Author Archives: David Futrelle
Ta da! Man Boobz is now We Hunted the Mammoth
A mammoth, hunted. By leocigale
Man Boobz is now We Hunted the Mammoth.
Don’t worry: nothing you knew and/or loved about the old Man Boobz, except the name, is going away. The blog will continue on much as it has. The old comments won’t vanish, and you won’t have to sign up again to post new ones. Your old links to manboobz.com should still work fine. (The new URL may take a little while to make its way around the world; let me know in the comments if you have trouble accessing the site.)
It’s just that, well, I got tired of the old name. I came up with it on the spur of the moment when I first started this blog. But it was kind of a dopey name. It was easily misunderstood, and gave people an easy excuse to dismiss the blog when it reported things that made them uncomfortable. I probably should have gotten rid of it a while ago.
But better late than never, huh?
I’ve given it a name that fits this blog (and its community of commenters) much better. The phrase “we hunted the mammoth” is a shortened version of “we hunted the mammoth to feed you,” which has become a catchphrase around these parts to describe a certain sort of self-important, self-deluding misogyny common amongst the people featured on this blog.
It comes from a quote I once posted from a dude who felt women weren’t sufficiently appreciative of what men had supposedly done for them over the ages. Here’s the full quote, in all of its glory:
We men built a nice safe world for you all the the coal-mines of death, roads, railroads, bridges and tall office buildings. Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety. Forget about the wars we died in and the sacrifices made just ignore history or is it now hersorty? You are accruing the benefits without ever having to pay the price you still don’t have to sign up for the draft and who will protect you? The Sex and the City girls will fight off the North Koreans with their Manolo Blahniks?
Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted we hunted the mammoth to feed you we died in burning buildings and were gassed in the trenches but that was just for fun right?
How quick and conveniently you forget who made this possible.
We gave you Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy not to mention countless others, Jonas Salk saved half the world from death and you just piss on it all.
“We Hunted the Mammoth” is such a wonderful distillation of this entire clusterfuck of misogyny, entitlement and unwarranted self-importance – not to mention historical ignorance – that when I decided to rename the blog it was the obvious choice.
Even though it means a long URL and a bit of an explanation.
Ok, you may wonder, but what is this “New Misogyny” you mention in the banner? Isn’t the misogyny you write about just a bunch of tired old ideas lightly reheated?
Much of it is. But I’m using the phrase “New Misogyny” to refer specifically to the angry antifeminist backlash that has emerged like a boil on the ass of the internet over the last decade or so. These aren’t your traditional misogynists – the social conservatives and religious fundamentalists who make up much of the far right (and whom I’ve always ignored on this blog).
So let me give a basic definition — which will no doubt seem overly basic to anyone who’s been reading this blog for any length of time.
These are guys, mostly, who range in age from their teens to their fifties, who have embraced misogyny as an ideology, as a sort of symbolic solution to the frustrations in their lives – whether financial, social, or sexual.
Some of them identify as Men’s Rights Activists, trying to cast their peculiar struggle against what they see as the excesses of feminism and the advantages of women as a civil rights issue of sorts. Alongside those who explicitly label themselves MRAs we find a great number of antifeminist and antiwomen activists we might call Men’s Rights-adjacent – like those in the Skeptic and Atheist subcultures who still haven’t gotten over an offhand remark Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson made about a dude in an elevator a couple of years ago.
Others proclaim themselves Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), declaring a sort of independence from women – while spending much of their time on message boards talking endlessly about them.
Still others see themselves as Pickup Artists (PUA), or masters of “Game,” espousing elaborate “scientific” theories of male superiority while trading tips on how best to pressure or manipulate drunk women into bed.
This misogynistic wing of the PUA subculture has a considerable overlap with a subset of traditionalist and far-right blogs. Many of those in what has become known as “the manosphere” don’t simply embrace misogyny; they also proudly embrace “scientific” racism and other bigotries.
Still, while some of the New Misogynists see themselves as conservatives, even “neo-reactionaries,” many identify themselves as libertarians or even as liberals. Theirs is a backlash that frames itself as a step forward.
So that’s the New Misogyny.
Like I said, none of this is going to sound altogether new to longtime readers of this site. But I think this helps to make a little bit clearer why I focus on the particular sorts of douchebags that I do.
And now, back to work.
