Author Archives: David Futrelle
Off-topic: I can’t stop listening to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” at 33 RPM
Ok, so I kind of love Dolly Parton, and “Jolene” is probably my favorite song of hers, though I’ve never quite believed the story told in the lyrics, because how could any woman, even the mighty Jolene, steal a man from DOLLY FUCKING PARTON?
Anyway, it turns out if you play the 45 rpm single version of the song at 33 rpm it becomes … another song entirely. But, amazingly, it works. It’s actually sort of great. The video above isn’t new, but it’s new to me, and I can’t stop listening to it, so I thought I’d inflict it all on you.
Here’s Dolly singing the song at the correct speed.
Comment of the day: “Women have no value beyond their sexual and reproductive role and if it was not for sex they would be killed at birth.”
Sinkhole (not to be confused with stink hole)
As I’ve said before, sometimes I search for hours to find the instances of misogyny interesting enough to share with you, the readers of my blog. Other times, the misogyny wanders in my door, delivers a rambling tirade, and passes out on the couch.
Today, an example of the latter, left in the comments to an old post of mine about the bad science behind the concept of the “alpha wolf” by a fellow with the unassuming name of Joeblow.
Joeblow starts off by agreeing that “the alpha – beta shit does not matter.” But in his mind this is because women are such sluts they’ll have sex with pretty much anyone.
Hugo-nominated Vox Day: Even worse than you think
Strike up the band! Vox Day has been nominated for a Hugo!
So our old friend Vox Day – the proudly bigoted science fiction/fantasy writer and self-professed expert on all things “Alpha” – is in the news again. This time, it’s not for declaring most date rape imaginary or writing a racist diatribe against a fellow author. Nope! It’s because another of his literary efforts, a novelette entitled Opera Vita Aeterna, just got nominated for a Hugo award.
In other news, apparently it’s not that hard to get nominated for a Hugo if you have a coterie of hard-core fans who are perhaps still pissed that you got kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and you suggest on your blog beforehand that it would be cool if they voted to nominate you.
Anyway, there’s already plenty of discussion of the news amongst the science-fiction set, most of them understandably displeased that a racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole got a nomination. Here’s a bit more about the racist attack on black fantasy writer NK Jemisin (and misuse of the SFWA Twitter account) that got him tossed from the organization. If you’ve never seen what he wrote about Jemisin, I’ll just quote some of the more memorable passages again here, because, wow. I’ve bolded the best — that is, worst — bits:
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?
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??”
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.
“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.
EDITED TO ADD: The cash prize ended up being … $170!
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.
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.
