Category Archives: homophobia
>How to blame feminism for everything: Airport Lesbians Edition
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| Gropes for everyone! |
So I had been assuming that the creepily intrusive new airport screening procedures — you know, the whole “let us look at you naked or we’ll grope you” thing — was the fault of a government willing to trade away our last vestiges of privacy for an illusion of security. But apparently, it’s feminism that’s to blame. And lesbians. “Rex Patriarch,” a blogger who is definitely going his own way, suggests that the new procedures are the “final result” of feminism gone bad:
Look who now runs the TSA, a bull dyke control freak. Look at who works for TSA, bull dyke control freaks and mangina white knights. This army of control freaks was created by feminism. Feminism is not about equality it is about upsetting the natural order creating female superiority through the abuse of men which then mutates into government superiority through the abuse of men and women outside the system.
Mr. Patriarch’s post was, ironically, inspired by a news story about India’s (female) ambassador to the US being groped — er, patted down — by a female Transportation Security Administration screener. I’m not quite sure how that promotes female superiority.
Women Are … Part 3: A Voice For Men edition
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| Britney, don’t you know YOU’RE toxic? |
More, uh, questionable wisdom from angry dudes on the nature of women. Today: comments from A Voice For Men. I’ve highlighted some of the nastiest stuff for easy reference.
Women: Deserve to be shot in the face.
Women are the natural enemies of men. No matter what anyone says and how good women claim to be, that is just the truth. This will never stop and men will continue under the tyranny of women. … We are called rapists, abusers, bullies, and even homophobes because we don’t embrace the faggots biologically backward, queer-ass culture. … I am so fucking tired of this shit, that I really wouldn’t mind shooting a bitch dead in the face. … They are evil. ALL OF THEM!!! … This is a gender war, and women, ALL WOMEN! are the enemies, there is no compromising.
(Note: This comment, even with the whole shooting-women-in-the-face bit, got more upvotes than downvotes from A Voice For Men’s peanut gallery, and “redpill” was not taken to task for actually suggesting murder by the site’s owner, Paul Elam. Lots of other crazy stuff in that comment thread.)
EDITED TO ADD: Elam has now removed this comment, which he says he hadn’t seen before, saying “I am vehemently against violence.” Given that he has posted similarly violent fantasies several times in his own pieces, this is a little difficult to take altogether seriously. (My link is to the version of the page saved on the Internet Archive, which still contains the comment intact.) He claims those other pieces were “satire” and that the violent parts were “taken out of context.” Of course, none of this changes the fact that a comment about “shooting a bitch dead in the face” got more upvotes than downvotes on his site. (Here, by contrast, is a comment that got massive downvotes on his site; you’ll have to click a link there to even make the comment visible.) EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: In this post, I take apart Paul’s claim that he’s being satirical when he talks about violence.
Women are: Toxic, but their vaginas are useful.
Women are toxic – stay away from them, dont be around them for too long and most importantly when pumping them with man juice wear protection so you dont get infected with child support.
Until women regress back into their maternal/house keeping roles use them for the only thing they have to offer to a straight man – their vaginas.
Women are: Malleable, gullible, stupid, bad, irrational, and ridiculous.
In my opinion women are malleable,gullible and lack vision.The statements they make are ludicrous,they are therefore stupid, driven on by one thing and one thing only-their sexual power. The day someone creates a pill that desexualizes them in our eyes, then that is it. It is over. I don’t for a single second believe that the nature of women has transformed over the ages. Go back in time and the same nonsense will be as visible then as it is now. … women are this way by nature. The good thing is,they have demonstrated, to their everlasting detriment, just how bad, irrational, and ridiculous they really are. Time to stop pandering.
Women are: Crazy, undisciplined, irresponsible, toxic, entitled, and they’ll probably get your penis infected.
[W]omen in this country my age and younger are out of their minds! They have no concept of discipline or responsibility. They can talk with the best of them but their actions paint an entirely different picture. It’s not going to an extreme to want to get away from Western women entirely. They are toxic human beings. It is dangerous physically (many of them have STD’s), economically (look at hulk hogan’s ex and her new yacht the alimoney), religiously (these girls are some of the MOST entitled I have seen), etc.. Even the best of them slip into the entitled mentality far too frequently.
>Straight talk on homophobia … on the Men’s Rights subreddit??
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Oh Reddit. Sometimes you make me so sad. Case in point: the 5,415 upvotes Redditors gave to this old dog of a story, a blatantly misogynist, and blatantly made-up, revenge-vasectomy tale from the “Best of Craigslist.” Mitigating factors: the fact that some commenters correctly labeled the story a hateful fake; the 4,582 downvotes the story got (resulting in “only” 833 net upvotes).
But sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. Even as I was contemplating the idiotic reaction to this idiotic vasectomy story, I ran across another headline: “Does homophobia affect straight males too?” Good question. Weirdly, the post was from the Men’s Rights subreddit. Hoping for the best but fearing the worst, I took a look. Lo and behold, the post had actually inspired a real, honest discussion of the issues.
The OP set the stage with a few specific questions:
Have you ever hesitated to become close to another male for fear that it might be misinterpreted by someone else? Was there ever a time you resisted getting close to another male emotionally because you were afraid it might be seen as sexual? Does the fear of being called gay or a faggot ever change the way you behave in front of other males?
Among the answers there were of course a few jokes, including one that was actually sort of funny:
dontputsaltinyoureye 9 points
it has had a tremendous effect on my life. i am unable to wear my avril lavigne [shirt] in public due to the fear. WHY CAN I NOT WEAR MY AVRIL LAVIGNE SHIRT?!
And there was the requisite reference to Glee:
AGenericGoon 44 points
I am heterosexual, and watch/enjoy glee.
I will take this secret to the grave.
But there were also a number of bracingly honest comments, comments that would not be out of place on a feminist or LGBT message board. Some commenters talked about being gay-bashed – even though they aren’t gay. Others talked about how hetero-normative gender roles force men to keep quiet about their feelings:
TheBananaKing 27 points
Absolutely. all -normative behaviours box people in.
Straight guy here. … there’s an awful lot of restriction and anxiety in inter-male behaviour. You can’t ever be sad or hurt – only angry. You can’t extend comfort or affection towards another guy, except via humorous taunting / rivalry / aggression (eg play-fighting), unless you’re very, very drunk. You have to do this kind of… reverse double-entendre the entire time, translating everything into John Wayne before you speak or act it, and back again to understand others. It’s a pain in the ass.
Others offered more personal takes on what it’s like to be a straight guy who’s frequently taken to be gay:
ecartes 9 points
I talk with a lisp and dress really well. I’m also heterosexual.
Almost everyone I initially meet believes, nay, KNOWS, that I’m, ACTUALLY homosexual. It’s weird, living with the thought that everyone I meet thinks I’m gay. Although I will never know fully the oppression that some gay people face, I feel like I’ve felt a lot of it just from being perceived as gay. …
And perhaps the most unexpected of all:
soylentcoleslaw 33 points
If I acted on my normal impulses, I’d be extremely effeminate. I love cute things and cute clothes, I have subconscious feminine mannerisms, and I’d love a strong partner who makes me feel safe and who would take charge. I’ve never had a gay fantasy in my life. The thought of being with another man just doesn’t do it for me, but given what I want and who I naturally am, I’m said on numerous occasions how much easier my love life would be if it did. As it is, if I want to attract someone new, I have to tamp all that down and put on my reasonably masculine face, and maybe if I’m lucky, I can reveal some of that side of myself gradually. But I can’t be totally myself. Never. … So I go on pretending to be manly sometimes and hopefully don’t screw up.
Oh, sure, there were some answers that were bluntly homophobic — redwood9 states plainly that “I just hate fags … I hate all cocksuckers and those who bend over and take it in the ass” — but they made up a tiny minority of the comments, and were generally downvoted.
