>I wouldn’t be an MRA if feminists weren’t so bitchy and hateful towards men.
Hey, if I had to pay a penny for every instance of feminists invading MRA-blogs, I would lose very little cash.
now if a penny was spent on funding some project pertaining improving the situation of men every time some MRA invaded a feminist blogs, the movement would never be strapped for cash.
My partner doesn’t happen to have a Facebook account, and that’s fine. But if he did, and was connecting with his old friends and exes, I’m deeply confused as to why I would object to that. Am I supposed to want him not to have any friends besides me? Because that seems pretty damn weird and horrible. I’m really, really okay with “sharing” him with the world in the sense that he interacts with people who are not me sometimes, and it’s fairly concerning that you apparently think the solution to fears about your partner’s fidelity isn’t “date someone you trust” but rather “try to prevent your partner from ever talking to other people.”
@Buttman
Did someone reject your advances citing your lack of Facebook account? If so, I’m just gonna give you a pro tip: That was her way of letting you down easy. In reality you were probably just creeping here out. Sorry “cr**ping her out”.
I suspect they’d act the same way even if feminism didn’t exist. The hatred of women is there anyway, it just gets prodded a bit by it not being acceptable to all and sundry anymore. Back in the day they’d have probably blamed women for not being available to them when the women were sold in the slave market. Feminism just gives them that nice martyr’s-crown glow when the property gets uppity.
::crosses fingers hoping first-ever attempt at block quote works::