Category Archives: a woman is always to blame
Men’s Rights Poetry Corner: “Feminists Killed Kurt Cobain.”
Kurt Cobain, RIP
Yesterday, several days after the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, A Voice for Men took a moment to honor the brilliant musician who tragically ended his life at the age of only 27.
Well, not exactly. What they actually did was run a terrible poem using the anniversary of Cobain’s death as an excuse to launch an extended attack on the supposed evils of feminism.
Here’s the opening:
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot change
It gets worse. The poem, written by a YouTube MRA calling himself Laudanum Byron, continues on for another 104 lines after this. Only 13 refer to Cobain, and five of these are simply repetitions of the opening accusation: “feminists killed Kurt Cobain.”
The rest of the poem consists of an assortment of Men’s Rights talking points sketched out in the most melodramatic manner possible.
Men chastised, demonized,
Healthy males pathologized
A man is just a dirty ape
Longing, lust, desire: all rape
Your body is a loaded gun
And all that it has done is wrong
Like all too many MRAs, Mr. Byron lets his anger at women get the better of his logic. In the following lines, for example, he lashes out at women both for living off of the earnings of men — and for earning money of their own.
Now the girls get told get what you can
After all, he’s just a man
You’re right to think it’s right to take
Yes you go girl, you make him pay
The girls get taught they must get on
Like work empowered anyone:
To sell your life for dollar bills
Taking calls & stacking shelves
In offices & factories
Fulfilment sought in drudgery
Mr. Byron – no relation, one presumes, to the actual Byron – seems to have only a rudimentary notion of what a poem actually is. While most, though not all, of his lines scan, he has persistent troubles with the concept of rhyme, with his aabb and aabbcc rhyme schemes dominated by half-rhymes and quarter-rhymes and, well, the words have some similar sounds in them.
“Bills” and “shelves” don’t rhyme, or half-rhyme, despite both ending in the letter “s.” “Take” and “pay” aren’t even remotely close.
Admittedly, “chivalry” is a tough one to rhyme. But surely one can do better than “steeds.”
White knights, on their hobbled steeds
Still cling to laws of chivalry
Passed over by the queens they save
A joke to all the other slaves
When he pulls off an actual rhyme, it comes a surprise:
All of us the sons of Cain
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain.
But while we’re on the topic, it’s worth pointing out that feminists and/or feminism did not actually kill Kurt Cobain. (Nor did anyone else; the conspiracy theories suggesting he was murdered don’t make a lot of sense.)
Byron’s only “evidence” linking feminism to the suicide?
He screamed onstage & pierced his flesh
Put on make-up, wore a dress
Look, nobody knows for sure the reason or reasons Cobain took his own life, but he was a troubled man with a history of suicide attempts. He suffered from depression and from a painful, persistent stomach ailment. He was addicted to heroin. And as his suicide note made clear, he found the fame he had achieved to be something of an intolerable burden; he felt like a fake. Like a lot of suicides, Cobain’s could be seen as psychologically overdetermined; it could have been caused by any or all of these things.
Using his suicide to score cheap rhetorical points against feminism is not only dishonest but highly disrespectful to his memory.
To top off this gigantic platter of disrespect, whoever wrote the headline on AVFM didn’t even bother to spell Cobain’s first name correctly. It’s Kurt, with a K.
Below, “Byron’s” own reading of his poem. If you can’t bear listening to it — I only made it a couple of stanzas in before I had to shut it off — you can make your way to AVFM, or to YouTube, to read the rest. I feel safe in saying that Kurt, who considered himself a feminist, would have hated it, and A Voice for Men as well.
Pickup artist: “If God ever created a better replacement for women, we’d exterminate them overnight.”
The problem — well, one of the many problems — with a lot of so-called pickup artists is that they think with their dicks, and then use their relatively underpowered brains to rationalize their dickular preferences as The Way The World Should Be.
By contrast, the problems with Lance Christopher, a so-called pickup artist who hangs out in the comments section on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog, really start when he stops thinking with his dick.
Some dudes roll over and fall asleep the moment after they come; Mr. Christopher contemplates genocide because women don’t want to hear him pontificate about Ukrainian history.
In case you’re wondering, no one else in the discussion suggests that Mr. Christopher’s opinion here might be a teensy bit extreme.
No, the commenters happily share terrible opinion after terrible opinion about the inferior creatures known as women.
Oh, it gets worse.
Cleanup in the pompous misogyny aisle!
You’ll notice that all of these comments have upvotes, by the way.
There may be some even more terrible comments in that thread, but I gave up reading them after a few screens full of this sort of garbage.
After a feminist activist at Queen’s University reports being attacked, possibly by an MRA, the king of “fuck their shit up” responds with angry denial
Paul Elam: Anger is “pulsing through my veins like molten lava.”
A student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, says she was attacked and beaten by a strange man after receiving threatening messages about her opposition to a Men’s Rights group on campus. On Thursday, Danielle d’Entremont posted a picture of her bruised face to Facebook along with this explanation:
Just walked out of my house and got attacked by a stranger. I was punched in the face multiple times and lost half my tooth. This was after a few threatening emails regarding my support for feminist activities on campus. I can’t say for sure if the two are connected, however the attacker was a male who knew my name.
The campus Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) – the group d’Entremont has been fighting – has condemned the attack, as has the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), which co-sponsored a talk the MIAS put on Thursday. The police are investigating.
Right now, this is pretty much all we know about the story. Not that it this has stopped MRAs from offering their very fervent opinions on the matter.
Before we get to them, here are a few of my own:
Check out the “Farrell’s Follies” series of posts on Reddit
Warren Farrell: His ideas are as bad as that logo
Today, just a recommendation: if you’d like to learn more about the wrongheaded and often quite bewildering opinions of Men’s Rights grandpappy Warren Farrell, take a look at the excellent Farrell’s Follies series now being posted on the AgainstMensRights subreddit. The Redditor known as feminista_throwaway has been systematically going through Farrell’s Myth of Male Power and looking in detail at Farrell’s positions on such issues as “Date Fraud,” why it’s supposedly easier to be a gay man than a straight man, why patriarchy is women’s fault, and how men and women don’t really love each other. There’s a guide to the whole series here.
A Voice for Men fans have appropriated logos of real anti-violence organizations for new “Don’t Be That Girl” postering campaign
From @im_adam_barrett on Twitter
Here we go again. Like small children who have just discovered the power of the tantrum, the terrible people at A Voice for Men seem to have realized that the only reliable way for them to get the attention of the world is to act like complete assholes in public. And so some fans of AVFM have decided to bring back the “Don’t Be That Girl” campaign — you know, the witless and misogynistic “parody” of the successful Canadian “Don’t Be That Guy” rape awareness campaign. Now they’re postering in Halifax.
But there’s one difference: this time they’ve put the logos of the real sponsors of the real “Don’t Be That Guy” rape awareness project on their phony posters. (You can see the whole list by downloading one of the pdfs of the real posters on this page.)
So far, two of the organizations listed on their phony posters – the Bryony House shelter for victims of domestic violence and the Halifax Police Department – have made very clear that their logos are being used without permission.
https://twitter.com/BryonyHouse/status/448148862193389568
It’s a pretty safe bet that the other organizations whose logos were appropriated feel similarly.
I’d like to encourage anyone who can afford it to follow up on a suggestion from Cloudiah in the comments and donate to Bryony House so that some good can come out of all this.
Now, I’m no expert on Canadian law, but it seems rather unlikely to me that it’s legal to simply stick some organization’s logo on something and pretend that they have endorsed it. Especially when that organization is the police.
Apparently some MRAs disagree with me on that:
“Your consent is not required” seems to be the operating assumption of a lot of those drawn to the Men’s Rights movement.
In later tweets, Elam claims that using the logos is legal because of “fair use,” which is not actually a term used in Canadian law, and promises that the “[p]osters will continue, cupcake.”
I guess we will see. Here are several more photos of the posters. There’s more discussion of this in the AgainstMensRights subreddit.
EDITED TO ADD: Elam has now responded to the critics, and promises to bankroll any legal challenges against the posterers. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t understand why the logos are a problem.
