Author Archives: David Futrelle
@Fidelbogen is killing it on Twitter with his antifeminist bon mots #NotReally #SeriouslyTheyreAwful
So our old friend Fidelbogen the Counter-Feminist Agent of Male Renaissance has gotten on the Twitter. And even though he hasn’t yet figured out how to replace his generic egg avatar, and has managed to amass only 44 followers (one of them me), he’s been tweeting up a storm in the last couple of days.
Indeed, he’s so proud of his recent tweets that he screenshotted a bunch of them and put them on his blog under the title Casting Your Breadcrumbs Upon the Water. (Huh. I thought the expression was “Cast your bread upon the waters.” Maybe Fidelbogen is hoping to recruit some ducks?)
Anyway, I thought I’d give his timely tweety wisdom a somewhat wider audience. I hope he won’t mind.
Can you all suggest some more Fidelbogenisms for him to post?
From the mouths of trolls: Rape is unneccessary if you’ve got “game.”
So my Mighty White of You post — about the demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit — drew the attention of Obsidian, a longtime Manosphere blogger who has been described by some of his comrades as “the Blackest Man of the Manosphere” (not that this is much of an accomplishment in that lily-white world). He stuck around for some not-terribly productive discussions of race and feminism, pickup artistry, and I can’t remember the rest because I just sort of stopped caring after a while.
But there was one thing he said — a passing remark in a long comment — that stood out to some of the commenters here, and which I thought was revealing enough to warrant highlighting in a post:
I don’t support rape for a very simple reason – because it’s not necessary. A Man with Game doesn’t need to rape anyone.
That … is not a good reason to “not support” rape.
Really, that’s probably the worst reason to “not support” rape besides “I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to rape anyone today” or “I might muss up my new suit raping someone.”
Do you really need to search for reasons to “not support” rape beyond, you know, the idea that violating other people for your own selfish pleasure is wrong?
PUAs: Even the ones who aren’t directly advocating sexual assault have some pretty fucked up ideas about rape.
Google is Censoring Men’s Rights Searches and These Totally Not Fake Screenshots Prove It [CORRECTED]
The Man Boobz Internet Research Lab
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the AVFM screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
I feel a little guilty. Men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men had to “withdraw” one of its posts earlier this week after I demonstrated conclusively here that the site had used a fake screenshot to try to back up the article’s strange claim that Google searches for “violence against men” in fact returned mostly results related to violence against women. (It doesn’t. Try it.)
Thing is, A Voice for Men had been hoping to use that post to boost its claims that Mens’s Rightsers, and men in general, are being “censored” and otherwise stymied by feminist-dominated Internet power players like Google and Facebook.
Science Proves that Men Going Their Own Way Don’t Go Anywhere, Really
I highlighted that one big word.
If you ever wonder what a bunch of dudes who are Going Their Own Way and totally don’t give a good gosh darn about women, nosireebob, like to talk about the most on their special Men Only No Girls Allowed We’re Totally Going Our Own Way forum, well now you don’t have to rely on the comments I so cavalierly cherry pick from their forum.
Nope, I just realized we can use SCIENCE, in the form of the tag clouds that the site puts above the various subforums, to SCIENTIFICALLY see what they talk about. If you cast your glance upwards, for example, you’ll see the tag cloud for the most active forum on the site.
Seems like these Men Going Their Own Way haven’t gone very far, huh?
I’m guessing the National Organization for Women spends less time talking about women than they do.
EDITED TO ADD: If you would prefer to hear this post read aloud by an actual Man Going His Own Way, one of them has helpfully prepared this video. It’s an uncanny impersonation, by the way. They showed me, I guess!
A Sexual Assault How-To by a sleazeball Redditor? Thanks, Kickstarter! [UPDATED: Kickstarter: "We were wrong."]
So you may have heard about that Kickstarter that raised $16,000 for a loathsome Reddit PUA’s “handbook on how to bully women who don’t like you into sex, while preserving your claims to believe you had consent should you need to tell the police,” as Amanda Marcotte aptly described it in her post on it yesterday. Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg also has some thoughts on it.