So what’s going on here? Has the Men’s Rights Subreddit suddenly become a beacon of open-mindedness? Not exactly. Most of those commenting in the topic don’t appear to be Men’s Rights regulars, but Redditors who were drawn to the topic when it appeared on Reddit’s main page. Here’s what someone who is a MR regular had to say:
aetheralloy 0 points
“Bro’s” and “bromance” is the term often used to shame men … Women (feminists) in particular love to use it. …
The really interesting question here isn’t if it affects males, but why women are both extremely homophobic towards gay males while also willing to use them as emotional buddies.
Yeah, damn those feminist women and their hatred of gay men!
So, no group hug just yet. But it’s good to see an outburst of good sense in a discussion forum that’s often pretty backwards.
It’s just a pity that the moderator of Men’s Rights remains convinced “that there is an international, feminist, antimale conspiracy,” as he puts it in the sidebar, and that the subreddit’s slogan remains “Earning scorn from feminists since March 19, 2008.”
Because, you know what? If you’re a guy feeling boxed in by normative gender roles, some of the best people in the world to talk to about it are, you know, feminists.
>Anglo-haters gonna Anglo-hate
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| Bill O’Reilly secretly spreading Feminazi man-hate. |
The fellow behind the charmingly named Anglobitch blog — devoted to the notion that “Anglo-American Women Suck!” — has delivered up a rambling, loopy rant about hate crime legislation, which essentially suggests that the very existence of such legislation reflects an “inherent, all-pervasive hatred of men” in the “Anglosphere.”
For while Hate Crime is prohibited by each Anglo-American national state, pan-anglosphere misandry is actively promoted by each state against its male citizens.
His first example of this is … Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. I’m not sure exactly when Murdoch was promoted from media mogul to head of state, but never mind. Our Anglo-blogger is off and running:
The Murdochratic media ceaseless vilifies men as outcasts, misfits and sexual deviants while exalting women as paragons of virtue, beauty and intellect. This anti-male propaganda is at least as relentless as the Nazi media campaign against the Jews -- but even more insidious, since its agendas are covert and unstated. … And, as in the Third Reich, hatred of the outcast group (in this case, men) has been fully normalized since the rise of gender-feminism in the late sixties.
Uh, yeah, that agenda is pretty … covert. I don’t remember there being a lot of Jews at the top of the Nazi party. But it seems like every time I turn on Fox News I see someone from “the outcast group (in this case, men)” spewing what to the untrained ear sounds like reactionary nonsense. (I mean, there’s Gretchen Carlson, but she’s got to share the set with Steve Doocy and that other dude.) But apparently I can’t see Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck for what they are: footsoldiers of our feminazi overlords. Er, overladies? Overwomyn?
Our Anglobitcher then moves from the anti-male evils of Murdoch to the anti-male evils of the law. Apparently divorce law is so biased towards women that
many Anglo-American women consciously plan for a ‘starter marriage’ to fleece some unsuspecting male [which] proves that malicious misandry is rapidly becoming a female lifestyle-choice.
After a brief denunciation of the welfare state — men pay the taxes and women benefit! — Anglobitcher comes to the US military draft, for which only males have to register “despite them being tacitly viewed as Untermenschen by law, government and the media.” Hey, I didn’t like having to register, and I don’t think any one of either sex should have to, but, uh, no one has been drafted in the US since the Vietnam war.
So the first of his examples of state oppression is based on the idea that Rupert Murdoch is The State, not to mention some sort of feminazi. And his last is based on guys having to sign what is for all practical purposes a meaningless scrap of paper. The Anglobitcher nevertheless concludes “that males represent the primary victims of ‘hate crime’ across the Anglosphere.”
Oh, but he’s not quite done. For what angry denunciation of hate crime laws is complete without, you know, some good old-fashioned homophobia, served with a side order of transsexual-bashing:
It is also telling that the only male groups effectively protected by pan-Anglosphere hate-crime laws are gays and transsexuals. This is entirely to be expected: such males simulate the female role which, as we have endlessly observed, is routinely and blindly exalted by Anglo-Saxon culture. When the only way for men to achieve protection from ‘hate crime’ is to adopt homosexuality (or female genitalia) the true nature of Anglo ‘patriarchy’ reveals itself. Only women and their mincing mimics can enter that charmed circle; the healthy, potent male never can.
Dude, you’re an Anglodouche.
EDIT: Mr. Anglobitch has responded to this post. His response is actually a bit more coherent than the original post, though, admittedly, that’s not much of an accomplishment.
>Douchebag Asst. Attorney General who harassed gay student gets the boot
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| Shirvell in action. |
Some good, long overdue, news. Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan assistant attorney general who’s been harassing a gay University of Michigan student, has been fired. Some details, from Freep.com:
Shirvell had been criticized for his blog in which he calls Chris Armstrong, the president of the Michigan Student Assembly, a radical homosexual, a Nazi and Satan’s representative on the assembly. Philip Thomas, Shirvell’s attorney, had said his client is expressing his free-speech rights.The firing was confirmed in a statement this afternoon from AG Mike Cox, who said Shirvell was fired for conduct unbecoming a state employee, especially that of an assistant attorney general.“To be clear, I refuse to fire anyone for exercising their First Amendment rights, regardless of how popular or unpopular their positions might be. However, Shirvell repeatedly violated office policies, engaged in borderline stalking behavior, and inappropriately used state resources, our investigation showed.”
According to Cox, Shirvell had, among other things:
Showed up at the home of a private citizen three times, including once at 1:30 a.m. … harass[ed] Armstrong’s friends as they were socializing in Ann Arbor … [repeatedly called] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, Armstrong’s employer, in an attempt … to cause Pelosi to fire Armstrong; Attempt[ed] to “out” Armstrong’s friends as homosexual — several of whom were not gay.
Oh, and he did some of this while at work, Cox says. And apparently lied to the Attorney General during his disciplinary hearing.
CLARIFICATION: Shirvell is not part of the MRM. I am posting about this because gay-bashing is an important men’s issue. See the comment by Sandy below.
Further Reading: Prison Rape
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| From Stop Prisoner Rape (now Just Detention) |
Rape in US prisons, jails and other detention facilities is a serious problem, and a disgrace to our country.
Men’s Rights Activists often complain, quite justifiably, about prison rape jokes. Typically, they attribute the double standard towards prison rape jokes as an indication that, as one MRA put it in a recent discussion, “nobody gives a shit about men.” As I’ve pointed out, this explanation doesn’t take us very far, given that women are also raped in prison, and that people make jokes about that too. (Indeed, there is an entire genre of “women in prison” exploitation films that sexualizes this abuse.)
More to the point, most MRAs don’t seem terribly interested in actually attempting to do much about prison rape beyond complaining about obnoxious rape jokes or making rhetorical points about the “disposability” of men. (See below for the few examples of MR blogs I could find that have addressed the issue as more than a bullet point in a laundry list of complaints; I’ve found much more serious discussion of prison rape on feminist blogs.) Anyone who is interested in doing something about it should consider getting in touch with Just Detention, a human rights advocacy group working to stop sexual abuse in detention facilities.
Some basic information about prison rape. I’ve bolded the crucial information.
Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09, by Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., Paige M. Harrison
An estimated 4.4% of prison inmates and 3.1% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission to the facility, if less than 12 months. Nationwide, these percentages suggest that approximately 88,500 adults held in prisons and jails at the time of the survey had been sexually victimized.
Female inmates in prison (4.7%) or jail (3.1%) were more than twice as likely as male inmates in prison (1.9%) or jail (1.3%) to report experiencing inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization. … Most victims of staff sexual misconduct were males; most perpetrators were females.
Note: Men make up the overwhelming majority of rape victims in prison — 90 percent — largely because the overwhelming majority of inmates are male. While the number of men raped in prison is appalling, I would like to clear up one Men’s Rights Myth: that the number of men raped inside prison is greater than the number of women raped outside of prison. This is simply false; the numbers aren’t even close: again, while the estimate of the total number of people (male and female) currently being held in prison who have been raped there in the past year is 88,500, estimates of the total number of those raped per year (outside of prison) range from about 200,000 to more than a million (the real number is probably closer to the latter); estimates suggest that anywhere from 86% to 94% of rape victims are female, and that males may make up to 99% of the perpetrators. See here (doc format) for a look at various estimates, and here (pdf) for more details from a large scale survey. As is the case with rapes in general, the vast majority of prison rapes go unreported.
EDITED TO ADD: The information in the previous paragraph is outdated. The Department of Justice has revised upwards its estimate of the number of prisoners (male and female) who are sexually assaulted each year to 216,000. Which means that considerably more men are raped per year than previously thought. There is still no clean and direct way to directly compare rapes of men and women, in prison and out, because the various studies out there use different methodologies and different definitions of sexual assault. Stephanie Zvan drills into the numbers in great detail here; anyone seriously interested in this issue should read her post carefully.
Information from Just Detention:
Overview:
Sexual abuse behind bars is a widespread human rights crisis in prisons and jails across the US. Aaccording to the best available research, 20 percent of inmates in men’s prisons are sexually abused at some point during their incarceration. The rate for women’s facilities varies dramatically from one prison to another, with one in four inmates being victimized at the worst institutions.
In a 2007 survey of prisoners across the country, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that 4.5 percent (or 60,500) of the more than 1.3 million inmates held in federal and state prisons had been sexually abused in the previous year alone. A BJS survey in county jails was just as troubling; nearly 25,000 jail detainees reported having been sexually abused in the past six months.
Unfortunately, the data provided by the still represent only a fraction of the true number of detainees who are victimized, especially of those held in county jails. The number of admissions to local jails over the course of a year is approximately 17 times higher than the nation’s jail population … .
(Source pdf)
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer inmates are the chief target of sexual abuse in prison
Sexual abuse of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) inmates constitutes one of the most rampant and ignored human rights violations in the US today. In a 2007 academic study, funded by the California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation and conducted at six California men’s prisons, 67 percent of inmates who identified as LGBTQ reported having been sexually assaulted by another inmate during their incarceration, a rate that was 15 times higher than for the inmate population overall.
(Source pdf)
Sexual Abuse and STDs:
Sexual violence in detention spreads disease. Prisoner rape victims are highly vulnerable to contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. … In 2004, the HIV prevalence rate inside US prisons was more than four times higher than in society overall. Hepatitis C rates are 8 to 20 times higher in prisons than on the outside … The rates of infection for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis are likewise significantly higher among inmates than in the population at-large.
(Source pdf)
For more information from Just Detention, see here for fact sheets, and here for links to useful articles and studies.
Human Rights Watch Report: No Escape, Human Rights Watch, 2001.
Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature, National Institute of Justice, 2004.
Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson, Comparison of Sexual Coercion Experiences Reported by Men and Women in Prison, 21 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 1591 (2006)
Cathy Young: Assault Behind Bars
Interesting discussion of prison rape jokes on Reddit.
Some useful blog posts about prison rape, and prison rape jokes:
The Curvature: Prison rape and complacency
Feministe: Prison Rape: Assault shouldn’t be part of the sentence
Sex abuse rampant at youth prisons around the country
An old story: the cruel and unusual punishment of prison rape
Ms Magazine blog: Prison rape: Can it be stopped?
Equal Writes: Rape in prison is still rape
Alas, a blog: Ezra Klein on Prison Rape
Feminist Critics: Discussion of the Alas, a blog post linked above
Alas, a blog: More on prison rape
Alas, a blog: Blog post round-up: Prison rape (Extensive list of links)
Reason Hit and Run: Mocking prison rape for fun and profit
Men’s Rights blogs on prison rape:
Human Stupidity: Stop Prison Rape! Legalize Corporal Punishment (Whipping)
Female Offenders: Prison Rape Report
Toy Soldiers: Cost of Prison Rape
Menstuff: Prison Rape
Mens-rights.net: Prison Rape: the challenge of prevention and enforcement (Note that this cut-and-pasted post is illustrated by an animated gif of a pair of boots with the caption: “These boots were made for kicking feminists in the cunt.”)
