Author Archives: David Futrelle
James Taranto of the WSJ: Drunk women who are raped may be as guilty as their rapists
James Taranto, saying something terrible
Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto is probably the closest thing to an authentic Men’s Rights Activist there is operating in the mainstream media today, by which I mean he regularly puts forth “arguments” on gender issues that are breathtaking in their backwardness.
His latest, er, contribution to the gender debate? A column in which he suggested that drunk women who are raped on college campuses by drunk men are as guilty as their rapists. No, really. Here’s his argument, such as it is:
If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn’t determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver’s sex. But when two drunken college students “collide,” the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.
Huh. I’m pretty sure we determine the victim of a rape not on demographics but based on WHICH PERSON RAPED THE OTHER PERSON. Much in the way we would charge a drunken person who shot another drunken person with shooting that person, rather than simply throwing up our hands and saying, well, they were both drunk, so no harm no foul, right?
For a longer take on the issue, check out this piece over on Media Matters.
Media Matters has also assembled a nice, and mercifully rather brief, media montage of some of Taranto’s other pronouncements on gender issues. See if you can make it to the end without pulling out all of your hair.
MGTOWforums goes away — or does it?
A bit of drama in the land of misogyny: The guy behind MGTOWforums.com, the leading site devoted to so-called Men Going Their Own Way and one of the most reliable purveyors of highly mockable misogyny, has decided to, well, go his own way. (Sorry, I had to.)
Last night, MGTOWforums founder “Nacho Vidal” (not the real porn star) took the forums down, replacing them with a rather embittered farewell letter. But as of a few minutes ago, the forums were BACK UP again, albeit with no explanation and no new posts since last night. (Perhaps the site is just going to remain up as an archive?)
More on this as it develops, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at Nacho Vidal’s long goodbye:
Some of the comments I don’t let through
How comments are moderated at Man Boobz.
So I had to re-ban a couple of long-banned trolls today, who had returned with new names and slightly different IP addresses but who gave themselves away with their behavior. And that got me thinking about the people — well, the MRAs and PUAs and other such charming folks — who regularly denounce me as an evil censor of FREE SPEECH.
In fact, when I ban people, I do so for good reasons: one of the two trolls I banned today was a longtime MRAish commenter here who eventually creeped everyone out by boasting about having sex with underage prostitutes; the other was a man of many sockpuppets known for angry, abusive meltdowns full of slurs.
Anyway, so I thought I’d give you all a glimpse into my “trash” folder. Here’s a sampling of comments from would-be first time commenters at Man Boobz that I felt would not add anything to the discourse here. But in the interests of FREE SPEECH I thought I’d give these “ideas” an airing today.
TRIGGER WARNING for violent and offensive language. (Sorry about the quality of the last two; you can click on them to see larger versions.)
Not all of the comments I trash are quite this awful. Some are only mildly violent or abusive. I tend to be a bit picky with people’s first comments, assuming that if someone posts a shitty first comment it’s not likely to get any better after that. There are a few banned commenters who stop by and try to post anyway, including one fellow who leaves endless comments trying to prove, as far as I can tell, that teenage girls are objectively hotter than women in their twenties and older.
And, of course, there are comments targeting individual women, whether these are giant cut-and-pasted rants about Anita Sarkeesian, vaguely threatening remarks aimed at other well-known internet feminists, or bizarre sexual comments about female MRAs from fans of theirs.
Once in a while I will get a comment from a feminist that resorts to violent language; I don’t let those comments through either.
And then there are the pictures people try to post in the comments. Below, one of the ones I actually let through, depicting me in a dress with some extremely tall dude. A quick Google image search reveals that it was originally posted online by regular A Voice for Men contributor Janet Bloomfield, in a blog post of hers from last year on Disney princesses. Stay classy, Men’s “Human Rights” Movement!
I don’t actually own a dress like this.
Anyway, the pictures I don’t let through are worse.
Men’s Rights White Knights rush in to protect Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan from MRA criticism
Karen Straughan, in an uncharacteristic moment of silence
So FeMRA videoblogger Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan flapped her gums for nearly two hours the other night and sounds came out. This time she wasn’t sitting at her kitchen table blabbing to a webcam about female “hypoagency” and regurgitating misremembered factoids about bonobos but was speaking to an audience of mostly white dudes at Ryerson University in Toronto Canada.
