Author Archives: David Futrelle
Why do Men’s Rights Activists hate the heroes of the Aurora theater shooting?
Our old nemesis The Pigman — the MRA blogger and one half of the cartooning team responsible for atrocities like this — has some thoughts on the Aurora shootings, specifically on the men who lost their lives to protect their girlfriends from gunfire. Their heroism makes him angry, much like the fellows on The Spearhead we looked at the other day. Here’s his complaint:
How’s that for inequity? How’s that for disposability? These guys appear to have sacrificed themselves for these people primarily because of their sex.
Well, no, I think they sacrificed themselves for their girlfriends because they loved their girlfriends.
After all, where are the guys who jumped in front of their best mate, or their dad or brother? And above all, where are the women who died saving their boyfriends?
There were many heroes in the Aurora shooting. Jonathan Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves died protecting their girlfriends. Stephanie Davies risked her life to keep a friend shot in the neck from bleeding to death. Other acts of heroism had less storybook endings: Marcus Weaver tried to shield a female friend. He was wounded but lived; she died. Jennifer Seeger tried to drag a wounded victim to safety, but fled when the shooter returned.
Men’s Rights Redditor: “The cougar phenomenon is perverse. Yet we criminalize sex with fertile women who haven’t passed some arbitrary age limit.”
Fresh from the Men’s Rights subreddit, some thoughts from some dude called atiwywr on cougars, age of consent laws, and Justin Beiber.
So “cougars” are perverse, but pedophilia – sorry, ephebophilia — is natural and good?
The age of consent in most American states is 16.
Complaining that men can’t legally have sex with girls – sorry, “fertile women” – aged 15 and younger: Men’s Rights activism at its finest!
Manosphere blogger blames Obama, Jesse Jackson, and feminists for the Aurora theater shootings. Yes, really.
Scientific geniuses: Always white dudes
We’ve already seen some unusual perspectives on the Aurora theater tragedy courtesy of The Spearhead and the Men’s Rights subreddit. Over on whiskeysplace, the manosphere blogger (and sometime Spearhead contributor) who calls himself Whiskey throws some racism into the mix.
In Whiskey’s view, the whole thing just shows … just how badly treated white men are in America today. And, he suggests, unless we change our evil white-man-hating ways we should expect even worse massacres to come. His basic thesis:
[T]hat an (admittedly crazy) 24 year old White guy with an extremely high IQ would paint his hair red, carefully position his beat up old pickup truck against one emergency exit door, enter through the pre-arranged opened other door, and kill (again as of this writing) 12 people while wounding 58, many seriously, shows how out of hand Obama’s America has become. …
Who is at fault? In no particular order, Obama, the entire Affirmative Action establishment, Jessie Jackson, feminists, the media, and the American people for taking the easy way out and not removing the former from public life through a hard, brutal political struggle that costs time and effort and more.
Spearheader: Women are “feral creatures who want to be thugf#$cked and used.”
Women: Feral, civilization-destroying monsters
Over on The Spearhead, the discussion of, er, “altruism” (and why the men who sacrificed their lives to save their girlfriends in the Aurora theater shootings were “suckers”) continues. All of the comments I mentioned in my previous post now have dozens of upvotes; one has more than a hundred. (All except for the comment praising the dead men as “heroic” which remains underwater, votewise.)
The discussion has inspired one commenter called ck to offer this rather harsh assessment of modern women:
Words cannot convey my sense of dispair, isolation, and acceptance that women are at best amoral beings and at worst imoral. I no longer look at a women and hope they may be the one who vaules a decent, kind, moral man. Instead I see a feral creature who wants to be thugf#$cked and used. They are addicted to a drug called emotion. They want the highs of being thugf#cked and the coming lows of being used and dumped. Then rinse and repeat.
