Author Archives: David Futrelle
Kate Beaton confuses the Reddit Men’s Rightsers
From Hark, a vagrant. I photoshopped a little.
Hark, a vagrant, as I may have noted many times already, is pretty much the most hilarious comic in the world at the moment. So recently the comic’s creator Kate Beaton got together with some of her cartoonist pals and did a bunch of cartoons featuring a gang of superheroines called the “STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS.”
Someone linked to them in Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit. Take a look at the comments. The cartoons seem to have, well, confused the Men’s Rightsers just a little bit.
MRA: Thomas Ball is no martyr
Not everyone in the MRM is hailing Thomas Ball as a martyr. Here’s what the blogger at Rise of the Zeta Male has to say on the subject:
What happened was a tragedy, and he absolutely should be honored for his fight. But at the end of the day, I still think his methods, and advocacy for violence (see the Molotov cocktail section) are wrong. The only thing violence breeds is more violence, and I am not going to excuse that, just because he proves a point I stand by. This was not an act of self defense, it was not an act of selfishness, it was an act of self destructive protest and it is a great tragedy.
I don’t often agree with what’s posted at Zeta Male – I’m not sure I’ve ever agreed with anything he’s said previously – and there are things in this comment and the rest of the post that I think are problematic. But I have to give the blogger credit for taking a principled stance on this issue, and one that is distinctly unpopular amongst MRAs online.
MGTOW Out Loud
You may not have realized that you wanted to hear dramatic readings of comments from NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum. But, trust me, you do. And so here you go, courtesy of the folks behind Troper (a series of dramatic readings of terrible shit from the TV Tropes message boards). There are two episodes of the NiceGuy series so far, with more (eventually) on the way.
Amanda Marcotte on the Thomas Ball suicide, and MRA haters
Amanda Marcotte, feminist blogger and Friend of Man Boobz, has been taking a lot of shit from MRAs – and I mean a LOT of shit – for a comment she made here on the Thomas Ball suicide.
As you may already know, Ball burned himself to death outside a New Hampshire courthouse. In a lengthy manifesto he wrote shortly before killing himself, he portrayed his suicide as a protest against a corrupt family court system, and went on to argue that MRAs should quite literally assemble some Molotov cocktails and “start burning down police stations and courthouses.” (You can read the whole manifesto here.) Despite his calls for violence many MRAs have hailed him as an MRA martyr.
Marcotte, in her comment here, suggested that there might have been other, more personal reasons for his suicide – namely, the desire to hurt his ex-wife:
I’ll point out that setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell, and if your anger at losing control over her overwhelms all other desires. Which is common enough with abusers, who will ruin their own lives and their own shit and turn their children against them in an effort to hurt the woman they’ve fixated on.
One MR blogger declared this comment “pure feminist evil”; a conservative blogger compared Marcotte to the Beast of Babylon. Still other MRAs resorted to assorted variations on the c-word.
Marcotte has now responded to this, er, “criticism” with an excellent post on Pandagon. As she points out, correctly,
suicide and threats of suicide are common tactics used by abusers to hurt their victims. Abusers dramatically self-destruct all the time in their desperation to control and hurt the objects of their obsession. There was just recently a big story about this, in fact: Jason Valdez of Utah, who had a long criminal record that included domestic violence, held a woman hostage in a hotel room for 16 hours and kept updates about the situation on Facebook. He eventually committed suicide.
The notion that suicide can be a hostile, aggressive act designed to hurt other people is hardly a controversial one, whether the person committing suicide is male or female. Threats of suicide are often used to manipulate other people; suicide itself can be an act of revenge.
Marcotte goes on:
Apparently, I’m supposed to pretend that suicide isn’t a disruptive, selfish act in many cases (especially when the suicide victim commits it in a public and destructive way), and that people who do it, while yes victims of their own mental health problems, are also thinking that they’re going to make everyone pay for not indulging them. In fact, not only is this true in Ball’s case, but he spelled it out in his suicide note. The “make the bastards suffer” theme of his note is the reason that wingnuts are supporting him.
But you don’t have to take her word for it. Read Ball’s entire manifesto, to the end, and ask yourself if this man is an appropriate “martyr” for any political movement.
Make me an LGBT sandwich, hold the L. And the T.
Some clubs are TOO exclusive.
“Kloo2yoo,” the moderator of Reddit’s Men’s Rights Subreddit, is worried that racists in his subreddit will give Men’s Rights a bad name. So he’s put out a call to some of the more artistic readers of the subreddit to come up with a nice new logo for it, to show how broad-minded and all-inclusive Reddit’s Men’s Rightsers really are. Well, not literally all-inclusive. As Kloo put it in his call for artiistic help:
New logo needed, to emphasize racial and lgbt inclusiveness, but not feminism.
Oh, but even that turned out to be a bit too inclusive for some of the commenters there. Specifically, they objected to the “L” portion of LBGT. And some of the Ts. As white_cloud put it:
I don’t think you need to appeal to the L in LGBT. It is well-known that lesbians are the most radical of all feminists. They will never feel welcome here and we should not go out of our way to make them feel welcome. Male to female trans pretty much the same thing. They’ve already renounced their male gender, they don’t care about male rights
Scott2508 concurred:
ok i am in favour of inclusivness and im not sure if i am going to word this right so stick with me , the one thing i am curious about is how we bring ourself in line with the lesbian [angle] of it all simply due to the hostility that can arise from that community towards men
Kloo replied:
point taken. we can embrace lesbian mras, without embracing lesbian supremacists.
Apparently these are the only types of lesbians in the world.
In any case, despite these design constraints, I have come up with what I think is a very compelling logo that I think will convey just what Kloo would like to convey. What do you think, guys?
Happy Pride Day, non-existent gay men!
Well, you're no lady. But I guess you'll do.
Today, as many of you no doubt know, is Gay Pride Day. Here in Chicago, that means the annual Pride Parade, a celebration of all things LGBTQetc — and a nice aerobic workout for parade participants. (Gyrating on a float for three hours dressed in a leather harness and thong will burn roughly 1000 calories. But beware of chafing!)
Rookh Kshatriya, proprieter of the Anglobitch blog (devoted to the notion that women in the Anglosphere are, well, bitches), has evidently decided to celebrate Pride Weekend by offering us all his theories on gay male sexuality. Which is to say, his theory that there is no such thing as gay male sexuality, and that all those gay men out marching today would much rather be spending their Sunday eating bagels and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with some comely (non-lesbian) lasses.
Yep, in Rookh’s World, gay men – or, as he puts it, “gay” men — are actually nothing more than exceptionally horny straight men who have been unfairly denied sex-on-demand with women of their choosing.
Let’s let him explain this:
Despite their rhetoric about lifestyles and the contemplation of flowers, gay men are clearly entranced by orgasm to an extent far surpassing that of heterosexual men.
Alas, in our Feminazified world, women sometimes refuse to have sex with men. Deprived a natural outlet for their sexy urges, horny dudes have to, well, improvise a bit. Why try to finagle your way into a vagina assiduously guarded by some dumb lady, when other dudes just as horny as you have holes of their own available for the asking?
As Rookh sees it, these uber-horny dudes really have no other choice.
[A]re most gay men just hyper-sexualized males – a self-selecting group whose priapic urges can only be satisfied by rejecting the relative sexual deprivation inescapably attendant on heterosexuality? The more one considers this possibility, the more plausible it seems. Even some badass with the looks of Apollo, the Game of Roissy and the confidence of a warlord would struggle to enter a nightclub and say: “I want sex NOW!” and expect to get it.
A terrible, terrible injustice. But there is a way out:
Yet homosexual men can enter any gay bath house in any Anglosphere city, say the very same words and expected to be sexually serviced by several men in a matter of minutes! In short, the sexual mismatch between the sexes makes the heterosexual lifestyle a poor option for any hyper-sexualized male – a non-option, in fact, if he wants to fully slake his sexual thirsts. By contrast, adopting homosexuality allows him to instantly indulge his every sexual whim in every manner conceivable.
Unless, of course, these whims involve sex with, you know, women. But lust is apparently stronger than mere sexual orientation. As Rookh sees it, homosexuality is the only rational choice for uber-horny men – even if they’d rather be boning women.
Since sex is so scarce and difficult to acquire in a heterosexual context, it simply makes no sense for an Anglo-American male with priapic urges to remain heterosexual – hence the self-selection of hyper-sexualized males towards homosexual lifestyles, not to mention the hyper-sexualized nature of homosexuality itself.
Is this all a prelude to a touching coming-out announcement by our man Rookh?
No such luck. It’s actually an excuse for, yes, more feminism-bashing. For it is the evil feminists who, in Rookh’s world, have been encouraging the “female sexual ostracism” of poor suffering straight men:
As we all know, women seek to control men by limiting sexual supply, be it representational (pornography) or actual (prostitution) – and that feminism is, essentially, an institution created for that purpose.
And so, in Rookh’s world,
homosexuality has advanced in lock-step with feminism. … [F]eminism – by assailing marital monogamy and allowing women to indulge their primordial attraction to dangerous thugs, moronic bullies and swaggering plutocrats – produced an unwanted ‘rump’ of educated, economically stable but sexually disenfranchised males. Given that gay males are disproportionately intelligent, solvent and educated, it is fairly obvious that members of this group have opted for homosexuality as a means of escaping the living death of involuntary celibacy, that the two phenomena are in fact closely related and that feminism is directly responsible for the advancement of homosexuality across the Anglosphere.
Feminism, by encouraging women to say “no” when they don’t actually want to have sex, may have created modern homosexuality, in Rookh’s view. But that doesn’t mean that feminists actually like gay dudes. No. Ick!
[T]he vast majority of Anglo females detest gay men as vehemently as they hate men in general. … the real link between pan-Anglosphere feminism and homosexuality [is that] the latter is a reaction to the former, which hates it with boundless counter-reactionary zeal.
Yeah, seems to me that the only one here who really “detest[s] gay men” is, well, Rookh, so much so that he’s decided to completely erase gay male sexuality – to put “gay” in scare quotes – in order to give himself another opportunity to run down feminists and women in general.
Now, human sexuality is a weird, messy, complicated, wonderful thing. It may well be that some bisexual men end up having sex with men more often than with women because they find it easier to find male sex partners for casual sex. But guys who are thoroughly gay – who would score a 6 on the famous Kinsey scale – don’t actually want to have sex with women. They really don’t. Drop a beautiful, eligible, horny (straight or mostly straight) woman in the midst of a bunch of Kinsey 6 guys, and this is what you get:
Court’s free!
Will Ferrell, Conscious Man
Do you remember the Conscious Men and “Dear Woman,” their little video manifesto/apology to women? If not, please go read my post on them and/or watch at least a minute or two of their creepy, cringeworthy video – you may not be able to take much more. Then watch this: Will Ferrell’s spot-on parody of their video.
Here’s the original “Dear Woman” video:
Weekend Open Thread Dada Party!
Schampa wulla wussa olobo!
Welcome to the Weekend Open Thread Dada Party. Talk about whatever you want. And don’t worry if some of the words you use aren’t actual words. The Dadaists didn’t care about that sort of thing. Blago bung, blago bung. Bosso Fataka!
Click here or here to hear Kurt Schwitters read some of his Dadaist poetry. For more on this poem, see here.
Enjoy! Or, as Hugo Ball might have put it, ba – umf.
Screech it from the mountaintop
Not me.
Here’s an interesting case study in how one’s ideology can color one’s perception of the world:
The blogger behind Gucci Little Piggy – he used to comment here, but alas I can’t remember his name — took notice of my last little post about Scott Adams. Here’s what he wrote about it:
Many are calling Adams a misogynist – none are screeching this pejorative louder than David Futrelle who may finally get that honorary castration that he’s been working so hard for.
Setting aside that somewhat surreal bit about castration, what’s interesting about this comment is that I didn’t actually “screech [that] pejorative” — loudly or otherwise – in my recent posts about Adams. No need to shout, or screech, something that at this point is pretty obvious. In my last post on Adams, I mocked his narcissism, not his misogyny. In my earlier post on the Pegs and Holes nonsense, I wrote this:
It goes without saying that Adams’ notions of human sexuality are profoundly insulting to both men and women . On the one hand, he’s suggesting that men are basically all potential rapists walking around with, er, turgid pegs; and, on the other, he seems to regard women as little more than passive (if stubbornly recalcitrant) receptacles for these male “pegs.”