EDIT/CORRECTION: It’s not completely clear that this postering campaign originated with AVFM. It’s pretty clear, though, that it’s supported by AVFM, and that those involved in it are supporters of AVFM. I’ve made a few changes to the headline and first graf to reflect this.
Warren Farrell is an Ass, Man
Yep, that’s a butt on the cover. He put a butt on the cover. Men are oppressed by women’s butts.
You may remember the embarrassing spectacle a couple of months back when Warren Farrell asked the readers of A Voice for Men to help him pick out a cover picture for a new ebook version of The Myth of Male Power, the 21-year-old crackpot bestseller that more or less provided the, er, intellectual foundation for today’s Men’s Rights movement.
It wasn’t just embarrassing because AVFM is a noxious hate site that regularly calls women c*nts and whores and helps to organize informal campaigns of harassment directed at individual women. It was also embarrassing because all three of the pictures were sexualized images focusing on specific female body parts. You can guess which three, and you’d be right: tits, ass, and vagina (the latter tastefully covered in a merkin made of moss).
Well, Farrell ended up rejecting all of these images in favor of … a different picture of a woman’s butt. Yep, the screenshot above features the actual cover of the recently released ebook version of The Myth of Male Power. (You can see it in its full sized-glory over on Amazon.)
The implicit message of the cover couldn’t be clearer: men may seem to run the world, but women can control and exploit them through the power of their sexuality. Male power is undercut by … butt power.
Am I reading too much into a cover image? Farrell doesn’t really believe this nonsense, does he?
Well, in the introduction to the ebook, Farrell writes:
In case you’re wondering, “genetic celebrity” is Farrell’s term of art for any attractive woman.
But golly, you say, the fact that a dude feels “powerless” because he can’t have sex with every woman with a nice butt that happens to wander across his field of vision doesn’t actually mean that men are powerless or that male power is a myth. Well, Farrell has an answer to this as well. And by “answer” I mean, well, whatever this is:
Got that? I’m not sure there’s anything there to get; it’s nothing more than hand-waving to distract attention from the nonsensical nature of his previous statements. In case any Men’s Rights activist ever brings Warren Farrell up as an example of a respectable, “academic” MRA, you may wish to point out that almost nothing Farrell writes ever actually makes any fucking sense.
In the book itself, Farrell repeatedly suggested that male power can be undone almost completely by the sexual power of women. In one oft-quoted passage, he wrote about the effect that a “secretary’s miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power” allegedly has on their male bosses. (Myth of Male Power, p. 21)
While that statement has earned a certain notoriety for its sheer ridiculousness, Farrell went further elsewhere in the book, essentially arguing that men are as addicted to female “beauty” as drug addicts are to the drug of their choice — and as helpless.
“Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal,” Farrell wrote. “[M]any men feel ‘under the influence the moment they see a beautiful woman.” (p. 320, emphasis in original.)
This sort of temporary “intoxication,” Farrell argued, leads men into shackling themselves to these temporarily sexy tyrants for the rest of their lives — thus agreeing to support them (he suggested implicitly) even after they get old and ugly. (p. 85.)
In Farrell’s original book, this “argument,” such as it is, was merely one of many that he thought undercut the alleged “myth of male power.” Now, with the butt on the cover, he’s put it front and center. Or, more precisely, rear and center.
Warren Farrell, you’re an ass, man.
Oh, awkward segue here, I just wanted to show off the cover to the new edition of my classic book, The Myth of Human Power.
It will soon be available for one million dollars in cash in unmarked bills, upon delivery of which I will sit down and write it for you. It will probably be pretty short and not very convincing.
Wearing a Skirt Has Consequences: A Men’s Rights Redditor defends a man’s sacred right to take upskirt photos
Women: If you wear skirts here, some MRAs think you should be punished for it
So we, as a society, have “peeping tom” laws to protect people who might unknowingly expose themselves to the creepy peepers of, well, creepy peepers who get their thrills from seeing and sometimes photographing strangers revealing more than they meant to.
It would seem reasonable enough to consider surreptitiously taken “upskirt” photographs as violations of peeping tom laws. But not in Massachusetts: On Wednesday, the Supreme Judicial Court in that state ruled that upskirt photographs are legally ok, as the laws there are written to apply only to protect victims who are “partially nude,” not those who are merely wearing short skirts.
In the wake of the ruling, legislators and women’s rights advocates are saying that the laws — written before cell phone camera were ubiquitous — need an update.
Naturally, this has some of the dedicated Human Rights activists in the Men’s Rights subreddit in an uproar. How dare anyone challenge their sacred right to take pictures of women’s panties on public transportation without their consent!
![Demonspawn [-1] 6 points 7 hours ago (26|20) Wearing a skirt has consequences. If we use state violence to protect women from the consequences of her choice to wear a skirt, we remove her agency. This man didn't assault her, didn't touch her... all he did was take a picture of what her choice in clothing exposed to the public. How is that criminal to the point of deserving of state violence upon him? This is saying that protecting women from the consequences of their choices in clothing is more important than men's freedom. permalink save source save give gold hide child comments [–]nigglereddit 5 points 6 hours ago (13|8) You're absolutely correct. If you wear clothing which exposes parts of your body from some angles, you have to expect that someone at that angle will see those parts of your body. You can't tell everyone not to see you from those angles because you're not comfortable with that part of your body being seen; that's ridiculous. If you're uncomfortable it is your job to cover that part of your body. permalink save source save parent give gold [–]DaNiceguy [-2] 4 points 4 hours ago (11|7) Ah but you see the wrong man saw it. That makes him a criminal, right?](http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/demonskirt.png?w=604)
“Wearing a skirt has consequences!” What a perfect slogan for a “movement” that is about little more than tearing down half of humanity in the name of, what, a man’s right to be a peeping tom? Put it on a t-shirt, Demonspawn, and show the world the kind of creep you are.
NOTE: Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing me to this.
UPDATE: The Massachusetts State Legislature, moving surprisingly quickly, has passed a new law explicitly banning upskirt photos; it could be signed into law by tomorrow.
#LiesToldByFemales is the misogynistic cesspool you might expect. Plus giant lizards, and JC Penney
Lying female
So Twitter is a bit depressing today. One of the trending hashtags at the moment is #LiesToldByFemales and, yes, it’s the misogynistic cesspool that you might expect, a vast assortment of not-very-original stereotypes about women — sorry, females — and their allegedly lying ways. The female-bashing tweeters — some of them female themselves — aren’t even terribly original in their complaints, and most of the tweets seem to be reworkings on a few very basic themes.
We have the good-old fashioned trope of the female-as-narcissist, forever obsessed with how she looks — and given to lying about how much work she puts into her appearance.
Don’t Ask: A Middle-Aged Man’s Creepy Roadmap to a Woman’s “Secret Garden.”
Escalation to the sex location
Sometimes I scour the internet for hours in search of material for this blog. Other times it just plops right in my lap. Today, it plopped, in the form of a new visitor to this blog by the name of J.S., a 52-year-old married farmer (he said) who brought with him some very old-fashioned ideas about love and romance and how men can best access the “secret gardens” of the pretty ladies of the world.
No, really, he did,proclaming himself an infallable guide to
the ‘secret language’( sub and non-verbal communication), the dating game, or how very attractive women go about choosing which men they let into their secret garden and which ones they don’t.
The primary lesson he tried to impart: that the “secret garden” is a little bit like Fight Club: The first rule of Secret Garden is that dudes can never ask to enter Secret Garden.
Why can’t Men’s Rightsers design posters to save their lives? A new theory
Note: Not an actual quote from me.
Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of designing posters that aren’t embarrassingly ugly and offputting?
Posters designed by MRAs are so routinely godawful it’s hard not to wonder if there is something inherent about them or their ideas that prevents them from seeing what a complete mess they’re making when they put together something like the poster above, which I recently found amongst a whole collection of similarly terrible posters at the website What Men Are Saying About Women.
In the case of Christian J, the WMASAW poster-designer, there is clearly something more than bad ideas at work here, but I do think the bad ideas of the Men’s Rights movement are a large part of the reason why MRAs can’t design posters to save their lives. Their posters are muddled messes because their ideology is a muddled mess.