[citation needed]
The stable decent man is too “boring” or “nice”. The lush sociatal enviroment we have created for them is taken for granted. It exists as does the air they breath, simply out of nothing in thier minds. They simply cannot grasp the truth of it takes good men to build, invent and maintain their “posh” world. … My eyes are sadly opened to what women are now.
ck also makes comments that suggest to me that he is suffering from depression, possibly quite severe. He gets upvotes for his misogyny, but no one there offers any comfort or help, except for one commenter who urges him, unhelpfully, to “[t]ry to get as far from feminist women as possible,” possibly by moving to another country.
Evidently the last thing MRAs ever want to do is to provide actual tangible help to fellow men who are suffering.
Meanwhile, Darryl X offers some thoughts on you, my dear readers and commenters:
I hope the posts on Futrelle’s site and others illustrates for you the cold-blooded and parasitic nature of those kinds of people and that they do not represent civilization and that as more and more honest hard-working and innocent men are killed off by them, they will be living in a cave because they have neither the intelligence nor the initiative to do anything but defraud others and they are running out of victims. Eventually they will start cannibalizing themselves. Actually they already have started.
Evidently, according to Spearhead logic, “civilization” is much more effectively maintained by demonizing half of it.
Hawaiian Libertarian: “Misogyny is the key to male liberation from blue pill delusions.”
This pedestal is a trick illusion.
It’s amazing how daintily some manosphere dudes dance around the word “misogyny.”After spewing forth venomous woman-hating filth in post after post, they turn around and equally vociferously deny that they are in any way misogynistic – after all, they can think of three or four women in their life they don’t actively hate.
It’s strange. Men whose entire political and social philosophy is based on the hatred of women aren’t willing to say this out loud.
Over on Hawaiian Libertarian, a blog with some influence within the marginal universe of the manosphere, Keoni Galt is a bit more honest: he is proudly and openly misogynist. Not only that, but he’s convinced that others in the manosphere need to fully accept misogyny into their shrunken little hearts. And he’s written a little manifesto about it:
MRAs: The men who lost their lives protecting their girlfriends in the Aurora theater shooting were “suckers.”
Over on The Spearhead, the regulars are discussing the three young men who sacrificed their own lives to save their girlfriends in the chaos of the Aurora theater shootings.
Needless to say, many of them aren’t too keen on any act of heroism that might benefit a woman.
In the wake of the tragedy in Aurora, Men’s Rights Redditors take a brave stance against “vagina-pedestaling” and “creep shaming.”
Picture from the AdultFriendFinder profile of James Holmes.
In the wake of the shootings in Aurora Colorado, pickup guru Roosh “No Means Yes” Valizedah quipped on Twitter: “I bet $100 the shooter was getting no play.” The implication being: had the shooter been trained in the fine art of “game,” and thus presumably scoring with women, the massacre would never have happened.
There are a few problems, to say the least, with Roosh’s crass comment, one of the most obvious being that training the sort of person who becomes a mass murderer in a set of manipulative techniques of sexual aggression in which a woman’s “no” is treated as “last-minute resistance” seems a little less than wise. Best case scenario? He becomes a serial rapist rather than a mass killer.
The other obvious problem is that it suggests the murders are, in a way, the fault of women for not paying the shooter more attention. The logic here is abuser logic: if you gals don’t put out for awkward nerds, there will be hell to pay, and the blood will be on your hands.
Yesterday, someone calling himself Throwaway72212 brought Roosh’s “meme” to the attention of the Men’s Rights subreddit. His concern? That this kind of “vagina-pedestaling” (!) from pickup artists makes sexually frustrated men look bad; it’s a “virulent form of creep shaming.”
Yeah, really. Apparently the true victims here are “creep-shamed” dudes.
Propaganda of the Shirt
Over on A Voice for Men, the regulars are trying to figure out the best way to defeat the feminist menace. One commenter, Raven01, has a ingenious suggestion: t-shirts with weird, crude sexual messages!
I’m sure that’ll do it, fellas. Good work!