How Melody Hensley is putting the bullies to shame
Yesterday, a message arrived in my email inbox with the title “Are you happy to die a virgin,” a somewhat unusual question, I felt, not just because of its faulty premise but also because of its lack of the conventional question mark at the end. The email itself was equally blunt and illiterate:
You sound like a 40 y/o FAT VIRGIN living in a basement rotting away. Is manboobz.com your way of hide behind your own internal issues u refuse to face? Father issues???
Ah, here’s where the missing question mark went, along with some friends.
The sender appended a photo of an extremely obese Asian man at least 20 years my junior, mostly if not completely nude, along with the question (and I quote verbatim) “This this photo you??”
As hate mail goes, this isn’t particularly interesting and original. What got my attention was the sender: it came from the admin account at mensrightsmelbourne.com, an Australian Men’s Rights site taking much of its inspiration from Men’s Rights Edmonton (its website design) and A Voice for Men (its propaganda). So this wasn’t simply some anonymous internet troll sending me puerile hate mail: this is one of Australia’s most visible MRAs.
On the front page I noticed something else: A post with the title: “‘Twitter gave me PTSD’: Woman claims mean comments and ‘cyberstalking’ gave her an illness usually suffered by WAR VETERANS.”
The post – most of which is plagiarised directly from The Daily Mail, including the title itself – is an attack on Melody Hensley, a feminist and skeptic who is the Executive Director of Center for Inquiry in Washington DC. Hensley, who in the past suffered intense harassment from misogynists in the skeptic movement and other assorted assholes, is now facing a second wave of harassment as a result of saying publicly that the earlier harassment had given her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
That’s right: she’s being harassed for saying that harassment so fucked up her life that it gave her PTSD.
While much of the most vicious harassment this time is coming, as it did last time, from the misogynist wing of the atheist/skeptic movement, MRAs are jumping on board as well.
The “argument” of Hensley’s enemies? That she couldn’t possibly have gotten PTSD from “mean words” online. Men’s Rights blogger The Native Canadian put it this way:
PTSD from being a feminist on the internet? Yeah I bet she wakes up screaming at night because of all the mean words! Must be hard going day to day with flash backs of your friends being called “femnazi’s” right in front of you! How ever do you handle life? Fucking disgraceful b****. Let’s see her tell that to someone who really knows what living with PTSD is like. …
I’m sorry but I am totally shocked, I don’t know what else to say, other than, is there nothing sacred to these cat lovers?
And that’s pretty much the argument all of them make: based on nothing but their own vague notion that PTSD is a serious thing that only happens to soldiers, they’ve decided she’s a lying “b****” who is trying to steal the sympathy that rightly belongs to men. (Never mind that her comments on Twitter about veterans suffering from PTSD are always respectful.)
As Hensley has made clear, she’s not claiming that a few mean tweets gave her PTSD. On a page she’s set up to help raise money for research into PTSD she notes:
In July of 2013 I publicly disclosed that I had been diagnosed by my psychiatrist with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to more than a year of online harassment and abuse. The abuse -including death and rape threats- occurred on numerous websites and via email, phone, online postings, images, and videos.
Is it possible for this sort of harassment to cause PTSD? Well, according to someone who knows a lot more about the subject than me or The Native Canadian or the dude at Men’s Rights Melbourne or the staff writers at The Daily Mail, the answer is a clear yes. Caleb W. Lack, a licensed clinical psychologist and psychology professor who writes a blog called Great Plains Skeptic, and who is an expert on anxiety disorders, writes in a recent post on the Hensley controversy that
Bullying has long been known to have a severe impact on mental health, particularly if the bullying is repeated and prolonged. While research has traditionally focused on youth (as briefly reviewed here), more recent work has examined it’s impact on adults. as well, particularly in the workplace. Research focusing specifically on cyberbullying has found very similar results to “traditional” bullying, in terms of increased risk of depression, suicide, and anxiety. In youth, around a third of bullying victims display quite high rates of PTSD symptoms and rates are perhaps even higher in adults who are bullied.
So, given what we know about PTSD, and given what we know about the effects of bullying (cyber and otherwise) on mental health, I think it’s relatively safe to say that “Yes, you can ‘get’ PTSD from Twitter.” One needs to be careful, though, to be specific about this: it’s the bullying and harassment that could lead to PTSD or PTSD symptoms (as well as depression, increased suicidality, and so on), not anything inherent to Twitter itself. Twitter and other forms of social media are just a new tool to use to bully and harass others, but the underlying mechanisms and the results are the same as if these interactions were face to face.
