Author Archives: David Futrelle
“Would You Kill a Pony for Me?” and other real dating questions asked by an imaginary Swedish Girl
This pic has nothing to do with the post today, but it does feature a giant chicken, from a film called “The Hoboken Chicken Emergency.”
Today, something a bit lighter than usual. Someone recently posted the a link in the comments here to a hilarious blog called Swedish Girl Seeking, which displays the results of a simple but wicked dating site experiment being carried out by a couple of funny Swedes.
The two – a female comic book artist and a male comedian – set up a phony dating profile featuring a “blonde, happy-go-lucky, kind of over-sexual cliché of a Swedish woman.” (The female half of the couple posed in a cheap blond wig for the pics.)
When a legion of hopeful, horny men besieged the imaginary girl’s inbox with come-ons ranging from awkward to crude, the Swedes responded with surreal silliness. And then posted the most ridiculous conversations online.
While there are a few genuinely creepy messages amongst the dozens posted on the site – it looks like the Swedish duo kept the worst messages to themselves – the most amazing ones reflect a certain willful obliviousness on the part of the hopeful male admirers. Nothing she says is too bizarre to faze them.
Expat PUA blogger: “24 is super crazy, crazy old. for a girl. 17. 19. past that, if we’re going to get all about babies, is pretty sketchy.”
I couldn’t come up with a good graphic for this post, so here’s a giant chicken kidnapping a young boy.
Jakeface — not his real name — is a “Game” blogger, pushing 40, and living in Vietnam. Or visiting there? I haven’t read enough of his blog to be able to figure that out. Given that the name of his blog is “cedonulli,” which seems to be a pretentious reference to the Latin phrase “cedo nulli” ( “I yield to none”), I probably won’t be reading all that much more.
But I do know he likes Vietnam, because he’s the sort of guy who enjoys joking about having sex with “girls … so barely legal … it’s not even funny,” and in Vietnam, he says, he’s not the only one who thinks that 24-year old women are “old as fuck.”
Did I mention he’s pushing 40 himself?
Anyway, not long ago, Jakeface offered readers of his blog his deep thoughts on the subject of age, and why women over the age of 19 are already starting to look elderly to him. [Link is mildly NSFW]
Chewing on gristle at Chateau Heartiste
Heartiste’s nonsense is a bit hard to swallow.
I‘m beginning to wonder if Chateau Heartiste isn’t so much a “Game” blog as it is an elaborate unannounced contest to see who can say the worst possible things about women in the most pretentiously incoherent prose. My evidence? Heartiste’s latest choice for “comment of the week” from an aspiring ladykiller (hopefully not literally) who calls himself burke.
Burke’s grand insight into the female of the species?
if you could grind a woman’s entire being to dust with your dick, like a mortar and pestle, that’s the oblivion she is searching for
Well, that’s pretty good, as far as pretentious douchebagginess goes, but it’s almost coherent. I mean, dicks are roughly the same basic shape as pestles, and it’s not hard to visualize one grinding away in a little stone bowl. Hell, there’s probably some porn video out there featuring just that.
But then Heartiste comes along and offers his own comment on the comment, and shows burke just how it’s done. And by “it” I mean “awful, pretentious, incoherent misogyny.”
Insight elevated to sheer poetry by the breezy lack of punctuation. Women secretly desire their oblivion at the insistence of an imperious man. As the vessel sex, they must be filled with the life force of another — a powerful man, or a child — to fully experience sublimation of their souls. Thus it is that surrender is encoded in the gristle of woman.
The gristle? It’s “encoded in the gristle?”
Gristle is cartilage. The tough stuff in meat that’s hard to chew. The stuff that sharks have instead of bone. Nothing is “encoded” in it. Animals don’t store all of their genetic material in their gristle.
The somewhat archaic phrase “in the gristle” means “not yet hardened into bone or strengthened into sinew” or, more broadly, “young, weak, and unformed.” It’s not a fancy synonym for “in the genes.”
Here’s the phrase in a sentence — that is, in a sentence written by someone who actually knew how to use language.
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
Well, come to think of it, that’s a sentence fragment, not a sentence. But at least Edmund Burke understood why that particular metaphoric phrase made sense in that context.
Heartiste, not even competently pretentious.
Vox Day: Honor mothers. Yes, they’re women, but without them the “Western sub-species” of Man would go extinct.
Mothers: Women, yes, but without them we’d have no babies.