I don’t really have anything to add.
There’s a petition up demanding that Kickstarter simply refuse to fund what is essentially a how-to guide to sexual assault. Last I checked, it had gotten nearly 60,000 signatures.
EDITED TO ADD: Casey Malone, who wrote the blog post that brought this awful project to the attention of people outside of the sleazier corners of Reddit, wrote Kickstarter about it and got a response suggesting that Kickstarter, while planning to go ahead and fund the project, will be reexamining its policies as a result of the controversy. Malone posted some further thoughts.
EDITED AGAIN: Kickstarter has offered an apology. You can find it here. But I’m just going to repost the whole thing:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
- The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.
- Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.
These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.
Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.
Where does this leave us?
First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.
Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.
Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.
Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.
We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.
That is an apology. Some people could learn a thing or two from this.
Mighty White of You
So here’s an interesting chart. Guess what it represents?
A) The membership of the David Duke Fan Club
B) The racial breakdown of the most successful Liberace impersonators
C) The demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit
Well, ok, that was too easy. It is of course all of the above. I’m guessing. It’s definitely C, at least, as this chart was prepared to show the results of the 2013 Men’s Rights subreddit demographic survey.
Now, you might say, well, isn’t Reddit itself a pretty white place? And you would be right. But the Men’s Rights subreddit seems to be a bit whiter — and a lot less black — than Reddit as a whole, if Quantcast’s estimates of Reddit’s overall ethnic breakdown are accurate.
In other completely non-surprising news, 89% of Men’s Rights Redditors are men. And a lot of them are libertarians. MRAs complain endlessly that we pigeonhole them as a bunch of entitled white dudes. They’re really not doing much to challenge that assumption.
The most important issue to these fellas (and the small minority that aren’t fellas)? Survey says: False rape accusations.
Other critical issues to the Men’s Rightsers include “custody rights” (which is a bit odd because 92% of those surveyed have no kids), “legal discrimination” (whatever that means), “education discrimination” (this is a thing?), and “male disposability.”
“Male birth control” and “paper abortion,” while relatively less important to the Men’s Rightsers, each got hundreds of votes.
I’m surprised “friendzoning” isn’t at the top of the list, but unfortunately it wasn’t one of the choices. I blame misandry.
[CORRECTED] Dean Esmay’s Pile of Lies: How A Voice for Men Destroyed its Last Remaining Shred of Credibility
Dean Esmay: You can close your eyes, but it won’t go away.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.
The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.
Bride of the Monster: The Red Pill Subreddit creates Red Pill Women
He’s kino escalating, but she’s not giving him any Indicators of Interest.
So you all remember The Red Pill subreddit, that wretched hive of scum and misogyny I wrote about the other day, and the other other day, and the other other other day before that. Well, now something even more horrible has sprouted up on Reddit, like genital warts after a night “raw dogging it” with a PUA douchebag.
It’s a new subreddit from the Red Pill masterminds called Red Pill Women.
Paul Elam blames me for his alleged ignorance of the blatant fraud on his own site [CORRECTED]
Thanks Obama! (And David Futrelle.) (For more, click image)
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least –that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the "gosh, Paul" paragraph and made a few other changes.]
Scorned: How Pissed is GirlWritesWhat at A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam?
GirlWritesWhat to TheWoollyBumblebee: This misogynistic hate blog ain’t big enough for the both of us.
Sometimes the subtext is much more interesting than the text. On the surface, blabby FeMRA videoblogger Girl Writes What’s recent 3,635 word blog post on the l’affaire TheWoolyBumblebee is a nasty, brutish, but not-at-all-short attack on her former FeMRA comrade at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men, recently kicked out of the clubhouse for telling off libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way. (See here and here for more details on it all.)
But if you read a little more carefully you can see signs that Girl Writes What’s anger and frustration may really be directed at AVFM’s founder and grand pooh-bah Paul Elam.