Fellas who want to get the attention of the very women that Mr. Raven01 wants to repel might consider picking up a t-shirt on the Man Boobz Zazzle store. 1Also suitable for women and genderqueer folks of the feminist persuasion.
Just one quick question: What’s an “innie plumb?” I can only assume this is some sort of reference to a
Far from OK, Cupid
Do not reply to this man.
Every woman I know who’s tried online dating has gotten all sorts of weird and sleazy messages from guys, from crude sexual come-ons (“sorry for being forward but id love to cum on your glasses :)”) to terrible “sexy” jokes (“So ay girl, you looking for a stud? Because I got the std, all I need is u :)”) to fetish-tastic examples of Too Much Information (“I WISH I WERE A DOG SO I COULD SUCK MYSELF OFF”). (No, guys, appending a smiley face emoticon does not make it ok to be a grotesque douchebag.)
You always wonder what guys like this are thinking. With the dog lover at the end, it’s clear he was trying to rattle a woman who hadn’t replied to two earlier messages of increasing creepiness. With the others, I suppose they think there’s always a tiny chance that some woman out there is as desperate and horny and undiscerning as they are.
What’s stranger are those who lead not with sexual come ons but with blatant misogyny. Do men really think that women melt at the thought of dating a man who hates half the human race? Or are they just looking for yet another chance to mansplain their Men’s Rights bullshit to the world?
Here are a couple of examples of this strange and unsuccessful approach to winning over women which I found on the delightful and disturbing blog The Ladies of OkCupid, which documents the quests of three women searching for love online.
Sometimes the misogyny sneaks up on you, as in this OkCupid profile from a “laid-back” slut-shamer (who was clearly not an English major):
This fellow, by contrast, launches into the misogyny right from the start, suggesting that the woman he’s writing is exceptional, simply because she’s not stupid and illogical like the rest of her gender:
This “edgy” fellow tries to break the ice with some lovely rape jokes:
But the strangest one I’ve seen so far comes from this dude, who uses his OKCupid profile as an opportunity to mansplain why feminism is eeeeeevil:
Oh, and that list keeps going; it’s one hundred items long.
As Jasmine from The Ladies of OKCupid writes,
Delusional and repulsive takes on a whole new level with this one, because I really don’t think he’s kidding. He has every social media outlet known to man with all the same crap, and his profile is HUGE. So either he’s attempting to become the ultimate Canadian troll, or he really thinks there’s a woman out there who exists like this AND would be interested in him, of all people. Really? He offers little more than a receding hairline and an outrageous sense of entitlement in return.
To paraphrase Animal House, delusional and repulsive is no way to go through life.
Happily for The Ladies of OKCupid, and the rest of those ladies seeking love online, not all the messages are like this. For example, take this message about a basic but delicious foodstuff:
Also, the woman who got the message above about that thinking-outside-the-box use for her glasses? She stayed on OkCupid, and is now in a happy relationship with a dude she met there who is not a shitlord.
Men’s Liber-urination: How installing home urinals will save the world from misandry
Men’s Liberation starts here!
What’s the deal with MRAs and urinals? You may recall the highly touted “URLs @ urinals” campaign from last year, a plan to plaster little posters over urinals in public bathrooms to lure peeing men to Men’s Rights websites; evidently the way to a man’s heart is through his urethra?
Then there was that big to-do in the Men’s Rights subreddit when a Canadian restauranteur removed a urinal shaped like a woman’s lips after some feminists complained about it.
Oh, and who can forget GirlWritesWhat’s weird FemRA lament that men hanging out in men’s bathrooms can’t even bitch about women any more due the encroachment of evil mangina language police. (Note: Men in public bathrooms do not actually talk to one another.)
Well, now the MRA videoblogger who goes by the nom-de-internet of ManWomanMyth has weighed in on the Urinal Problem in a long and rambling blog post titled, and I am not making this up, “Urinals – a genesis for male psychology?”