Happy Mothers’ Day! In honor of this special day let me share the sweet sentiments of the mother-loving Vox Day, who took time out of his busy schedule of woman-hating to write a post urging his readers to “Honor the Mothers” of the world. Or at least the non-feminist mothers of the “Western sub-species” of the human race.
Vox starts out his paean to motherhood by noting that women are mostly shitty and need to be constantly reminded of their shittiness by right-thinking fellows like him:
We are, quite rightly, very often hard on women here at Alpha Game. We need to be, because they spend most of their lives having smoke blown up their pretty little asses by people of both sexes and all ages who want to curry favor with them.
Oh, but even though women are terrible, don’t give in to the temptation of misogyny!
But never be tempted into misogyny by the bad behavior of one, one hundred, one thousand, or even one million women. They are the fate of the human race. They are the fate of the Western sub-species. They matter.
Take the day to honor the mothers of our sub-species. Well, some of them.
So, honor those who reject the nihilistic hedonism of feminism despite being literally inundated with its dogma from their earliest years and fulfill their primary destiny, that of motherhood. Whether she fulfills it gracefully and well or grudgingly and incompetently, she has done her duty. Respect that she has played her part in the miracle of life, honor her for doing her part in turning back the dark void of universal entropy.
It’s not nothing. It’s not a minor thing. Without women, there is no Man.
So even if you hate women, you need to remember that they serve a useful role as incubators of future men!
Happy Mother’s Day.
And a happy mother’s day to you too, you racist, misogynistic piece of poop.
Music to Annoy MRAs With, Part 1: Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk, musical badass
Sometimes when I’m listening to music – particularly music written and/or performed by women – it occurs to me that the music I’m listening to would probably annoy or even anger Men’s Rights Activists. And that makes me want to share this music with the world. So I’m starting a new series here: Music to Annoy MRAs With.
First up: Meredith Monk, an avant garde composer/performer/filmmaker/etc probably best known for her “extended vocal techniques” which one music critic has described as a melange of “extraordinary ululations and incantations, vertiginous leaps, drops, cries and other wordless acrobatics.” That seems about right.
If you’re a fan of The Big Lebowski, you’ve heard at least one song of hers: when the lovably pretentious feminist artist Maude Lebowski makes her memorable entrance, swinging naked through the air on a harness in a darkened studio, splattering paint onto a giant canvas, it’s the voice of Meredith Monk that provides the musical accompaniment. (Monk found the scene hilarious.)
Anyway, here are some Meredith Monk videos for you all. You may like them, you may not – Monk is sort of an acquired taste — but one thing is virtually guaranteed: they will confuse and annoy the hell out of any MRAs who happen to watch. A critically lauded female composer/musician making music they don’t understand? Noooooooo!
W.F. Price of The Spearhead accuses me of supporting violence against women … by opposing violence against women
W.F. Price (not pictured) believes the best way to prevent domestic violence is to put men in charge of households, and to keep police out
W. F. Price of The Spearhead isn’t very happy about my recent suggestion that the Men’s Rights movement encourages abusive ways of thinking towards women. It’s a strange claim for him to make, coming as it is from a guy who presides over one of the most notorious outposts of vicious, virulent misogyny in the Men’s Rights universe. Even stranger is his claim that by opposing violence against women and children I am therefore … supporting policies that lead to more violence against women and children.
It’s going to take a little while to work our way through his convoluted argument. So let’s start at the beginning. Here’s the quote of mine he objects to, from my post the other day about Lundy Bancroft:
“I love women enough to treat them like dirt,” former Beta Male proclaims
Bizarro men know how to treat a lady right.
In case anyone doubts that manosphere blogs encourage men who are already assholish to become even more assholish, here’s the latest reminder: a “Comment of the Week” from Heartiste’s terrible blog explaining why men should treat the women they love (or at least love having sex with) as badly as they possibly can.
In the comment, a former “beta male” calling himself Just Saying explains how he changed his ways after discovering the allegedly indisputable fact that women just love being treated like shit by the men in their lives — up to and including getting punched in the face:
No, Amy Schumer did not give a speech celebrating how she raped a guy
Amy Schumer, not celebrating rape.
Thought Catalog – which seems to be rapidly becoming the go-to site for terrible antifeminist posts – is making a bit of a stir on Reddit with a post bearing the deliberately provocative title “Wait A Second, Did Amy Schumer Rape a Guy?” Spoiler Alert: The anonymous author concludes that yes, she did. The anonymous author is full of shit.