>Around the world in a Google-Translated daze
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| No girls allowed. |
So yesterday I asked the MRA masses to post the names of blogs, websites, online manifestos, etc. that in their opinion represent the best that the Men’s Rights Movement has to offer.
I got a lot of comments, but, er, I didn’t exactly get a ton of suggestions. The first commenter to come through with actual URLs was Yohan, a non-native English speaker who mainly reads non-American sites. He posted three URLs, all to sites not in English.
But hey, we live in a global village, and I’m not going to let a little thing like language get in the way. So I pasted his URLs into Google Translate and took a look.
The first site he mentioned, a German Men’s Rights hub called MANNdat, looked, sadly, almost completely identical to any number of American Men’s Rights sites, from its page on “Feminist Myths” right on down to the obligatory “Woman Behaving Badly” post on its front page.
The second URL led to an Austrian site with the translated title “Executioner,” which looked too dour and creepy to me, so I didn’t even bother poking around.
I approached the third site he mentioned with a little bit more optimism. It was Japanese, so I figured the combination of vast cultural differences, gross translation errors, and the natural hilarity of internet antifeminists would lead to pure win, as they say on the internet.
And at first, I did indeed seem to have struck internet gold. I found myself utterly charmed by the site, which is apparently called “Feminist Fantasy,” and which through the magic of Google Translate seemed to be a virtual repository of fantastic Dadaist poetry:
Identity of feminist leadership
America seems to be the queen of quibble.
Around in a thoughtful but very good at sophistry,
In the United States to refrain from the country so fast lady,
I argue that it is no longer anyone to organize a quibble
I can even sort of agree with that. America really is the “queen of quibble.”‘
But, alas, my euphoria was short-lived. As I kept looking around the site I found some things that even Google Translate couldn’t render charming. Like the articles “Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Netherlands” and “Gay marriage is a human misery,” which explains, in Google-translate-speak:
In order to destroy the institution of marriage, the idea of same-sex marriage are pushing a plan to destroy the sanctity of marriage.
So God does not bless same-sex marriage in the Bible the same shape as opposite sex marriage.
Yeah, I don’t need a perfect translation to get the gist of that article. Or this one, which I reproduce in its Google-translated entirety:
American abomination
Abomination ever played the glorious U.S. military in Iraq. Why such a moral collapse happened. Between men and women of loose morals are the leading cause of it. That gender equality and women soldiers of the United States, the relationship between men and women, who had loose sexual relations, she was weakening resistance to an immoral abuse.
Also, female sumo wrestlers? They aren’t having any of that either.
So much for my foray into international antifeminism.
>Famous all over town
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Apparently, they can’t look away. A couple of days after Paul Elam — the MRA elder I am scheduled to debate on the topic of domestic violence later this week — launched a weird tirade against me on his blog, I’m now getting attention (and some traffic) from Ferdinand Bardamu at In Mala Fide, in a post urging MRAs to, er, stop paying attention to me.
As is generally the case with my MRA critics, it’s basically a bunch of empty insults. But as empty insults go, they’re not half bad. He calls me, among other things, a “twerp,” a “feminist quisling,” and “a miserable mediocrity who’s trying to get famous, an ant in our blog ecosphere.” He somehow manages to avoid the term “mangina” altogether.
There is one bit that’s actually obnoxious. In an attempt to explain something he said in a homophobic post of his I quoted last week, he says this:
radical gay activists, in their obnoxious way of shoving their lifestyles in the faces of the heterosexual majority and demonizing them, are poking and prodding an elephant. Elephants are big, heavy and have sharp tusks, and can gore or stomp you to death without breaking a sweat. If gays don’t clean up their act and stop treating straight people with contempt … they could inspire a violent homophobic backlash. Capisce?