I think it’s pretty clear to anyone who has been paying attention that Scott Adams is a misogynist. I also think it’s pretty clear that he’s a misandrist as well. (Two great prejudices that taste great together!) I’ve explained why I think this, and cited the specific things he’s said that have led me (and rather a lot of other people) to these conclusions. The only “screeching” going on here is in Gucci Little Piggy’s imagination.
Career women: A crime against nature?
She's trouble!
Quiz: Which of the following is an example of female infidelity? (Check all that apply.)
a) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; neither one sleeps with anyone else.
b) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; the man sleeps with someone else.
c) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; the woman sleeps with someone else.
d) A woman, who may or may not be in a monogamous relationship, works hard at a job she enjoys.
ANSWER: If you answered c, congratulations! You are correct. If you also answered d, you are probably PUA guru and freelance internet asshole “Roissy” or one of his douchey fans. In a recent post Roissy argues, quite sincerely, that women who take their careers seriously are committing a sort of psycho-social-sexual crime against men.
In the post, Roissy quotes a reader of his who’d suggested that “female career obsession [is] a form of infidelity to the family and marrage.” Roissy seconds this opinion and goes on to argue that:
Women who place their careers front and center are committing a kind of betrayal of their sex’s biological and psychological imperatives. It’s like a big middle finger to everything that distinguishes the feminine from the masculine, the yin from the yang.
Is it possible that these women are just, you know, really into their careers? That they’re good at what they do and enjoy doing it? That they want to make a difference in the world? That they might have a family to support? Or that, you know, they simply like making a lot of money?
Of course not. For Roissy, careers are little more than psychological crutches for women who are 1) trying to distract themselves from loneliness and/or sexual boredom:
It’s quite possible that the worst offenders — the 14 hour day lawyercunts and the graduate school hermits — embrace the male-oriented rat race and achievement spectacle because it offers a welcome distraction from either spinsterly loneliness or boring beta male partners who, while intellectually are rationalized as good matches, do not viscerally excite them.
Or, 2) imagining themselves as the heroines in some glamorous romance novel:
Maybe, too, these careerist chicks see their jobs as a way to enter the world of the alpha male, to have a taste of what it would be like to be part of his life. The office cubes and doormen and glassy skyscrapers have given legions of plain janes the daily stimulation to mentally masturbate fantasy romances with the alpha males who run their companies or the alpha salesmen who greet them at the front desk with a twinkle in their eyes.
Or, 3) trying to magically ward off the case of the uglies that apparently infects each and every woman when she hits the age of 40:
When a woman’s SMV [Sexual Market Value] inevitably craters in her 40s, her career might be all she has to lift her spirits, especially if she has no husband she loves, no kids, or even just one kid who spends most of his time playing CoD or robbing convenience stores.
Of course, in Roissy’s mind, these women aren’t quite women to begin with, even before they get hit with the 40th birthday ugly stick:
[T]here is something “off” about women who are excessively devoted to their careers and to obtaining an acronymic parade of pointless credentials. Careerist shrikes are some of the most unpleasant, unfeminine women to be around. They must have more androgen receptors than normal women to be so grating to the male sensibility. Sure, they can fuck like Viagra-laced male pornstars, but as soon as you relieve yourself in them you will feel a second powerful urge to escape their aggro nastiness.
Yeah, somehow I’m guessing that urge to flee is pretty strong in these women as well, as soon as they realize that they guy they’ve just had sex with is a pretentious narcissistic windbag who hates women.
Roissy continues, revealing far more about his own sexual insecurities than about any actual career women:
The women for whom career success is their comfort and their purpose are some sort of weird, monstrous amalgam of man and woman, halfway between both worlds, their sexual polarity askew. These types tend to attract either intense short term flings with alphas or plodding marriages with dweeby, effete kitchen bitches.
Roissy is vaguely aware that feminists – not to mention pretty much anyone who isn’t a complete douchebag misogynist – might have a few issues with his theories here.
The dumbfuck feminists will naturally ask, “Why doesn’t this same theory apply to men? Aren’t they escaping sad love lives by retreating to their careers?”
Don’t you know it’s different for guys? Unlike women, men are evolutionarily programmed to be resource providers for women. It is not a betrayal of a man’s innate purpose in life to ambitiously pursue achievement and accolades. In fact, just the opposite; it’s an affirmation of that ancient purpose.
Remember this, you ungrateful career ladies: WE HUNTED THE MAMMOTH TO FEED YOU!