I haven’t watched her performance — which is of course online as well — because life is short, and frankly I’d rather endure this for ten hours than subject myself to the tedious GWW for nearly two.
Dating by the Numbers: Why “hacking” OkCupid is a waste of everyone’s time
This data point is an outlier.
Is there no problem out there that can’t be solved by SCIENCE? Apparently not. Indeed, it has recently come to my attention that one heroic nerdy dude actually used MATH to get a girlfriend. No really, an actual girlfriend. As in, a living human female that he’s seen naked. (We can only presume.)
Wired magazine found the story so astonishing that they devoted an entire 3000 word feature to it.
Open Thread for Personal Stuff: February 2014 Edition
An open thread for personal stuff, continuing from here.
As usual for these threads: no trolls, no arguments.
Sperm Banks: Prelude to male enslavement?
Not a real sperm bank
So manosphere dudes have a theory of sorts about young women that they frequently boil down to the handy catchphrase “alpha fucks, beta bucks.” The idea is that women — oh, you evil women! — have an insatiable desire to mate with and capture the sperm of hot but unreliable alpha males, and an equally innate tendency to try to con some hard-working beta schlub into paying the bills, with his beta bucks, for the resulting alpha spawn.
Attention-seeking manosphere douchebag offers how-to guide for abusive boyfriends
Not the model for a happy and successful relationship
Apparently hoping to gin up another flood of hate-traffic to his blog, the attention-seeking human stain whose name rhymes with Batt Gorney has posted what is essentially a how-to guide for would-be abusive boyfriends under the charming title “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem.”
“Gorney” has conveniently arranged his suggestions into a numbered list, so let’s proceed through them one by one. (If you’re triggered by explicit discussions of psychological and physical abuse, please stop reading now.)
So-called Men Going Their Own Way need to really GO. This video shows them how.
So I get periodic visits here from hostile and uninformed visitors demanding to know just what I have against those Men’s Rights activist-adjacent fellows who have declared themselves to be Men Going Their Own Way. Surely, they sniff, I can’t be really opposed to men living the lives they choose to live, independent of women? Don’t feminists encourage women to be similarly independent? You go, girls, and all that?
As a fellow calling himself Praetorian wrote:
Why are women so bitter towards men going their own way, without them
“John,” meanwhile, thought he detected some hypocrisy:
So, if a woman says she does not need a man in her life, she is seen as a strong independent woman. If a man says he does not need a woman in his life, he is seen as someone who has a deep hostility towards and/or profound distrust of women.
How convenient and how logical…………….
Happpily, the commenters here always put these misguided souls straight: we don’t object , in principle, to men “going their own way,” if that’s what they want to do.
But in practice, the men who classify themselves as Men Going Their Own Way don’t go anywhere; they stick around and stink the place up with their raging misogyny.
If you go to MGTOWforums or any other popular MGTOW hangout, you’ll discover that the regulars there don’t spend much time talking about the fabulous lives they’re leading on their own — the things they’re learning, the hobbies they’re pursuing, the experiences they’re having.
Nope. They spend virtually all their time and energy taking about women, and how awful they are. The typical MGTOWer spends more time thinking about women on any given day than the president of Planned Parenthood does. And what they think about women is awful. Just go through my MGTOW posts here for example after example.
You want to see some men who are really going their own way? Watch the video at the top of this post. These are guys enjoying themselves and not giving a shit what anyone thinks. They are AWESOME.
That’s what Men Going Their Own Way should look like. And I’m not even joking.
NOTE: I think I’ve posted this video before. I don’t care. Some people might not have seen it. EVERYONE MUST SEE IT.
Evo Psych Sunday: “Women have an amorality similar to lower evolved animals that steal.”
Prehistoric women gathering foodstuffs.
So over on MGTOWforums — the festering hive of misogyny that is the internet’s largest forum for so-called Men Going Their Own Way — one of the regulars was so impressed with the Evo-Psychy insights of a YouTube commenter by the name of Moe that he decided to share them with the gang there. And I have decided to share them with you.
Brace yourself, though, because Moe is bringing some hardcore SCIENCE to the topics of feminism being awful and why women are such terrible selfish child-murdering monsters.
Moe starts off with some MGTOW basics:
