Women Laughing Alone At Tom Martin (and his video project about “gold-digging women”)
Gold digger, 1933 model
This won’t be news to a lot of you — I’m a little late getting to it — but our old pal Tom Martin, the repulsive British MRA celebrity, is actually going ahead with the somewhat baffling video “women and comedy” project he was babbling about in the comments here many months ago, when he was still allowed to comment here. Well, “actually going ahead with it” this August if he can get anyone else to agree to work for him for free minimum wage.
The documentary project is called “Laughing with Women” and, Martin explains, it will “investigat[e] if gold-digging impairs women’s joke-making ability, and if, when women reject gold-digging in all its forms, they can become instantly funnier.”
In case that didn’t make sense to you — don’t worry, that’s a completely natural reaction — Tom explains his, er, “logic” a bit further in a jobs listing he’s posted in hopes of finding a crew, which has already gotten a good deal of ridicule over at PZ Myers’ and on at least one comedy website.
Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impede women’s joke-making ability? When women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or even funnier than men?
In his numerous visits to Man Boobz, Martin expounded at length on the topic of gold-digging women, generally referring to them by his preferred term, the shorter and blunter “whores.” Martin has previously estimated that roughly 97% of women fit this description, and has suggested that female penguins are also whores. Frankly, once he gets going on the topic, it’s hard to shut him up, which is partly why he’s no longer welcome in the comments here.
In any case, this odd hypothesis will be tested, Martin says, with a “radical, and revealing street-based social experiment.”
Still puzzled? Mike Booth, the British video comedian behind SomeGreyBloke and Dan Cardamon, has managed to tease out a few more details from Martin (posting here as sexismBusters):
Martin is confident that his proposed video will blow the lid off this whole “women and gold-digging and comedy, no really, they’re connected” thing:
If the radical, and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles (Update: this advert alone has already been blogged and tweeted about by outraged PC types).
The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans within the non PC gender equality field around the world, who, along with everyone else, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.
In other words, it sounds like some sort of video gold mine.
So I’d recommend that all gold-digging women out there try to get in on the ground floor of this Tom Martin dude.
Oh, and speaking of Dan Cardamon, here’s the faux MRA’s take on the project:
CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Martin wouldnt’ be paying his crew, but he says he will be paying them minimum wage, so I’ve corrected the relevant passage above.
EDITED TO ADD: Tom has shown up in the comments, and I’m letting his comments through (for now at least), so if you have any questions for him, feel free to head to the comments to address him directly.
Posted on June 16, 2013, in $MONEY$, grandiosity, hypergamy, I'm totally being sarcastic, it's science!, ladies aren't funny, misogyny, MRA, somegreybloke, Tom Martin, whores, YouTube and tagged men's rights, misogyny, MRA. Bookmark the permalink. 1,119 Comments.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaitwaitwaiwaitwaitwait. Is Tom Martin using the handle “Tim Martin fan”?
It’s lucky no man has ever married for money/dowries *cough*.
This needing to quantify everything is so peculiar. I haven’t really seen it outside of mra/pua circles. ‘If this woman is a 7/10 then I need to raise my game by 2.4% to be in with a chance’ ‘What the heck?! She’s still ignoring me!! But I did the sciencemaths! Must just be a whore’
You can’t quantify people, you can’t quantify humour. That might be upsetting but it’s true.
Like how certain men will start spouting technical irrelevant nonsense when you’re having a discussion or arbitrarily inform you of how many degrees they have – they must be right about everything because of sciencemaths!
I am reminded of, and sadly cannot find, the clip from Madagascar 2 when King Julien laments the failure of his plan to return water to the river by throwing the giraffe into the volcano…”I don’t know why the sacrifce did not work. The science seemed so solid.”
You may critisise Tom if you wish but you must recognize him as one of your own as you do so. He is the most sincere (possibly the only sincere) feminist I have ever met. He still seems to believe feminism is about equality (which is why he was surprised at what happened to him in the LSE) and he still believes that feminism has something do with women supporting themselves financially.
Baffling but true.
Wohoo! Just barging in completely off topic to tell you guys that I just got a research grant on 440 000 SKr for two years tax free! Economical situation SOLVED for the next two years, wohoo!
