Category Archives: douchebaggery
Happy Mother’s Day, the A Voice for Men way. (Note: Much worse than you’d think.)
Over on A Voice for Men, our dear friend Paul Elam has come up with an interesting new way to celebrate Mother’s Day – with what is essentially the longest, least funny, and most rage-filled “Yo Mama” joke ever. (Indeed, it’s so rage-filled I should probably put a Trigger Warning right about here.)
Elam starts off by addressing the mothers of the world, suggesting he’s got a “a socially conscious twist” on the traditional Mother’s Day celebrations. Mothers, he argues, should gather together the flowers they’ve been given by their loved ones and:
Place a bunch of daffodils at a dumpster near you, perhaps one in which one of you, or one of your kind, has tossed an unwanted baby, leaving it there to slowly die alone in a pile of trash.
Perhaps you could lay a single rose at the base of a bridge that has been used by a mother to throw her baby into an icy river. Perhaps you can lay it there with hands that have beaten or shaken a baby to death.
You probably didn’t see that coming, did you? He goes on.
Now perhaps some of you could place large, colorful arrangements at the abortion centers where women go to have children cut out and laid to rest in those colorful and attractive biohazard containers that are all the rage in the clinics. …
Maybe you can lay virtual flowers at your computers to honor all the children that you and your sisters have pimped out to pedophiles, or perhaps the blossoms could be placed in your child’s room, which also doubles as your preferred place to abuse your own.
Oh, but you say you haven’t done any of these things, and that abortion isn’t actually the same as infanticide? No matter. Elam has an answer for that:
This is not a request for some mothers, or a percentage of them, but all of you. In fact, you don’t even have to be a mother. If you have a vagina, the blood of all those children, who are abused far more at the hands of women than men, has stained your skin and caked around the cuticles of your fingers.
If you are a mother, particularly one of the many abusers, or just one that has remained silent as your sisters have beaten, choked, stabbed, burned, drowned, abused, neglected, dumped, tortured and otherwise done the unspeakable to the most defenseless among us, then I hope to see those flowers in your murderous hands, paying homage to those that have been unfortunate enough to be placed in your path. …
In Daffodils for Dumpsters the gash gets you in, and you don’t really have a choice.
You see, Elam has decided that we live in an era of “collective guilt,” and that the evil (straw) feminists who go around blaming all men for the actions of a few – through such dastardly things like rape awareness seminars – deserve to find themselves collectively blamed as well.
Except that Elam’s post goes well beyond an ill-conceived and ill-intentioned attempt at “turnabout is fair play.” This isn’t a piece of Swiftian satire. He actually believes all this hateful nonsense, and says as much:
Now, do I really mean all this? Yes. It is not that women deserve to be collectively regarded as child abusers and killers. Most aren’t. Most are actually very good to their children and can even be trusted with the children of others. But that truth is not what is important here.
What is important is the children, or the principle, or whatever other bullshit we make up to convince ourselves it is not about demonizing women when that is exactly what we are doing.
I have to confess I have no idea what he’s trying to say in the second paragraph here. Did he mean to say “men” instead of “women?” If so, this is an interesting little slip.
He continues:
The fact is that mothers are more dangerous than fathers where it concerns children. They always have been. It is only a few percentage points in that direction, but of course in a White Ribbon way, it is more than enough to justify pointing a finger at your entire sex and feeling superior as we watch you atone for the unspeakable acts of a minority.
So, suck it up ladies. If you knew about White Ribbon and said nothing to object to it; if in general you have remained silent or actively participated as the image of the male half of the population has been reduced to that of a depraved threat, the step up and get your flowers. You deserve every last petal, stem and thorn.
I imagine Elam chuckling a bit as he typed that final word.
And a happy Mother’s Day to you, too!
Oh, and if you found yourself wondering about that “White Ribbon” thing, Elam is evidently (as best I can figure it) referring either to the women who, during World War I, handed out white ribbons to men who didn’t enlist in the army. Or he’s referring to this contemporary campaign to fight violence against women. But I don’t live inside Elam’s head, so I’m not sure what he meant, or why he seems to think that all women would know about either campaign, much less have any responsibility for them.