The internet isn’t somehow apart from the “real world.” It’s a part of it, and actions on the internet have real world consequences. Unfortunately, the internet seems to magnify the power of bullies. But it may also magnify the power of bullying victims to fight back.
Of course, the bullies don’t want to acknowledge that what they are doing is bullying. Indeed, many of the worst bullies in the skeptic and Men’s Rights movements consider themselves “activists” — even though the bulk of their “activism” may consist of nothing more than harassing individuals. That may be part of what is driving the widespread refusal to accept that online harassment can lead to real trauma, including PTSD.
And that may be why the guy at Men’s Rights Melbourne — that is, a guy who sent me a crude, bullying email calling me a “FAT VIRGIN” — felt the need to weigh in on the Hensley’s case, and to insinuate ( in one of the few portions of his post that wasn’t plagiarised) that she’s making it all up.
But on some level the bullies know that they’re bullies. There’s no question that the new wave of harassment against Hensley is driven by one of the central dynamics of bullying — offline and on. Bullies love to pounce on anyone who shows signs of vulnerability, and Hensley’s announcement that she suffers from PTSD is a sign that the first wave of bullying got to her.
Happily, that’s not the whole story. What really seems to infuriate Hensley’s enemies is that she’s not acting like they think a victim should. She’s not shutting up and going away. She’s back on Twitter and responding to critics, because doing so gives her a sense of control over her bullies. She’s taking power away from them.
On A Voice for Men, Dean Esmay tries his best, in a barely coherent post, to paint her as a “professional damsel in distress” who deserves to be distressed some more. But the tweets of hers he reposts aren’t very damsel-like; they’re blunt and direct and they call out bullies by name. And when she posts them she knows she has the support of a lot of people who are as disgusted by the bullies as she is.
And while the bullies fulminate, she’s raising money for PTSD research. Because she’s an actual fucking activist, not a bully with a Twitter account, or a website, or a YouTube channel.
EDIT: There has been a lot of really good stuff written about Hensley and PTSD, particularly on Freethought Blogs. Here are some links to interesting, useful, insightful posts.
How could Twitter possibly cause PTSD? by Stephanie Zwan, documents some of the harassment.
What Melody Hensley Has to Teach You About Professionalism, an older (2013) piece by Zvan
Your Uninformed and Incorrect Opinions About Psychology, by Miri Mogilevsky
A Voice for Me – AVfM and Thunderfoot on PTSD, by Avicenna
PTSD and Me(lody), by Avicenna
Feel free to post more links in the comments!
NOTE TO DRIVE-BY ASSHOLES: If you want to talk about what a liar you think Melody Hensley is, don’t bother trying to post comments here. I mean, you can if you want; it’s just that it takes me a lot less time to throw them in the trash than it does for you to write them.
MRAs post secret recording of non-secret event, confuse feminism with the complete opposite of feminism
Secret Squirrel: Much better at this than MRAs
If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.
Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.
A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.
The organizers made clear that there was to be no filming or recording of the event.
They had security remove Steve Brule, an MRA-sympathetic “documentarian” who’d shown up with his camera gear. Organizers had every reason to worry about Brule and his camera: in the past, footage from Brule has been used by AVFM to dox feminist students. Nevertheless, he cried foul, saying that he promised the security guards he wouldn’t film the event –honest! — and, absurdly, claiming that he had been discriminated against as an “old guy.”
But organizers let in other MRAs, apparently on the condition that they not record any of the proceedings.
Well, I guess we now know how much those sorts of promises are worth. Today, A Voice for Men posted a recording of the event. Vinczer explained that
I herewith revoke my word not to record the Jaclyn Friedman What’s Feminism Got To Do With It public event. Had security not violated my Charter Rights I would never have had to take the steps I did to preserve those rights.
His accusation?
On April 7, 2014, a group of five men and one woman were denied access to a public feminist event at Queen’s University for absolutely no reason at all. Security trampled on Charter rights of these Canadians.
But then in his next line we learn that four of these people, including him, WERE ultimately allowed to attend the event. (Presumably the fifth was Brule.)
So four of these people were unfairly denied access to something they were not actually denied access to, and a fifth was denied access because organizers and students didn’t trust him not to record the event.
And so, in order to protest a man being kept out of an event because people were afraid he would secretly tape the event, AVFM is … posting audio that someone secretly recorded of the event, after promising not to record it.
So that’s irony number one.
As for irony number two, well, according to Vinczer, posting the audio of the event is necessary because
The public has a right to know what type of damaging and dangerous rhetoric is being spoken to highly impressionable young adult minds.
But guess what? The event wasn’t actually secret. It was actually BROADCAST LIVE AS IT WAS HAPPENING.
And for anyone who missed it, it’s ARCHIVED ONLINE HERE. Go to April 8 at 8pm (or, as they have it, 2000 hours). Ta da! The sound quality is better than AVFM’s recording, as well.
Besides sound quality, the other difference between AVFM’s recording and the officially broadcast one is that AVFM’s includes the panel discussion afterwards, which, as the radio station that broadcasted the event noted in a tweet “we were not permitted by the panelists and event organizers to record & broadcast the panel discussion due to safety concerns.”
In other words, the organizers wanted students to be able to ask questions without worrying about being publicly identified on the internet by MRAs — because MRAs, particularly those associated with AVFM, have a longstanding practice of singling out college feminists for harassment online.
So good on you, AVFMers, for making life a little easier for potential harassers.
Also, in the comments on AVFM, we see this wondrous little exchange.
Wait, a feminist telling women to exploit their sexuality for money? That seems … odd.
And that’s because she isn’t doing that at all.
Which brings us to irony number three: If you actually go and listen to that portion of Friedman’s talk, you will see that she isn’t issuing marching orders to her feminist sisters. In fact, she’s describing the traditional, patriarchal, female-sex-as-commodity notion of sexuality. She’s very clearly describing a model of sexuality she, as a feminist, finds troubling, not one that she endorses.
But just as the folks at AVFM have trouble telling the difference between a secret event and one that was literally broadcast to the world, they also have trouble telling the difference between feminism and the complete opposite of feminism.
Congratulations, AVFMers, you’ve once again demonstrated to the world that you are both liars and idiots.
EDIT: Added several paragraphs noting that the AVFM recording included the panel discussion and audience questions.
EDIT 2: On Twitter, AVFM “assistant managing editor” Suzanne McCarley seems to suggest that Attila Vinczer’s argument that he had to post the audio because the public “has the right to know” is pure bullshit: AVFM, according to her, posted the audio simply because it was forbidden to post the audio.
Here’s her tweet:
@DavidFutrelle It wasn't secret, silly. It was forbidden. Much more exciting.—
Suzy McCarley (@SuzyMcCarley) April 22, 2014
So is she trying to make excuses for AVFM not knowing that the audio of Jaclyn Friedman’s talk was already online, or is this the truth? Funny thing is, either way, the folks at AVFM look like asses.
“We Hunted the Mammoth” Banner Contest Winners!
We have a winner in the We Hunted the Mammoth Banner Contest!
Well, two winners, actually. And they are:
Dani, who designed several variations of a banner which will soon become the banner of We Hunted the Mammoth. I actually haven’t quite decided which of these to use, but I like them all, and it will be one of them! (Tell me which one you like best in the comments.)
Leocigale, who did the awesome cartoon below. Even though it’s not, technically speaking, a banner, I plan to use it on We Hunted the Mammoth as well. So Leocigale is also the winner!
Well, we all are, really.
Dani and Leocigale will split the cash prize of $100.
Well, actually, it might be a bit more than that: a few people made donations during the contest and didn’t leave a note specifying whether they were for the contest or not. If you were one of them, and you want your money to go to the contest winners, email me and I’ll add it to the prize. Once I get that sorted out, I’ll post an updated number here, and a breakdown of the donations in the comments below (I will break them down anonymously, of course).
Thanks to everyone who submitted entries! There was a lot of awesome artwork to choose from.
8 Men’s Rights Memes From A Voice for Men That Make No Damn Sense
Yesterday, we looked at 6 memes from A Voice for Men’s “meme team” and decoded what they really meant. Today, some memes from AVFM’s Pinterest page that are a bit harder to decode, because they really make no sense at all. I’ll do my best to try to sort them out.
1) TALK TO THE HAND
What might it mean? “Ha ha girls talk too much, well joke’s on you because I’m GOING MY OWN WAY and later I’ll go home and make a poster about how I imagined I might I totally really did put that bitch in her place.”
I mean, that is what this poster is saying, right? It’s illustrating the notion that men and women should listen to one another by depicting a dude just up and leaving because he’s tired of listening?
How exactly does this advance any “men’s rights” other than the right of men to act like petulant children?
6 Memes from A Voice for Men, and What They Really Mean
Memes, memes everywhere, and not a drop of sense.
A Voice for Men seems to have gone a bit meme-crazy. The site’s official Pinterest page, which seems to be fairly new, is loaded up with 374 memes on such subjects as Sexual Politics, False Accusations, MGTOW, and of course Feminism.
It’s not clear how many of these memes were created by the AVFM “Meme Team” and how many were simply grabbed from the internet. But a number of the memes are emblazoned with the A Voice for Men name and/or logo, so I think it’s fair to say that these, at least, are “official” AVFM memes.
Going through these memes, one thing about them becomes clear very quickly: most of them seem to convey messages that are often considerably different than those their creators seem to have intended.
So here, without further ado, here are 6 AVFM memes and what they really mean.
1) MEN SOLVE PROBLEMS
What this meme purports to say: These two variations on the same meme might (charitably) be interpreted to mean that we should honor the historical achievements of men.
What this meme really says: Men are superior to women. Suck it up, dumb bitches!
2) TODAY HE WOULD BE CALLED A RAPIST
What this meme purports to say: Feminist ideologues have so corrupted the notion of rape that is has become ridiculous.
What this meme really says: We basically don’t understand what consent is. Why shouldn’t a dude be allowed to just go kiss a woman on the mouth without her permission?
3) THANKS FOR NOTHING, FEMINISM!
What this meme purports to say: Feminism has conned women into giving up the joys of motherhood for the sorrows of wage labor
What this meme really says: We believe in a magical prefeminist fairyland in which all mothers were young, beautiful middle class women whose husbands could afford to support them while they raised children. There was no such thing as the working class, or women working in factory jobs, before feminism. Also, we basically think women shouldn’t have jobs, though we get mad at housewives for “leeching” off their husbands all the time, too.
4) COMMITTED TO FAIRNESS IN FAMILY COURTS
What this meme purports to say: Judges should not automatically assume that mothers will make better parents than fathers.
What this meme really says: We hate women, and love to laugh at them, and think that if any woman anywhere behaves badly it reflects poorly on all women due to the transitive property of women being terrible bitches.
5) BAN BOSSY?
What this meme purports to say: We oppose the #BanBossy campaign, for some reason.
What this meme really says: We hate women with any power in the world. We also hate little girls.
6) FEMINISTS WON’T STOP UNTIL WE MAKE THEM
What these related memes purport to say: These two memes suggest that feminism is a vicious, violent ideology that must be strongly opposed.
What these memes really say: We like to portray ourselves as victims of feminist violence, even if we have to imagine it, because that gives us a justification to indulge in wild fantasies of violent “retribution” that for some reason involve fists being shoved into women’s orifices.
COMING SOON: An arbitrary number of A Voice for Men memes that make no fucking sense.
EDIT: Proofreading fixes.
Women who get catcalled are the real sexual harassers, explains Men’s Rights Redditor
Woman sexually harassing a group of men with her slutty attire.
A month or so ago, after an antiques dealer responded to her comment about a piece of furniture by asking her if she and her female friend “ever made out with each other,” Leah Green of The Guardian decided it was time to try a little gender-reversal experiment: she would use hidden cameras to film her to treat unsuspecting men to the same sort of inappropriate sexual remarks that women get treated to every day, using real life examples collected by the @everydaysexism project.
You can see their reactions in the short video she posted on the Guardian’s website; she discusses her motivations more here.
Many of the men, unaccustomed to this sort of harassment, weren’t exactly sure how to react to her comments. When she asked a bartender for a drink and a lap dance, she had to repeat herself several times before he got her point. When she tried the “have you guys ever made out with each other” line on two older men, they couldn’t quite even process the question at first.
Others got angry. When she yelled “oi, get your asses out” at some construction workers – a gender-swapped version of the classic “show us your tits” — one of the affronted men responded with “you can’t talk to us like that.” And that was essentially the point of the video: no one should be talking to anyone like that.
That point seems to have escaped one angry commenter on the Men’s Rights subreddit going by the name of frankie_q, who spewed forth a well-received virtual manifesto arguing that it’s complaints about cat-calling, not the cat-calling itself, that is the bigger problem. And that the biggest problem of all is that women wear clothes that men consider sexy.
CreepyPM Time: Let Me ‘Splain That For You Edition
Let’s take another visit to the CreepyPM subreddit, where innocent souls post screenshots of the perfectly horrendous private messages they’ve gotten, sometimes on dating sites, sometimes not.