I will be paying people the minimum wage per hour, £6.19 (it’s going up to £6.31 per hour after October 1st).
I am more than happy to offer commission to collaborators – it shows a certain level of commitment and belief in receiving higher rewards eventually -but actually, the film crew jobs websites don’t like it when you offer commission only, so I’m offering a choice, of minimum wage or points, or something in between the two – its all open to negotiation.
People will be getting paid on the 30th August (2013).
I would estimate that of the 383 job applications I have received so far (who all know the deal as it’s in the advert) none have been from the gender politics websites poo-pooing my documentary. I think this might be because gender politics is hotly contested, rather than hotly investigated – internet commenters the naysaying nothing doing brigade
Shooting an independent documentary is hard physical work, for people who like risk – and can see the bigger picture.
I’ve noticed applications from Oxford and Cambridge graduates, from people who’ve been in the business for decades with major credits, BBC wets, all sorts – there’s lots of talent out there keen to go for it. Lots of applications from ambitious young black women (twice the work ethic of white or Asian women). The ones who start crying about money in their cover letter just get instantly discarded (because they’re jaded). Tesco pays £8 an hour – go and live your dream there.
I’m not going to be testing men for gold-digging in this documentary, because I don’t have limitless resources, and I don’t see it as such a pressing problem.
Feckless wannabe economically inactive househusbands, seeking to permanently scrounge off their overtime-working spouses is a problem, but nothing compared to the wannabe feckless housewife massive.
I will be challenging men on gold-giving though – because they are the enablers.
I will also take the experiment to different parts of London, to see how differing ethnicities, cultures and religions react – the united colors of gold-diggerton.
The experiment will not require hidden cameras, as the awful thing about most women is, when talking about sexual politics in public, its always their specialist uncontested domain (thanks feminism) – so they’ll just blurt out gender-fascistic orders and hatred towards men, laughing at their own jokes as they go. Less, “aren’t we women funny ha ha”, and more “Isn’t it wonderful how unfunny we can be, haw haw.”
But then, juxtaposing this lame awfulness (hope, hope) will be those women who don’t gold-dig, are optimistic and funny, can make jokes about things which don’t involve the financial or spiritual or physical abuse of men – these women becoming mini celebrities, for their awesomeness – setting an example (let’s hope they’re physically hotter than the gold-diggers too).
I have a dream…
Congratulations on your research grant! Thats pretty fabulous.
‘Giraffe into volcano = water’ makes more sense than ‘whores aren’t funny’.
There was a guy at school who was really clever, the top at everything but he absolutely hated English. He just couldn’t stand it at as according to him there was no rules. He didn’t understand how some people could write poetry and felt it was all some scam. It’s an incredibly limited way of looking at the world – ‘I don’t understand something, sciencemaths doesn’t appear to work….’ *brain melts anger ensues*
OT but this Nigella Lawson thing is horrible. =(
Who doesn’t do a bit of throat grabbing during an argument *sarcasm*
Awesome news Dvärghundspossen! Congratulations!
What’s really sad is that this experiment has actually already been done and presented on. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html It’s a pretty good talk (and is awesome for disproving bullshit austerity measures, IMHO) and interesting research. And I’m willing to bet it was actually a well-funded study, one in which the people who worked on it actually got paid. In other words, it was legit. Course, it didn’t prove that all women are gold-digging whores, so of course it’s not good enough for Tom.
So, I started reading the comments. Tom Martin’s first comment.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to read these comments. First page and I already broke everything laughing. And there’s more. Oh, there’s more….
And what exactly would be Tom’s point to this? To tell PUAs not to waste time with women in bars who can’t make then laugh because said women might be gold-diggers?
And considering that there is such a thing as gold-digging men (i.e., attractive or charming men who date/marry wealthy women mostly with the motivation of sharing in their affluent lifestyle), are you going to run an identical experiment to see if gold-digging men are unfunny?
Are you going to provide us with a literature review like most documentaries do, discussing what anthropologists, sociologists, behavioral psychologists, and other scientists have had to say about such a thing, if anything?
Nah, you just want to make a documentary to highlight your paranoid belief that women everywhere are out to steal your 401k, which makes you not only a bigot, but an international “attention whore”. Who’s the “whore” now, dude? xD
Thanks Fox and Dainty!
Hm… wonder how that will affect my level of funny?
Actually, I think it would be possible to test Tom Martin’s hypotheses, but a shitload of money would be needed, and it hardly seems plausible that anyone would fund this.
BUT you could do the following:
1. Find a large sample size of women who have married husbands with much higher income than themselves. Obviously, many of these women will have married for love, but it’s plausible that this group will contain a larger percentage of women for whom money matters than
2. the second group, consisting of women who’s married husbands with about the same income as themselves. If the former group has a higher percentage of “gold-diggers”, as seems plausible, and if TM:s hypothesis is correct, the former group would be less funny on average than the second, even if most women in group 1 married for love.
3. Find corresponding groups for men. Necessary if your hypothesis is that gold-digging women in particular rather than any kind of gold-diggers are less funny.
So now there are four large groups of test subjects. How to test how funny they are? Presumably by finding out how funny other people find them on average, so as to avoid that a particular individual’s particular sense of humour affects the result. So, a fifth large group of people, let’s call them “the audience”, is needed. Their task will be to, say, view recordings of the gold-digging/non-gold-digging men/women trying to tell jokes and be funny, and then rate them on a scale of funny from, say, 1-10. The average rating of a particular test subject will be considered that test subject’s level of funny. (Perhaps, since there are so many test subjects, this will be too enormous a task for just one audience – perhaps you’d need several.)
Eventually, one can calculate the average level of funny in each of the four groups of test subjects. If it were to turn out that the women who have married a man with a higher income than themselves were, on average, less funny than the other groups, TM:s thesis would have some level of support.
@ Dvärghundspossen – congratulations!
On Tom Martin and his experiment–one does wonder how the dearly (dear to Mr SteALe, anyway) departed Mr. Hitchens would weigh in on this subject?
(for those who were not big fans who eventually became massively disappointed, he famously said women were incapable of humor. Any humor, any woman, full stop)
Okay, so let’s pretend this hypothetical situation is true. There is a woman who is always quiet around a rich man so that she can keep him happy and have access to his wealth. There is a problem, though. If she is naturally witty and funny, she should be using those talents to help keep him. Most people enjoy spending time around people who make them laugh. So if she makes him laugh a lot, he would be more likely to enjoy her company and want to keep her around.
And,Tom, I am willing to work on this documentary, but you have to pay me upfront with gold.
@Dvärghundspossen
Congrats!!!!! All the bubbly for you!
Okay, I’ve reached Tom Martin’s SECOND comment.
Pure comedy gold!
Pffffffft
I can’t hold the laughter in
this is killing me
but I can’t stop reading
Very interesting Ted Talk there Ostara321, and vaguely related with my research on gold-digging and humour – maybe more to do with how I’ll best motivate the crew and PMD though.
But if the Ted Talk guy is right, then when women are thinking about gold-digging, or just autopilot gold-digging, we can expect them to become less productive and creative.
A picture tells a thousand words though, so at 25 frames per second, that’s a lot of information for us to enjoy, learning precisely how the creativity falls apart (if it does).
Ally Fogg over on PZ Myers blog post about Laughing with Women, seems to think that gold-digging humour is actually well-developed, and therefore gold-diggers will be able to get laughs using that shtick.
The documentary will also be considering the nature of the humour being created.
I hypothesize that the gold-diggers will use more hostile sexism (easy laughs), whilst non gold-diggers (we still need to think of a positive word for a woman who has renounced prostitution in all its forms) – non gold-diggers… I hope, will make more ephemeral, optimistic, pacifistic, higher-brow, freer-associating jokes. You know, the sort that is second nature to manboobzers, but should be first.
As for Hitchens on women and humour, was right about most things, but Hitchens the man didn’t agree with his women-friends working – he was a chivalrous wet when it came down to it – indicating he was genetically conservative, or strategically conservative.
I’m more egalitarian than the lot of you.
Yes, there will be a literature review, and real professors in checked shirts explaining how women’s brains work for you.
I’ll be lining up some big comedy names for their two cent’s worth as well.
Bill Burr is the best on gold-digging, people!
Following Tom Martin’s logic, if 97% of women are whores, could it be argued that evolution determined whoring a biological advantage? He might as well be telling people not to use their legs in that case.
Amnesia said: Following Tom Martin’s logic, if 97% of women are whores, could it be argued that evolution determined whoring a biological advantage? He might as well be telling people not to use their legs in that case.
Whorishness may have been an advantage (not sure) – but the bottom line is, according to a study I saw recently, these days, girls who state that they want to live off a man actually end up being the poorest, gold-digging the least effective strategy to amass resources.
@thebionicmommy
I had the same thought. It seems to me that Tom Martin’s real underlying hypothesis is that high-status men feel threatened by funny (i.e. witty, intelligent) women.
What I don’t understand is why the joke making must be accessed by a random panel and the viewing public. If we’re meant to be assessing women’s humorous talents, it should be the women who must access such skills?
On the topic of funny women, though, I’ve been re-listening to the Godless Bitches podcast recently, and some of them are side-splittingly hilarious… and this is atheist feminists we’re talking about – the most gold-diggy and humourless of all possible human females!! (So, long story short, methinks the boy be full of shit.)
Good way to exclude any potential comedians, or comedy critics, from the statistics – they’ll be in Edinburgh.
So I usually try to not respond to first page comments after multiple pages but…
SWEET JESUS MOTHER MARY!
How are such contradictory numbers possible? 95% of the people who’ve commented to his knowledge have done so negatively? And yet, a whole 378 people think he’s not utterly full of shit? Why… how is such math to be beheld!? Surely less than four hundred people is at least half of the population of the world?!
Seriously dude, small numbers mean shit. Though I do have to wonder why so few people have shown an interest in this venture of yours. There are probably thousands of MRA’s bumping around on the internets in one form or another, and most of them would leap at the chance to make dumb ol’ wimminz look stupid… so why have only 378 people applied? That’s not even 1% of 1% of the people online. It’s kind of pathetic, really.
@Dvarg, congrats! The currency converter I found by Googling says right now 440 000 SKr is about US$68,200. That’d keep me comfy over two years (I have no idea what the cost of living is in Sweden).
Good on yer.
And obviously right now you don’t have to depend on Men for your handouts, so you’re free to be funny … for two years. :P
@Dvärghundspossen That’s great! But, now you must live with constant vigilance. Beware the unfunny, they are after your gold.
@eselbosustow
Don’t forget TM thinks 97% of women are of the gold-digging kind. The equivalent male gold digger requirement is to have any social interactions at all.
Still a mystery who that 3% is…
@thekidwiththereplaceablehead
But the funny are after hir Lucky Charms.
So you want a “proper feminist” like you, and a “stubborn victim-feminst”… why not just look for a real feminist? 1 pseudo-feminist + 1 straw-feminist = 1 honest-to-god real feminist (trumath) so why not cut costs and just get a real feminist involved?
(After all, you know the victim-feminist will only gold-dig all your monies away!)
I don’t know, but I always get my guy friends to laugh and I’m not “gold digging” as it were. They’re rather poor anyway (one is rich, but I think he’s shy of women and I don’t want to make him uncomfortable).
I think his response was meant to say ‘once I have some of my dailies done the money will come rolling in because this concept is utter gold and they can’t NOT pay me.’
Which is to say, he definitely doesn’t have that money in hand.
Which is to say, about the level of preparation we’d expect from a Tom Martin project.
Well, that evil Sarkeesian woman got loads of money just through being a vile feminist, therefore this ACTUALLY REAL IMPORTANT PROJECT about things that are actually real is bound to make millions. There’s quite literally no way it could fail.
I wonder if mr Martin is interested in purchasing my emu farm. Profit guaranteed!
Workers will be paid minimum wage (years later, after fame and success), but they will gain high quality chairs in the workplace.
Really, Tom is paying them the equivalent of 25 pounds an hour, it’s just that he’s invested most of it on soft ball-hugging silk and fur chairs for everyone.
One concern is that he’ll only attract chair-digging whores, who cannot be objective in determining levels of humour due to chair interests. Moreover, the gold-diggo-meter might catch the chair-digging interference, skewing the results.