In the Thought Catalog piece, Anonymous takes a look at a speech that Schumer – a comedian with some subversive feminist leanings — recently gave at the Gloria Awards and Gala, hosted by the Ms. Foundation for Women. The centerpiece of Schumer’s speech, a bittersweet celebration of confidence regained, was a long and cringeworthy story about a regrettable sexual encounter she had in her Freshman year of college, when her self-esteem was at an all-time low.
Domestic violence expert Lundy Bancroft: Men’s Rights philosophies make angry and controlling men even worse.
Or any other time, either, I’m guessing,
Lundy Bancroft is an expert on abusive relationships and the author of Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds Of Angry and Controlling Men, a book I’ve found very helpful not only in understanding abusers but also in understanding the behavior and “activism” of Men’s Rights Activists.
In a recent post on his blog, he warns about the ways in which “Men’s Rights” ideologies can justify, and made worse, abusive behavior from men who are already abusive, or who have abusive tendencies.
In the post, entitled “The Abuser Crusade,” he writes
When a man has some unhealthy relationship patterns to begin with, the last thing he needs is to discover philosophies that actually back up the destructive aspects of how he thinks. Take a guy who is somewhat selfish and disrespectful to begin with, then add in a big dose of really negative influences, and you have a recipe for disaster. And the sad reality is that there are websites, books, and even organizations out there that encourage men to be at their worst rather than at their best when it comes to relating to women.
It’s not surprising that a philosophy rooted in male entitlement would appeal to men who already feel pretty entitled – and often quite bitter that the women in their lives, not to mention the world at large, doesn’t seem to regard them as quite so deserving of adulation as they think they are.
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to think it was unfair to label the Men’s Rights Movement “the abusers’ lobby,” as many domestic violence experts have done, because I felt that the movement did raise some issues that MRAs at least seem to sincerely believe reflect discrimination against men. But the more experience I’ve had with MRAs, the more I’ve begun to see the Men’s Rights Movement not only as an “abusers’ lobby” but as an abusers’ support group, and an abusive force in its own right, promoting forms of “activism” that are little more than semi-organized stalking and harassment of individual women.
It’s not that every MRA is literally a domestic abuser, though I wouldn’t be shocked to find domestic abusers seriously overrepresented in the Men’s Rights ranks; it’s that the Men’s Rights movement promotes abusive ways of thinking and behaving.
In case anyone had any doubt about which groups Bancroft is talking about, he gets specific:
Some of these groups come under the heading of what is known as “Men’s Rights” or “Father’s Rights” groups. Their writings spread the message that women are trying to control or humiliate men, or are mostly focused on taking men’s money. They also tend to promote the idea that women who want to keep primary custody of their children after divorce are evil. The irony is that we live in a country that has refused to pass an amendment to the constitution to guarantee equal rights for women; yet some men are still out there claiming that women have too many rights and that men don’t have enough.
Bancroft also warns about groups preaching a return to patriarchal values:
Other groups don’t use the language of “rights”, but promote abusive thinking by talking about the “natural” roles of men and women. These groups teach, for example, that men are biologically programmed to be the ones making the key decisions, and that women are just naturally the followers of men’s leadership. These philosophies sometimes teach that men and women are just too different to have really close relationships.
In the end, Bancroft urges women whose partners are picking up new philosophies that seem to be making their behavior worse rather than better to start researching the subject themselves, and reaching out to other women in the same situation, in order to better understand what their partners are getting into — and defend themselves against it.
I’m curious how many readers here have had personal experience with men who’ve embraced Men’s or Fathers’ Rights philosophies (or any of the varieties of backwards Manosphere philosophies), or who know of women whose partners have.
Men’s RIghts Redditor: When stepfathers abuse children “it’s not about men being violent. It’s an adaption to maximise genetic transfer to the next generation.”
Note: Not a human male
Men’s Rights activists — or a good portion of them, anyway — seem to suffer from what we might call “Male Responsibility Bypass Syndrome.” Whatever terrible things a man (or a group of men) has been shown to have done, MRAs have a remarkable ability to find a woman to blame for it.
Nowhere is this clearer than when it comes to excusing violence. If a man is violent, MRAs tend to argue, it’s because he was provoked by a woman unaware that “equal rights mean equal lefts.” Or it’s the fault of his mother for not raising him right. Or the fault of his female ancestors for “choosing” violent men to “mate” with.
And if a stepfather abuses a child, it’s the fault of the mother for inviting him into the home. Take this generously upvoted comment from DavidByron2 in the Men’s Rights subreddit, who attempts to give a “scientific” — that is, an Evo Psych — excuse for the abuse:
