Apparently we feminists simply can’t understand the Men’s Rights Movement, because
feminist ideology is still stuck in the 19th century concept that women are second class citizens when objectively they are in a better position than men. … The[y] just cannot grasp that in modern western society men are second class citizens.
Oh, and while they’re at it, they would also like to explain to us at great length why the whole Slutwalk thing is so silly. I mean, telling women to not dress like sluts if they don’t want to get raped is just good common sense! And obviously dudes have a much greater understanding of the topic of rape and personal safety in general than silly ladies with their silly lady brains and their silly tendency to get drunk on silly lady drinks.
Because Reddit Men’s Rights is not completely dominated by retrograde MRA misogynists, there are actually some decent comments mixed in with all the patronizing nonsense. Enjoy?
As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.
But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed. Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.
Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.
NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)
So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.
Three young women wake up, confused and terrified, in a room that looks like a cross between a normal hospital room and the creepy underground lair of some mad scientist from a horror movie. A video screen flickers on and a creepy older man, looking a bit like Academy-award-nominee Robert Loggia, appears on it, telling the women that he’s their “jailer.” The women, you see, had all been getting abortions when their jailer’s shadowy accomplices kidnapped them and brought them to this strange prison, where they will be forced to live for the next seven months until they gave birth. “You were all on the operating table, all ready to commit murder,” announces a mysterious doctor. “Your babies will be given life just as God planned.”
Now, if you thought that something seemed really … off about that trailer, well, you’re not alone. For the film is not, as you might have assumed from my description, a warning against the fanatical misogyny of many in the anti-abortion movement.
No, the film – produced by a pro-life former judge, crime thriller author, and Republican New Jersey state senate candidate – is meant as pro-life propaganda. As the offical press release for the film’s premiere put it:
The film, which appears to cut right down the middle [of the abortion debate], examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist. Del Vecchio and the cast invite pro-lifers to come to this historic event.
During the months the three women are held in captivity, you see, they are exposed to a barrage of films and books intended to, er, educate them about abortion –what their attending obstetrician Dr. Wise describes as “an abortion think tank.” Two of the captive women do indeed convert to the pro-life side; apparently we in the audience are supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome along with them. The third, as we see in the trailer, tries to induce a miscarriage, which doesn’t go quite as planned.
And this sets us up for the final twist, which I’m just going to go ahead and reveal: once all three women have given birth, Dr. Wise tells them she’s going to sew them all, mouth-to-vagina, into a Human Abortion-pede!
Actually no: the twist is that the “life zone” the three women in has actually been … purgatory! All three “captives,” you see, had died on the operating table while getting their abortions. (Apparently they went to the world’s worst abortion clinic, as first-trimester abortions don’t involve anything more surgically invasive than the insertion of a suction tube; the risk of death from a legal surgical abortion is 0.0006%, one in 160,000 cases, making the procedure many times safer than childbirth itself.) Their time in the “life zone” was a test: the two women who changed their minds were whisked up to heaven, while their miscarriage-attempting, stubbornly pro-choice companion is sent straight to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. Dr. Wise, despite being on the right side of the abortion question, also goes to hell for committing suicide. And, oh yeah, their jailer – Loggia – was Satan. Why Satan and a hell-bound doctor were the ones trying to convert the abortion ladies to the pro-life side I can’t tell you; del Vecchio’s theology is evidently more sophisticated than I am.
The real twist here? As Jersey Journal writer Alan Robb notes:
The Life Zone went viral across the internet [last] Friday after blogs The Frisky and Talking Points Memo picked up on the film’s trailer. … But despite garnering more than 20,000 hits on YouTube in the last four days, only fifty people – including the film’s cast and producers – attended this weekend’s screening, and even those who starred in the movie didn’t know how to interpret its twist ending.
It’s impossible to tell from the trailer if the film is bad in a so-bad-it’s-good way, or if it’s just plain awful. I will try to get hold of it when it hits video, and will report back with my results.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a good horror film set in a creepy hospital, try renting Infection, a Japanese film from 2005. Or, if you’ve got a longer attention span, try Lars Von Trier’s supernatural soap opera The Kingdom, a darkly comic miniseries which takes place in what one might call, paraphrasing Bill Murray’s character in Tootsie, “one nutty hospital.” Both are conveniently available on Netflix instant watch, so you don’t even have to leave your pregnancy dungeon to see them.
EDITED: Added some info on the minimal dangers of abortion procedures.
Dude, do you have a moment to take a quick survey?