You’re highlighting an interesting contradiction between Tom and the rest of the MRM: Tom says women have to not be funny in order to get and keep a man (also implying that it’s difficult for women to get men), whereas the general misogynist belief is that men have to be funny to get and keep a woman, but women don’t because it’s easy for women to get men.
@bionicmommy, right, his premise only works if you buy into the idea that women are naturally unfunny by default to begin with. From that angle, of course women are even less funny when they think they can get something out of keeping their mouth shut, because, duh, who ever heard of a man wanting to hear anything a woman has to say, amirite?
It assumes too that men naturally don’t want to listen to women and/or that the only thing women have to offer men is sex/good looks.
So basically just your average, run of the mill, Tom Martin “97% of women are whores” ideology.
I am skeptical that we will get “dynamite footage” out of people with no comedy background doing improv exercises for a week. I’m sure Martin imagines that the men will be firing off hilarious standup routines on the fly while the women stand around looking dour and offering to have sex for money, but having done amateur improv I have my doubts.
That said, I so totally want this documentary to happen.
*cough* Could all just be a ploy to interact with women *cough*
Congratulations Dvärghundspossen
Tom Martin: I will allow feminists to participate in my project to prove that money-grubbing whores are also incapable of humour.
Rest of world: Lol, is this that misandric chair penguin guy again?
Tom even if you prove your point (which you won’t because hahahahahahahaha you are fucking stupid), why would anyone care? Seriously what would be the wider significance or point of this (non-existent) link between two, very nebulous, concepts?
As for the supposed “study”, I can barely even begin to address all the things wrong with it. I know you’re just going to pull it all out of your un-padded arse, but you know the concept of humour is completely subjective, right? How are you going to attempt to prove gold-diggers aren’t as funny (as who? All men? Very unbiased), when people can simply retort that they do find them funny? You can’t ‘prove’ someone right or wrong on that.
Man alive, do I wish I had money to waste on frivolous lawsuits and inane ‘studies’.
Yes, that’s right. Another contradiction is that Tom says that women try to keep quiet to impress men, but PUA’s say that a woman might show her interest in a man by talking more. That’s one of their measures of success on a pickup attempt, if they get a woman engaged in a conversation, especially one with witty banter. And as much as I hate to do this, in this case, I agree with what the PUA’s say. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
The point mr Wizard is to scientifically prove (if further proof be needed) that women are stinky bitches. Duh.
Thanks for all the congratulations everyone! :-D And yeah, I’ll really watch out for unfunny lesbians who might try to become my mistress now when I have this grant.
I still find Tom’s hypothesis completely incomprehensible. Tom, if you’re still around, please explain what you’re going on about!
He’s starting with these premises:
-Women are less funny than men
-97% of women are gold-diggers
How is he going to disentangle these premises with this experiment? He’s going to give them improv classes, then ask them “do you think gold-digging is good?” and be amazed at how their comedy ability improves? How is he going to relate female humor to male humor? Is he going to put men through the same procedure? Are there any male gold-digger’s he needs to worry about in comparison? Who is the jury? Are they all men? Representitive of gender? Representitive of race and cultural background?
There’s no control here, unless he is able to reliably find the 3% of the population that aren’t gold-diggers in his mind randomly on the street. I don’t see how he’s going to assess comedic ability either, or how he’s going to “secretly” present a gold-digging opportunity and then “secretly” present an opportunity to reject it. The whole thing’s a mess.
But please, Tom, propose your methodology in a way that someone could actually reproduce! Look up guides on writing a methods section in scientific paper if you need help doing so.
Shaenon:
What I want is the documentary of the documentary. Someone filming Tom and his hypothetical crew as they desperately try to massage the footage they manage to get into something resembling the incoherent mess of a narrative that they are trying to build.
I just remembered that this is the same Tom who declared that any form of accepting a gift without immediate and equal recompense is gold-digging… Like, if a guy takes a gal out to dinner and pays for it, she’s a gold digger if she doesn’t sleep with him or pay for exactly her portion.
There’s no way this thing will happen.
@kirbywarp
Sounds like expecting people to work without immediate recompense is spot on with Tom Martin’s definition of gold-digging.