In this case, the recipient is a young black woman on OkCupid, the sender a white man more than twenty years her senior and 13 years out of her specified age range. He decides that the best way to overcome this age gap is to … mansplain and whitesplain to her about the history of Planned Parenthood.
And then there is perhaps the most awkward segue in the history of internet dating.
In the screenshot below, he’s red, she’s blue.
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan!
According to the recipient — no screenshot, alas — he followed this up with a classic bit of passive-aggressive sex nagging:
Take a chance, Ms. Free Love.
SPOILER ALERT: She didn’t.
You can read the original thread in CreepyPMs here.
Phyllis Schlafly channels the manosphere with a column about female “hypergamy.”
The world’s most eligible bachelor?
Professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly – perhaps best known for her fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – seems to have been channeling the manosphere in a column she published yesterday on the issue of “paycheck fairness.” Turns out she thinks such fairness is actually a bad idea, because ladies love marrying rich guys more than they love earning money.
According to Schlafly, equal pay messes with the fundamental female desire for “hypergamy” – that favorite manosphere buzzword – and undermines marriage:
[H]ypergamy … means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Indeed, Schlafly argues, women love marrying men who earn more than them so much that when the pay gap is eliminated some of them just won’t marry at all. Which is apparently the end of the world, or something.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. …
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
So it’s not enough that most people end up getting married; civilization will crumble if more than half of them don’t marry before the age of 30!
And so, she suggests, if American women knew what was good for them they would be begging for employers pay them even less, relative to men.
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Schlafly – a best-selling author and popular speaker on the right – didn’t send back any of her royalties or speaking fees so that she would feel more like a woman and her late husband would feel like more of a man, and I doubt she’s doing so now, as a widow. She’s also been unmarried for more than twenty years. Coincidence?
NOTE TO MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: When you find yourself agreeing with Phyllis Schlafly on pretty much anything (beyond, say, the existence of gravity, the need for human beings to breathe air, and other widely accepted beliefs of this sort), this is an indication that perhaps your movement isn’t the progressive, egalitarian movement that you like to pretend that it is, and that in fact it is sort of the opposite.
That said, I should also note that Schlafly’s notion of “hypergamy,” while sexist and silly, is decidedly less obnoxious than the version peddled by PUAs and websites like A Voice for Men — congrats, Men’s Human Rights Activists, you’re actually worse than Phyllis Schlafly!
She just uses the term to indicate a desire to marry up. For many manospherians, by contrast, “hypergamy” doesn’t just mean marrying up; it means that women are fickle, unfaithful monsters who love nothing better than cuckolding beta males in order to jump into bed with whatever alpha male wanders into their field of vision. (I’m guessing Schlafly hasn’t actually been going through the archives at AVFM or Chateau Heartiste looking for column ideas.) While many MRAs love to complain about hypergamy, many of them also seem to think that it’s unfair that “beta” males with good jobs aren’t automatically entitled to hot wives.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual definition of the word “hypergamy” involves none of that. According to Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, the word means “marriage to a person of a social status higher than one’s own; orig., esp. in India, the custom of allowing a woman to marry only into her own or a higher social group.”
That’s it. It refers to the fact of marrying up, not to the desire to marry up, much less to the alleged desire of all twentysomething women to ride the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel. The manosphere’s new and not-so-improved definition came from a white nationalist named F. Roger Devlin.
ANOTHER NOTE: Big thanks to the people who emailed me about this story. If you ever see something you think would make for a good Man Boobz post, send me an email at futrelle [at] manboobz.com. I get a lot of ideas from tips!
Banner Contest Update: Now With Cash Prize!
leocigale’s entry in the contest
Hey, everyone, just a quick update on the still-ongoing We Hunted the Mammoth banner contest (the details of which are here).
First, I want to thank all those who’ve contributed so far. Some great stuff!
Second, I want to announce that due to the generosity of some Man Boobz — soon to be We Hunted the Mammoth — readers, the contest now has a cash prize of $100.
Thanks very much for those who’ve donated, and if you want to add more to the prize, use the regular Man Boobz donation button, but include a note saying you want the money earmarked for the prize. (Also include a little codeword or phrase; I want to be transparent with this, so I will list the donations later according to these code phrases so you know your money went to the prize.)
Also, a question: I’m wondering what you folks think should happen if I want to use more than one of the designs? Split the prize money?
The contest will run through Sunday. So submit if you haven’t already!
Here are some of the submissions so far. Anyone is free to use the artwork in a banner design of their own (and if it wins you’ll split the prize with the artist).