NOTE: Elam is also celebrating Mother’s Day by suggesting I had something to do with creating Reddit’s appalling “beatingwomen” subreddit as part of a nefarious plot to make the Men’s Rights movement look even worse than it manages to do on its own.
You may notice that Elam presents no actual evidence to back up his claims. There is no such evidence, because Elam’s accusations are utterly and completely untrue.
I have nothing whatsoever to do with r/beatingwomen. Nothing. I don’t know anything about who created it, or what their aim was beyond laughing at pictures and videos of violence against women. As I’ve said before, it’s a vile place. I think Reddit should shut it down.
Men’s Rights Bronies, Part 2: The Piggening
Oy vey.
Hot on the heels of my recent discovery of Men’s Rights Bronies, a new controversy about My Little Pony has erupted in the Men’s Rights subreddit. Though, to be honest, I might have provoked most of the actual controversy there by wading into the muck and pointing out a few facts.
The discussion centers around a rather obtuse post by Kathleen Richter on the Ms. Blog from two years ago accusing the show’s creators of racism and homophobia, among other things. The post couldn’t be more wrong about everything, and, unsurprisingly, was torn apart by commenters on the site – and by Lauren Faust, then the show’s “creative steward” and executive producer, who was given the opportunity to write a rebuttal on the Ms. Blog.
So why are the dudes on the Men’s Rights subreddit getting worked up by this dead controversy today? Because an MRA who calls himself ThePigman – we took a look at one of his terrible, terrible comic strips here – decided to post Richter’s original post (but not Faust’s rebuttal) to r/mensrights under the title “My Little Pony FIM attacked by nuts at Ms Magazine Blog. NOT, repeat, NOT a satire.”
Perhaps inadvisedly, I posted a comment pointing out that the Richter’s blog post had not exactly been well-received. And this happened. (Click on the pic for a full-sized version.)
The whole discussion is rather surreal. Some highlights.
ThePigman responding to a rather straightforward and factual comment of mine with:
You are a disgusting animal. Go and talk to someone else, just having you on the same planet makes me want to puke.
Ullere repeatedly misrepresenting my recent post on Men’s Rights Bronies.
The dude who regularly posts on r/mensrights as “Manzboobz” makes an appearance.
And this barely coherent little masterpiece of sarcasm from our old friend Eoghan (who posts on r/mensrights as Sigil1):
As someone who speaks fluent Eoghan, let me translate: he is suggesting that the women discussing the issue of MLP on the Ms. Blog are all a bunch of layabouts living off of their hard-working husbands. He’s also making a snide reference to feminism as being an “astro-turf” movement (rather than a true grassroots movement) because, in his mind, feminism is all a big plot created and funded by the CIA and the evil elitists who run the world.
Eoghan aside, this whole episode suggests how difficult it is for a feminist to have any kind of discussion with MRAs even on the Men’s Rights subreddit, probably the most moderate MRA forum out there. (Several other people posted references to Faust’s rebuttal, but weren’t downvoted, because they aren’t the dreaded, more-evil-than-evil-itself “manboobz.”)
A couple of days ago, one poster to r/mr asked “Why are there not more feminists here” debating the issues with MRAs. Here’s your answer.
EDITED TO ADD: ThePigman has responded to this and my previous Brony post in his typically calm and reasonable manner on his blog. By which I mean he spewed forth a bunch of angry nonsense.
Spearheader: The existence of fat women “constitutes nothing less than a full-scale loathing of male sexuality.”
Beth Ditto doesn't give a fuck what you dudes think.
W.F. Price, the man behind The Spearhead and a tireless champion of Men’s Rights, has in his latest post taken on one of the gravest injustices facing American men today. I speak, of course, of fat ladies.
Traveling in Europe, Price has noticed that people tend to be skinnier there than in the US, which naturally has led him to think some deep thoughts about fat ladies in America and how disgusting he finds them.
So-called BBWs in the US are not really curvy — they are rotund.
I really can’t stress enough the extent to which obesity has ruined American women’s attractiveness. Feminists blather on and on about how women should be “comfortable” with their bodies, but the truth is that many American women would be viewed as abominations in most of the world.
Those damn feminists, making ladies fat!
If you were to try to come up with a parallel for men, I suppose it would be something like having toothless, homeless alcoholic men say that they should be proud of themselves and feel attractive.
Actually, if you were to find a parallel for men, it would also be, er, fatness. Obesity rates for men and women in the US are roughly the same, with women having only a slight lead: according to a recent CDC survey, 35.5 percent of adult women and 32.2 percent of adult men are “obese,” by current standards. Never mind that these standards are a bit, well, off, in that they classify the overwhelming majority of Americans as overweight or obese. Never mind that more than half of Europeans are also classified as overweight or obese according to these standards. And never mind that the fat shaming shit we hear every day in the media and on the internet is basically a bunch of bull.
Because Price thinks that fat ladies are gross:
Feminists are really that far out there. They are literally delusional by global standards. No normal man in the rest of the world finds obese American women attractive. Sure, they may be able to find some skinny guy from a third world country who will pretend to love them to get a green card, but any self-respecting man will give them a very wide berth.
Ho ho! Wide berth! I get it.
Naturally Price was hailed in the comments for his brave stance. According to dragnet,
The abomination that is the average American woman in flyover country constitutes nothing less than a full-scale loathing of male sexuality.
Andrew S., for his part, admits that
I always had a thing for cute heavy girls.
But he still thinks they’re stuck-up bitches:
Being in the midwest they are a dime a dozen. But since there aren’t a lot of attractive in shape or thin women in this part of the country, and most of the decent looking women have some meat on there bones, well, it was hard to stomach how women who pretty much anywhere else in the world would have been ignored acted like such perfect bitches.
Seriously, the “cute heavy girls” that Andrew prefers need to learn to properly hate themselves for being fat fatties. Maybe that way they’ll be more willing to put up with all this MRA bullshit.
-
Yes, this post contains
and high fat content. Because I’m fat, get it?
PUAs invade OkCupid!
Honestly, this would freak me the fuck out too.
Over on Buzzzfeed, a couple of interesting pieces on the fine art of online pickup artistry.
Kelly Bourdet looks at some of the online PUA gurus and their teachings, noting that
Online pick-up artistry has taken the original aims of IRL pick-up — to develop general tactics and techniques for attracting and bedding women— one step further. One dehumanizing step further. Now, instead of “peacocking” (wearing gaudy outfits to demonstrate Alpha status) in bars and using tired negs, we have them deconstructing every aspect of online persona and communication to create sleek, marketing packages of human beings to sell to one another.
In an even more entertaining companion piece, Ouiser Boudreaux (AKA the Annals of Online Dating gal) reports on some of the actual terrible things these online PUAs write to women in an attempt to “neg” them into their IRL beds. Like “nice headband, bitch,” or “Lol, you look like a space commando.” Or this little passive-aggressive masterpiece:
You nearly have a perfect lack of grace. What happens when you realize only the also ran hotties slum it in brooklyn? Somebody who says they’re not good at being surface and rattles off a list of authors read mostly in high school english classes is nothing but surface. Your profile is among the most trite and cliche i’ve come across. which is a compliment of sorts, though keep in mind, you’re not in kansas anymore. You know who else won’t deal with a narcissist? just look in the mirror to find the answer: another narcissist.
None of these worked, in case you’re wondering.
A little gender experiment confirms that Reddit is full of douchebags
Now that's what I call a bridegroom.
So someone on Reddit did a little experiment that confirmed what we already know: that Reddit is overflowing with misogynist douchebags. Here’s the experimenter explaining her somewhat casual experimental protocol:
I noticed after two months as my female username I was constantly having to defend my opinions. I mean constantly. I would post something lighthearted, and have people commenting taking my comment literally and telling me I was dumb or I didn’t understand xyz. People were so eager to talk incredibly rudely and condescendingly to me. People were downright hateful and it made me consider leaving.
Then I decided to experiment with usernames and came up with an obviously male name. While people still disagreed with me which is to be expected, I had more people come to my defense when I had a different opinion and absolutely no hateful or condescending comments. I am completely shocked at how different I am treated since having a male username. I am not saying Reddit is sexist, well kind of yes, but I think it’s really interesting and thought that some other girls on here would want to get male usernames and see the difference for themselves.