Speaking of bizarre anti-feminism, someone I used to like a lot just told me to “fuck off” when I said that chivalry is inherently patriarchal.
I know it’s just one person, and I’m very used to anti-feminists, but this honestly hit me hard because I thought we got along well. Just one of those things I have to get used to, I guess. I hate it when I lose friends, even when they’re shitty.
Yeah Aaliyah, that was really assholish behaviour. Okay if that person isn’t that well-versed in feminism and goes “What do you mean? I don’t understand? Chivalry is putting women first, how’s that patriarchal?” and actually asking you to explain, but merely telling you to fuck off – yep, anti-feminist asshole.
Except that then he’s accepting something for nothing and he’s a whore. It’s dizzying.
If it’s any consolation, he’s proving your thesis. Presumably this guy thinks of himself as chivalrous, but he’s ready to instantly lash out at women who don’t think or act the way he wants.
Congratulations Dvärghundspossen! That’s wonderful news!
@kirbywarp:
“I just remembered that this is the same Tom who declared that any form of accepting a gift without immediate and equal recompense is gold-digging… Like, if a guy takes a gal out to dinner and pays for it, she’s a gold digger if she doesn’t sleep with him or pay for exactly her portion.”
But if she does sleep with him, she’s a whore, so she can’t win.
@kitteh
Yeah, but remember, the biggest gold-digging whores of all according to TM are Saudi women. You know, they ‘withhold’ the sex for so long, and they all have men drive them around and stuff!
Maybe he could conduct his *cough* study in the KSA for more gold-digging potential.
@Aaliyah:
How crass. Tell him to fuck off too.
I’m not entirely sure the concept of chivalry is inherently patriarchal though? The generalized assumption of “Defend women!” is, but’s a bastardization. The Chivaleric code itself is really just from chevalier – horse soldier. It’s like Bushido, actually (Which is fun for those who claim that Europe never had a warrior caste and that the only legit honour code is found in Japan, rawr rawr katana!)
Or do you know I something I don’t? (This is quite likely) Because if so, I’d love to know more.
Tom what happens if a woman gold-digs through raucous comedy acts
We’ve had some very interesting discussions of chivalry here, but of course I never bookmarked them…
Off topic, my friend just rescued a little black white kitten on Friday that had gotten trapped between a wall and a storage shed. It was down to skin and bones and covered with fleas, but they got her checked out and cleaned up, and she’s living in one bedroom of their apartment while they look for a good home for her. (I suspect that their home may end up being the good home they find because they are clearly already TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH HER and their other cat seems more intrigued by the visitor than hostile to it.)
I have to get her to send me some pictures because she is adorable. Well, she’s a kitten so maybe we can just stipulate to adorableness.
I guess it would depend on what people mean when they think of chivalry? In my mind it’s always just been about being helpful in general to people in general… not so much holding doors for women, then slamming them in the faces of men, which I do anyway, but only for giggles.
@Fibinachi
Engaging with him, even if it just means telling him to fuck off, is going to make me even more stressed out (today I’ve been dealing with bitterness among my journal commentators towards one another and my father yelling at me again). I’m tempted to say that to him, but it really isn’t worth it. And he and some others are just going to accuse me of being “butthurt” anyway (which is true, I guess, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not being an asshole).
By “chivalry” I’m referring to the general practice of benevolent sexism that involves the man being the guardian and the woman being the weak one in need of protection. I’m pretty sure that’s patriarchal.
@thekidwiththereplaceablehead
XD words cannot express how glad I am I wasn’t drinking while I read that.
@bigmomma
XD this thread is perfect.
@kittehs
What adorable penguins!
@bigmomma
fuck that is perfect XD Both disturbing and hilarious at the same time.
@the boring fedora
We know, he said 97% of women are gold diggers. Huge difference ;)
I’m 99% sure you don’t need game to get laid if you’re low income, cuz my dad only has unemployment benefits and isn’t a pua and he’s getting married in a month. It clearly isn’t a necesity.
And posting before wordpress eats my comment. /sowwyz.
@dvärghundspossen:
Belated congratulations!
@daintydougal:
Ha, that’s exactly what I thought. Also the earlier linked A Voice for Pierre comic. “Female Penguins are whores!” Love it.
@freemage:
Love the idea. Working title: Tom Martin: The real comedy behind the scenes.
Is this Tom Martin guy for real, or is he just some very bizarre sort of comedian? Because I’m not laughing. Is he one of those ironic, surreal performance artists who do everything just for the attention, not to make any coherent point?
“Of course you’re not supposed to laugh. The irony lies in the fact that it’s not funny, which makes it funny. Also pink zebra with a typewriter riding a one-legged hippopotamus.”
And congrats also to dvärghundspossen — woot!
Also, congrats Dvärghundspossen! ^_^
Asking Tom Martin his opinion on what is and is not funny is like asking Donald Trump for hair care advice – comedy may ensue, but not intentionally.
Did I hear the word chivalry? I wrote an essay about it in my exam.
It was Medieval chivalry so not directly the same as chivalry as a modern concept, but modern chivalry has it’s roots in the the ideas surrounding courtly love.
And I can tell you that it is inherently sexist and patriarchal, very much so.
If need be I can produce a grumpy Feminist who wrote his third year dissertation on Chivalry who will tell you the same thing.
Here’s a quote from a really great journal article on the subject of courtly love and knightly masculinity:
“Success in love was an important part of knighthood. This did not mean that the knight’s goal was to impress women. Rather, he used women, or his attractiveness to women, to impress other men. Much of chivalric culture was built around a myth of women’s power over men through love. This system denied what real political and economic power Women had and gave them an empty authority. Women, as signs and as stand-ins, mediated relations between men”
Karras, Ruth Mazo. From boys to men: formations of masculinity in late medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
@Dvärghundspossen
Yay! Congrats :D
@Aaliyah
That sucks :( What an ass. Jedi hugs if you want them.
@fibinachi
Can’t speak about the historical context? from there, because I don’t know much about it, but just regular chivalry is pretty sexist, imo, even though it’s ‘benevolent sexism’. I now link to stuff, cuz I can’t articulate well, plus I love links:
http://feministdisney.tumblr.com/post/44549240503/is-chivalry-sexist-reblog-version
Tell me if I sound like an ass to you? I don’t want to, but my internet tone feels waaaayyy off atm.
@fibinachi, can I just leap in to say that while it is very tempting to compare Bushido and Chivalry, it is actually incredibly inaccurate to do so.
For a start, Chivalry is gendered, it is/was about male behaviour and constructions of masculinity. Bushido is/was not gendered, both men and women were samurai and both were expected to follow and embody the ideals of bushido, loyalty to ones leige lord and family, duty, honour, willingness to sacrifice.
Bushido was also a much clearer moral code, Chivalry cannot really be referred to as a moral code, many different ideals of Chivalry existed and it should really be viewed as an amorphous collection of cultural phenomena which manifested itself in various ways with great variety, from the troubador ballads to the Knight’s Templar. It wasn’t a moral code as such, while Bushido very much was.
/sorry history nerd
What about gold-digging AS humor? Mae West made a brilliant career in comedy writing and starring as some blatantly gold-digging women. Jennifer Lawrence’s hilarious quip to Jack Nicholson at the Oscars was very much in that vein — when he says she reminds him of an old girlfriend, she doesn’t miss a beat, and kind of does a Mae West imitation, saying, “Do I remind you of a new girlfriend?”
Marie:
I think you captured the use of the word chivalry here perfectly; and often, when you’re apologizing for your tone, you sound to me somewhat excited. In a talking-faster-to-get-the-ideas-out-before-I-forget kind of way. And that has always been a state of being completely distinguishable from being an ass, which, to the best of my memory, you have never sounded like.
TL;DR–you’re doing fine.
@Marie:
To me, no – but I’m tone deaf. And thank you for the link.
@Historophilia:
Interesting! Thank you. That sounds like a really neat book, so thank you for the full source. Off I go to the library requisition page.
I guess I was wrong. How damaging for my ego, I will now have to edit myself so
as to appear right all along. Wait. No. I’ll just not say that again, and keep the correction in mind. :D@historophilia
Did you just apologize for sharing an incredibly cool tidbit of historical data relating to the understanding of different honor systems and social organization?
Apology not accepted. .