So AskMen.com just put up the first segment of its annual 3-part Great Male Survey. Filled with strange assumptions and sometimes creepy questions, it’s a survey that reveals at least as much about the survey makers as it does the survey takers, and what it reveals ain’t good: it seems to have been written by a jaded ex-romantic ( or a committee of such) only a few short steps away from full-blown MGTOW-hood.
The survey starts off with a fairly innocuous question about basic compatibility, but quickly veers off course with question #2:
How important is it to you that your wife/future wife signs a prenup?
Hold on a second, daddy-o! We haven’t even determined if the little missy has “wife potential” yet — as question #3 puts it.
After one more question about marriage, the quiz moves on to cheating and then (perhaps inevitably) to the issue of divorce:
Do men get screwed by the courts in divorce?
Then it’s onward to kvetching about what a naggy shrew your partner is (assuming you haven’t already finalized the divorce):
Followed by the classic “Would you dump a girlfriend if she became fat?” (Just in case you’re wondering, ladies, nearly half the American guys in last year’s survey said “yes.”)
Next we get to what we might call the “creepy controlling asshole” portion of the survey. After asking whether we’ve ever snooped through our partner’s email or Facebook messages, they pose this doozy:
That quiet clattering you hear is the sound of a thousand creepy dudes Googling to see if this is possible – and, if so, the best place to put the chip.
After several more questions about Facebook and the internet, a few badly conceptualized questions about romance, and a bunch about sex, the quiz moves on to some good old-fashioned slut shaming, asking men to quantify the number of sex partners a woman is allowed to have before they consider her “promiscuous.” Ladies: you’ll be glad to know that 41% of American dudes who took the survey last year consider any women with more than 9 lifetime partners to be dirty sluts – sorry, “promiscuous.”
Then of course it’s on to an attempt to quantify exactly when women start getting all old and ugly:
Yes, one of the possible answers is “18.” You may be slightly reassured by the fact that zero percent of last year’s survey takers gave that answer. Six percent said “20,” though, and 24% said “30.”
Then we have this curiously worded question on workplace sex:
So the idea that your partner might be a big higher up on the old org chart isn’t even a possibility? What is this, 1962? Did they borrow this question from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl? Or find it scribbled on a napkin on Don Draper’s desk just before he impulsively proposed to his new secretary?
Creepy, huh? This is the most unsettling book cover from a set of “crappy joke books, circa 1955” found on the blog Vintage Sleaze – which lives up to its name, and then some.
Like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, whoever it was who bought these sorts of books by the millions in the 40s and 50s clearly had some trouble telling the difference between sexist and sexy. And I’m not quite sure how it was that anyone, sexist or sexy, actually found these funny. Then again, I think the same of newspaper comics today.
But I digress. Click on the link to see the covers of 1) an evidently hi-larious book called “Keeping Women In Line,” and 2) an irreverent guide to married life by Stanley and Janice Berenstain. Yeah, that’s right: the motherfucking Berenstain Bears Berenstains!
The video above, which has been making the rounds of the manosphere, is one of the creepiest and most off-putting things I’ve seen since watching Dogtooth a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I take that back: Dogtooth was much less creepy and off-putting. I was so repelled by what I saw in this video that it literally took me several tries to get through the whole thing. And no, it’s not some weird misogynistic rant by the likes of Bernard Chapin. Oh, no no no. The misogynists of the world are as repelled by the video as I am, though for radically different reasons. Titled “Dear Woman,” the video was actually put together by a couple of self-described “conscious men” who think they’re doing a great favor to the women of the world.
To which I can only say: Guys, stop it, you’re not helping.
If you can stomach it, the video is worth watching in its entirety. If not, here’s what you’re missing: The video is the work of a couple of New Age gurus — Arjuna Ardagh and Gay Hendricks, Ph.D – who, with the help of a little gaggle of guys, have written a little manifesto “apologizing” to the women of the world for all the bad shit done by men to women over the centuries. Or, as they put it:
I feel deep love, great respect and a growingsense of worshipfor the gifts of the feminine. I also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present. I want to apologize to you and make amends for those actions, in order to bring forth a new era of co-creation with you.
The first step in “making amends,” evidently, was to gather together a group of men – some of whom seem to have been roped into it in the middle of a garden party — and to somehow convince them to read out loud the entire text of this manifesto. (The full text is here, but it’s much creepier when it’s read out loud.)
There is something about this manifesto, and the men reading it, that is so “off” that it may well make your skin crawl, and make you wonder how many of the men in the video have dead bodies secreted away in the crawl spaces under their homes. A female friend I showed the video to could only make it through the first couple of minutes before switching it off in horror; one commenter on Metafilter reported that it “made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and not in a good way. Eeew.”
The creepyist, skin-crawliest part of the video has to be the section in which the assembled men talk about women’s bodies:
I honor the beauty and integrity of your body. When we worship each other through our bodies with awareness and devotion, there are no boundaries to the love that we can generate. I feel sorrow that men have used your beauty as a form of commerce in prostitution and pornography. In the grip of lust we have often lacked the skills to ask gracefully for intimacy or to take ‘No’ for an answer. I take a stand against any form of enforced or soulless commercialization of woman’s beauty, andI respect that your body belongs to you.…
I honor your capacity to listen to your bodyand its needs for food, rest and playtime.
I feel confident that I speak for many when I say “ewww.” Somehow I’m reminded of Saturday Night Live’s hot-tub-loving “lovers.”
It’s worth pointing out that the written manifesto refers to men and women “nurture[ing]” one another’s body; apparently no one noticed that the dude reading this passage in the video had turned nurturing into “worship.”
As one commenter on Metafilter put it:
“We worship women” sounds like something Buffalo Bill would have said if he had a PR agent. My guess is that they’re sickos who seem really earnest at first but it turns out that they’re actually trying to collect used tampons for onanistic purposes or something.
So what is it, aside from all this worshiping, that makes the video so creepy? Part of the problem is that these “conscious men” are, in their own way, as patronizing and sexist as any manosphere dudes “mansplaining” about how all women only want to fuck alpha guys. Women, in their view, are inherently peaceful earth-mother types. “I commit now to … honoring the spirituality of the divine feminine,” the guys tell us. “Ihonor your deep connection to the earth.”
The manifesto is overflowing with this kind of shit. No matter how “New Age” these guys think they are, these are some truly ancient, and quite thoroughly retrograde, notions.
But that’s just what makes them wrong and misguided. What is it that causes viewers to pick up that whole serial-killer vibe?
I think the answer to this can be found in a book called The Gif tof Fear by security expert Gavin de Becker. The book attempts to explain why our intuitions about creepy people are so often correct. There’s a good reason you feel uneasy around certain people; that’s your unconscious picking up on real, if hard to pin down, signals of danger.
De Becker also lays out some of the techniques predators use in an attempt to allay the suspicions of those they’re trying to victimize. One of the sneakiest? The unsolicited promise, which often means the very opposite of what is said. When someone tells you, out of the blue, that they “aren’t going to hurt you,” it’s often a very good sign that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. When someone feels the need to tell you, apropos of nothing, that he “honor[s] the beauty and integrity of your body” and “respect[s] that your body belongs to you,” you may well want to run screaming.
Even more than the unsolicited promises, I think it’s the unsolicited apologies in the Dear Woman video – so similar in intent to unsolicited promises — are a large part of what is setting off alarm bells in so many viewers. When a young guy in the video takes personal responsibility “for dragging you into … wars, and for the rape, murder, broken hearts and damaged families that resulted from them,” that’s just plain … weird, given that (unless he’s some young despot I’ve never heard of) he’s not actually responsible for any of this.
The “unsolicited promise” is similar to what de Becker calls “loan sharking” – offering unsolicited “help” in order to make victims feel obligated in some way to their unwanted helpers. In the manifesto/video, this “help” is abstract, but the strategy seems to be the same:
From this day, moving forward, I vow to treat your heart as the sacred temple it is, and I commit to honoring the feminine in you and me and in my relationship to all life.
Uh, who the fuck asked you to treat anyone’s heart as a “sacred temple?”
The manifesto/video is also filled with examples of “forced teaming,” another strategy favored by predators who want to convince their victims that they are in fact working together to do the very same thing:
I know that by leaving the past behind and joining hands in the present, we can create a synergy of our strengths. Together, there is nothing we cannot do.
But there’s something else about the video that adds to the sense that something is not right here: no matter how earnest all the men in the video are trying to sound, none of them (except perhaps the two ringleaders) seem to really believe the ridiculous things they’re saying. Instead, they seem to be, with varying degrees of insincerity, mouthing a series of essentially meaningless New Age platitudes – in short, simply saying what they think women want to hear.
No one is buying this bullshit, guys. Give it up.
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Women’s magazines can be terrifyingly good at reinforcing every bad thing women in this culture feel about themselves. Take, for example, this awful blog post over on Marie Claire, written by a dude, on “why men prefer innocent girls to bad girls.” It’s filled with statements like this, on why guys (supposedly) prefer virgins or near-virgins to more sexually experienced women — aka “bad girls”:
Guys just want to be the leader of that journey instead of the followers. I guess it’s like white fresh snow versus the snow that’s turning black on the side of the road … under the haze of car exhaust. The fresh snow is more of a palette for adventure.
Yep, that’s right. He’s comparing post-virginal women — that is, most adult women — to DIRTY, SOOTY, PROBABLY PISSED-ON, SNOW.
Actually, don’t click on his article. Not yet anyway. Click here instead, to see Captain Awkward’s masterful and often quite hilarious takedown of Rich and his paean to not-very-experienced, not-too-confident women.
>Another screenshot from Fat, Ugly or Slutty, the new blog calling out misogyny in the online gaming world. I know I just posted about this site, but, uh, take a look. Dude, you want to do … what?
The horny straight dudes who decide to go all MGTOW — that is, to Go Their Own Way, avoiding women — often find themselves facing what we might call the MGTOW Paradox — that is, they hate the sexy ladies, but the sexy ladies keep giving them boners. So many of them go to great lengths to figure out how to make women appear disgusting to them. We’ve discussed some of these techniques before.
Having read Esther Villars book, one of the stand out sentences was that if you shave a woman’s head and remove all the make up, the only difference is a fatter body (breasts included), wider hips and her vagina. …
Try it – when you see a ‘hot’ female, imagine them without the dyed hair, lip gloss, eye liner, foundation, high heels (longer legs), expensive clothes, perfume etc, really DECONSTRUCT the illusion.
It takes ALL the power away.
And you’re left with…. their personalities… oh well.
Some of the other fellows chime in with their observations. shade47 asks:
how could men take anything seriously that looks like a flabby 15 y/o boy when you shorten the hair and take off the makeup.
avoidwomen concurs, adding:
It’s no surprise then that I find porn repulsive. Women really do look ugly(and almost all the same) in their birthday suit without all their clothes and makeup.
But it is dontmarry who takes the whole discussion to a new level. Strip women of clothes, hair and makeup, he argues, and you’re not just left with women’s personalities:
You’re left with what you started with – just a piece of meat.
Only this time, it’s less visually appealing.
A toilet is still a toilet, before flushing or after flushing.
You don’t thank the toilet for its companionship, or appreciate its personality.
All you need to do is use the toilet. Use it.
So there you have it. Women are just meat toilets.
Somehow I suspect that dontmarry isn’t going to be fending off a lot of marriage proposals from the women of the world.
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Back by popular demand, here’s more Nightstorm. We’ve already heard his theories about the Mousetrap vagina. Now we see his nightmare vision of … men and women going shopping at the mall. Of course, I hate shopping with women — and, for that matter, men — as much as the next guy, but Nightstorm takes it to a whole other level:
Imagine a man who is walking in the mall. Browsing. Through the food stores figuring out what to eat. As he stands there pondering, the camera pans left to reveal his back. Mounted and glued is the fattest moda fucking slug you ever seen! It has no form but that of a leach and you could almost mistake it for a backpack.
The slug whispers things in the mans ear. The man smiles. The slug then begins to direct the man where to go while sucking on the mans neck, draining of him of his life force.
Suddenly another male who is in the mall, also browsing for food comes by. He too, has this same slug like creature on his back. Both males converse in conversation while the 2 slugs look absolutely hostile towards one another. They cling harder to their host and begin to hiss at one another, afraid it will steal its host and leave it hang to dry.
Yes, the entire livelyhood of the slug is at risk,so it hisses at the other ready to bite its head off. Soon it whispers to the man it doesn’t want to eat here, and that’s how men part ways because there gf told them to.
Wasn’t this a David Cronenberg movie?
Seriously, Nightstorm, stop wasting your time on MGTOW websites and start churning out scripts for horror movies. I would totally watch this shit, and I’m not even kidding. You’ve got a GIFT, son!
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This blog deals with some pretty extreme expressions of misogyny. It's not a safe space. You may run across upsetting and possibly triggering things in the posts and in the comments as well.
About We Hunted the Mammoth
" ... a delirious and incisive page against misogyny." -- El Pais, via Google translate
WHTM, written and edited by David Futrelle, tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online, focusing especially on Men's Rights, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pickup Artist (PUA) sites.
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