She posted this in TwoXChromosomes, a subreddit devoted to women and women’s issues that is regularly overrun with angry MRA dudes and an assortment of FemRAs. This time the MRA squad didn’t take over the discussion, and numerous 2XCers reported experiences similar to that of the OP.
earthpeesfire noted:
I had a feminine user name years ago. Fuck that. It was like having a target on my back.
cantstopthe tried to duplicate the experiment on a smaller scale:
Just wanted to say that I made an alt yesterday with a female name, and continue to post the kind of things I normally post under this account. And today I was told I should be raped.
That has NEVER happened in all my 4 years of being on this site with various neutral names.
misscastaway also tried posting with a clearly female name:
I just tried posting on an discussion from this account. Immediately an insult including the word cunt and remarks on how I’m making a fool out of myself.
Might be a coincidence but when posting from my regular account (which is very gender neutral) that I use for discussions related to science, fitness, books etc I have never received this kind of behaviour. Not even when it turned out someone knew more about the subject and I was wrong/short in my knowledge. Then I was given another point of view, with a source – that was it.
I guess I’ll keep using those accounts in parallel now just to see if this was just by chance or if it really makes such a difference.
fatchick400 reported on the results of a similar experiment:
I created this account a few days ago to comment on some fat-hate, and have actually found it really interesting to see reddit from a different point of view.
The biggest surprise for me is the difference in how fat women are treated vs fat men. There is so much more hatred towards the fat women. A lot of people even refer to these women as “it”, completely negating their gender all together.
Meanwhile in the posts about fat men there are a few hateful comments, but they’re mostly full of light hearted jokes. In a few posts where the guys were obviously morbidly obese, barely anyone commented on the guys’ weight at all. Yet in posts with woman who are maybe 200lbs , mocking her weight always seems to be the main focus of conversation.
twofish added her experience to the pile of anecdotal evidence:
Most people on reddit assume I am male until I make it a point to say otherwise. More often than not, once it’s discovered that I own a vagina I’m no longer taken seriously, my opinions are belittled, and a slough of sexist and misogynist jokes/accusations get thrown my way.
I love Reddit for many reasons but it is one of THE most hostile places on the internet to be a woman.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, the locals largely dismissed the experiment as unscientific and biased. As DavidByron put it:
Just seems like someone who set out to “prove” her own biases. She was biased to begin with, she ran the “experiment” in a biased way, interpreted the results in a biased way and then presented them to support her initial assumptions.
It’s the usual princess feminism which says men have it easy and women have it hard even while the exact opposite is happening. Why wouldn’t she say which usernames she used in her “test” so others can look at her methodology? Of course it’s not serious but then that’s the point.
Others explained that they weren’t really sexist because they’re such earnest fanboys of GirlWritesWhat, a woman who is able to bypass the usual MRA misogyny by pandering to the misogynists’ fantasy of male martyrdom.
The woman who posted about the experiment in the first place has now popped in to the r/menrights thread, and has (very politely) suggested to Mr. Byron that he try the experiment himself. I guess we’ll see what happens.
All Women Are Whores, Part XIV: Cat on a Roomba Edition
Cats and Roombas unite in service to the forces of whoredom.
Men of America! You face a grave threat today: Evil feminist slutwalkers are working tirelessly to enslave men by conning them into marrying secret porn-star whores! Over on The Spearhead, an unnamed “Featured Guest” explains the whole dastardly scheme in a post with the intriguing title “Whore is just a label.”
With slutwalkers working hard to remove the stigma of sex for women, you see,
young women in porn face far less stigma than they ever have. So much so that for that young women the leap from wanton behavior at a drunken college party to getting double teamed followed by a full facial in a porn shoot may not be a far leap at all.
Exactly. Because if you’re going to be having sex anyway, why not do it on camera with strangers?
The dollars and cents is that you have a huge growth porn industry demanding a huge number of sex workers who blend invisibly into the population because there is no longer any stigma attached to the world’s oldest profession.
Wait, I thought that prostitution was the world’s oldest profession. I guess porn and prostitution are the same thing now?
Not that it matters, because if you’re a man the evil ladies will keep their sordid whoring from you:
Unlike men women know how to keep a secret. Women don’t brag to their girlfriends, in fact they’ll lie even to themselves. You really have NO IDEA where even that conservative and very virginal girl you’ve proposed to has been until the night she thought she forgot shows up on Youtube.com. Where does that leave an increasing number of American men?
So YouTube is a porn distribution hub now? Or is he suggesting that any woman who has sex is by definition a whore?
Evidently he is, as Mr. Featured Guest then goes on to warn of the dangers of those who are:
Trying to turn a whore into a housewife.
Yes, there are terrific women out there. But single women are angling for a man to pay for their lives, and given that incentive there’s a huge temptation for a woman to present herself falsely, to tell a lot of lies and to make a lot of “stay at home, cook and raise kids” promises she has no intention of keeping. Under US and ESPECIALLY Canadian divorce laws, women are almost never accountable for bad behavior or broken promises. For all the men who thought their betrothed was only slutty the night she met you and who are steaming mad that you’ve been sold a bill of goods, does the marriage contract needs a “false advertisement” clause?
Or do women who have sex with men other than their betrothed – possibly on video, possibly on YouTube — simply need to have the word “whore” tattooed on their foreheads?
The regulars at The Spearhead respond to this sophisticated analysis of contemporary marriage with their usual good sense.
Quentin, in a comment that got 50 upvotes, notes with some alarm that
A lot of women don’t feel bad abut their sexual escapades. In fact, they take pride in them. “Ladies” are an endangered species, and are on the verge of going extinct. All this slutty behavior has really made me lose interest in women. I don’t want to be with a woman who has had sex with a lot of men. If she is easy to get into the sack, then she is a liability in a relationship. I have lost a lot of respect for women over the past several years. Sex, along with marriage, is something most women view as a get-rich-quick scheme. It is disheartening to think I live in a world where being a whore is considered empowering, while being a supportive wife is frowned upon. This world is upside down. … If you act like a whore, then you are going to get treated like a whore. If women were pleasant to be around and were loyal, more men would probably stick around. You reap what you sow, women.
Napoleon (24 upvotes) urges his fellow men to be cautious when dealing with the wily female:
Women these days are increasingly trying to have the best of both worlds and present themselves as wholesome nice girls to the public while hiding a lot of whoring that goes on behind the scenes. There is really no way to know whether a woman is a part-time prostitute or not but a good rule of thumb is to assume that she is until proven otherwise due to the prevalence of such antics.
Silent warns men to be especially suspicious of any woman who seems to know what she’s doing in bed:
Just be careful about the super-sweet girlfriend who knows a little too much about how to do that thing you like, without you having taught her. She may have had a mouthful. But hey, maybe it’s all “in the past”.
YoungMan shares his tale of woe:
Back in my plugged in days I dated a girl for over a year before I found out she used to play with herself on camera for money. I was incensed I had been taken advantage of like that.
Keyster, a bastion of morality who once boasted about dating a 14-year-old (when he was 25), warns men to stay away with women who don’t keep silent about their sexual pasts:
Any woman who feels compelled to reveal her debaucherous past has no intention of having a serious relationship with you.
It’s not a shit test.
It’s meant to show a certian amount of disdain and disrespect for you as a man who doesn’t quite measure up to her standards. Don’t ever forget that.
Yes, because if a woman has had sex with anyone other than you, it’s all about disrespecting you.
And then he adds:
If she says she can’t even remember how many guys she’s f*cked in a rather “matter-of-fact” tone, you’ve entered the Futrelle Zone. Go home and video tape your cat on a Roomba and post it on YouTube. It would be time better spent.
I guess I should be flattered? But alas it was not my cat on the Roomba. I wish I had a Roomba. (Also, I wish I had my cat back, but that’s a whole other and much sadder story.)
Alan Vaughn writes an impassioned defense of pedophiles – sorry, “pedophiles,” in scare quotes – that I’m frankly too tired to bother to cut and paste in here. Check it out yourself if you dare.
Eric has a sad about the poor quality of American women:
Women are presumed to ‘have all the power in relationships’. Really, it’s her choices alone that matter. Women choose to be with thugs and idiots when there are numerous better and more responsible options open to them. The fact that women overwhelmingly terminate relationships with good men and pursue worthless ones is proof in itself that the responsibility lies with them and not with us.
Men, on the other hand, are very limited in their field of choices (unless they expat out). The abysmal quality of American women; women’s complete lack of interest in responsible men; and the ever-impending consequences of acting contrary to misandryist legal and social norms considerably constrict men’s options. Most men, if they were honest about it, would admit that their choices are pretty much limited to the least objectionable—not the most desirable—of available women.
Life is apparently very tough for American men who hate the very idea of women ever having sex with anyone but them. And doubly tough for those who don’t see the inherent hilariousness of cats on Roombas.
Gamer asshole: “Sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community.”
This may be old news to gamers, but a reader just brought it to my attention:
Capcom and IGN recently put on a little online gaming “reality” show called Capcom’s Cross Assault, based on the game Street Fighter x Tekken. The show, like the game, pits a team of Street Fighter players against a Tekken team.
During a live stream of the ongoing battle on day five of the tournament, Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rea made a few remarks criticizing the assholish, and often misogynistic, comments of some of the fighters.
Here’s how the Penny Arcade Report summarized what followed. (I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting several particularly egregious comments in bold.)
“This is Aris,” a voice said on the feed. “If you don’t like onions, you get your sandwich without onions on it, man. This is the fighting game community.” He then stated that sexual harassment and the fighting game community are “one and the same thing.”
The voice belonged to Aris Bakhtanians, the coach of the Tekken team.
“The sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community… it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude. These things have been established for years,” Aris stated. He then noted that making sexual jokes at StarCraft players would be inappropriate, so it’s unfair for anyone to tell fighting game fans they can’t viciously mock women. …
“That’s what you’re trying to do to the fighting game community and it’s not right,” Aris continued. “It’s ethically wrong.” This may be the first time in the history of video games that someone had said that removing sexual harassment is ethically unjust.
Later in the, er, discussion, after someone brought up the harassment of a guy playing a female character (“someone yelling the world “bitch” over and over … and then scream[ing] for her rape when she lost”) Aris responded with this:
“What is unacceptable about that?” Aris asked. “There is nothing unacceptable about that. We’re in America! This isn’t North Korea! We can say what we want.”
You can listen to the whole discussion on this video; it starts, with Rea’s comments, at about one hour forty-five minutes in. (Aris starts commenting about two minutes later.)
Many more appalling details in the PA report post.
Oh, gaming community! Get it the fuck together.
Hey girl, I wish you were a greasy smear on the road: The Men’s Rights subreddit hates on the lady rescued by Ryan Gosling.
Oh, the Men’s Rights subreddit is on a roll! Earlier in the week, as regular readers will already be well aware, a sizeable number of the regulars there were waxing indignant about a spermburgling girlfriend who turned out to be imaginary, and expressing sympathy for the imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary boyfriend, even though he’d admitted to punching her in her imaginary stomach.
Now they’re directing their wrath at a British journalist whom they’ve decided is being insufficiently grateful for being rescued from being hit by a speeding automobile by Ryan Gosling.
The backstory: Earlier in the week, British journalist Laurie Penny was wandering the streets of Manhattan, lost in thought, when she almost stepped off the curb into the path of a taxi. A man standing nearby grabbed her and pulled her to safety. That man happened to be famously hunky young actor Ryan Gosling.
Naturally, Penny tweeted about it, and her tweet aroused something of a Twitterstorm, in part because of the novelty of the situation, and in part because the thought of someone so dashing performing this little act of urban heroism made more than a few ladies (and men) swoon a little. I would probably react the same way if I heard a story about Kate Winslet saving a kitten.
Anyway, Penny was a little bit overwhelmed by all the attention her story was getting, and ended up writing a funny, spiky little essay for Gawker reminding people that while, yes, Ryan Gosling had indeed done a very nice thing for her, for which she was grateful, that it wasn’t really the biggest deal in the world. For one thing, she pointed out, lots of ordinary decent people perform similar acts of “heroism” all the time. For another, there are bigger heroes out there – like those working tirelessly to keep Rick Santorum from becoming our next president.
She ended the piece with this:
I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story. I do not mean any disrespect to Ryan Gosling, who is an excellent actor and, by all accounts, a personable and decent chap. …
But as a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.
And the thing is, I’m sure he would. I’m sure he’s as embarrassed about the attention as Penny is.
Well, for some people, Penny’s refusal to play the “boring supportive role” was simply unacceptable. Over on The National Review, antifeminist asshole Suzanne Venker wrote a snide and misleading piece portraying Penny as an ungrateful bitch:
If Western women want to know where all the good men have gone, they need only look in the mirror. Not only can men no longer hold the door open for women or pay the check after dinner, they can’t even save a woman’s life and get a simple thank you.
Never mind that Penny wrote explicitly that she was “grateful to the dashing and meme-worthy Mr. Gosling.” We can conclude that Venker either has terrible reading comprehension, or is deliberately lying about Penny. In any case, she continued on in this vein:
Feminists have totally destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Not all women seek the feminized version of the American male. Most women like big, strong, sexy men. They want men who are willing to put out fires, fight in combat, and, yes, even save damsels in distress. But in post-feminist America, Marlboro Man is a rare breed. We can thank women like Penny for that.
Well, actually, the reason the Marlboro Man isn’t around any more is that he died of lung cancer. (Well, to be more specific, two of the actors who portrayed the Marlboro Man did in fact die that way.) But let’s continue:
If Americans don’t wake up to the evils of feminism, the next time a woman walks down the wrong side of the street, the men of America will simply walk right past her and let her get hit.
And we’ll have no one blame but ourselves.
Really? Really? I’m pretty sure that Penny’s Gawker essay isn’t actually going to turn American men into a bunch of woman-hating psychopaths. I think we can all agree that Venker is being a giant turd here.
Well, not all of us, I guess. Someone posted Venker’s little screed to the Men’s Rights subreddit – you were wondering when I’d get back to them, weren’t you? And the regulars responded, well, like you would expect them to. Here are two of the most highly upvoted comments there, from two of the subreddit’s most prolific posters.
Stay classy. Men’s Rights Redditors!
Rape jokes: Not a good way to advertise vodka. Also, a non-apology is not a good way to apologize for using a rape joke to advertise vodka.
No thanks, Belvedere vodka. I think I’ll be going with pretty much ANY OTHER BRAND than you the next time I purchase vodka.
After a flurry of complaints online, Belvedere offered this “apology.”
Yeah, pretty sure “sorry if you were offended” does not count as a real apology. Neither does this: Belvedere Vodka, I’m sorry you’re so fucking clueless.
Brother JohntheOther Mansplains it All For You: Rebecca Watson misrepresentation edition.
Blabbity blabbity blab.
Check out this post from PZ Myers, tearing apart a sleazy JohntheOther video about Rebecca Watson. In the video, JtO, the number two man at A Voice for Men, declared Watson a sociopath for allegedly mistreating a “handler” assigned to her at a Skepticon convention.
Trouble is, Watson’s “mistreatment” never actually happened, and her public recounting of her (wholly imaginary) selfish behavior was part of a good-natured prank, with the humor directed not at her handler but at herself and the conference organizer. The handler was of course in on the joke. It would seem that JtO either misunderstood the joke, or simply decided to misrepresent what happened in order to make Watson look like a sociopath.
Are there any truly honest MRAs out there? At this point I cannot think of a single one.
JtO, evidently stung by the criticism, has made the video in question private. And he’s made another video responding to the criticism from Myers, Watson, and the handler from the convention itself.
In the video, he offers his own explanation for why he missed the obvious fact that Watson was making a joke: he claims he didn’t actually watch enough of the original Rebecca Watson video to get to the punchline of her joke before making his diagnoses of her. That might seem to reflect poorly on JtO’s research skills. But he’s not overly troubled by this, evidently. “My bad,” he says, cheerfully.
But he still thinks she’s a sociopath, and argues that the criticism he’s gotten doesn’t stem from his complete misrepresentation of Watson’s joke, but because he’s “struck a nerve.” Then he babbles on about various other crap including Jessica Valenti and weapons of mass destruction and, well, I wasn’t really paying much attention at that point. He ends by calling PZ Myers “Sunshine.”
Here’s that video. I watched the whole fucking 11 minutes and 11 seconds of it. I wouldn’t really recommend that to anyone. You only have to watch about 11 seconds of it to conclude, correctly, that JtO is an ass.