Is it just me, or does anyone else suspect that the people given to “warning” gays about a “possible violent homophobic backlash” would be the first to get in line to stomp gays like an elephant in such a backlash?
EDIT: Oops! Speaking of attention, I forgot to add this actual screen capture. Hey, try it yourself.
>"Fag bashing," woman-hating, and Men’s Rights myopia
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One of the many failings of the Men’s Rights Movement — and “failing” really isn’t a strong enough word for it — is the way in which it ignores or denies real problems faced by boys and men that don’t fit into its grand conspiracy theory in which all the ills faced by men are caused by evil women or by men corrupted and seduced, personally and/or politically, by said evil women.
One of these problems, and it’s a big one, is the “fag bashing” that’s rampant among boys of high school and college age. The atmosphere of abuse has a tragic effect on gay teenagers, as the recent rash of suicides illustrates all too poignantly. And it also has an enormous effect on boys who aren’t gay but who have their masculinity challenged constantly by other boys.
While the MRM is obsessed with the notion of the smug, castrating (Western) woman, the entitled “princess” who looks down on decent, ordinary “beta” males and Nice Guys in favor of jerky, aggressive alpha males, it pays virtually no attention to the daily nightmares inflicted on boys by other boys (and men by other men) by “fag bashing.”
Again, take the recent gay teen suicides. While they have inspired magazine cover stories and ongoing discussion on feminist blogs, the only MRA blog of any prominence that even mentioned any of the suicides, to the best of my knowledge, was the False Rape Society, which essentially used the suicide of Tyler Clementi as an excuse to bash feminism, as I pointed out in a recent post, and (as cat pointed out in a comment here) to turn the story of “brutality against a gay kid” into one “about how hard it is to be hetero.”
While MRAs hate it if anyone calls them “fags” or otherwise criticizes their masculinity, they routinely deride any men they don’t like as a “manginas,” and various other terms to suggest they are not “real men.” A few MRAs, like the folks at the blog No Ma’am, bash gays and lesbians quite openly; they’ve also, you may recall, labeled me a “poof” (among other things)
One of the smartest takes I’ve seen on the phenomenon of anti-gay bullying comes from male feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer. In a recent post on “homosociality and homophobia,” he puts the recent suicides in a broader context. Drawing on the research of sociologist C.J. Pascoe, Schwyzer describes the ways in which “fag discourse” permeates American high school:
The discourse manifests itself in the almost incorrigible way in which young men label each other “fags” while seeking to avoid having that label applied to them. According to this discourse, fear of being called out publicly as a “fag” is the primary driving force behind what Pascoe cleverly calls the display of “compulsive heterosexuality.” … Pascoe notes that among young men desperate to establish their masculine bona fides with their peers, what we see in American high schools amounts to compulsive, almost frantic efforts by young men to prove their manhood.
Anyone who has worked with adolescent boys knows how much anxiety many of them feel about their own masculinity. It’s not news to say that our sons, like their fathers before them, often have to endure or participate in physical or at least verbal violence that we tragically and falsely believe is necessary to transition into manhood. … The real stigma in being labeled a “fag” doesn’t lie in the association with homosexuality, but with being seen as feminine.
There’s no easy solution for a problem that is so pervasive, but Schwyzer argues that “perhaps the best way to “inoculate against cruelty”is … to encourage strong non-sexual relationships between boys and girls at every age.” Going back to a review he wrote of Michael Kimmel’s book Guyland, a study of teen boys and young men, Schwyzer notes that
boys who have close female friends are much less likely to exhibit the worst and most destructive tendencies of the Guy Code. After all, the “guy code” is wrapped up in the notion that approval from other men … is the most precious commodity a young man can pursue. Even heterosexual conquest is, ultimately, a means of gaining approval from the guys. Young men who have friends of both sexes are less likely to be held hostage to solely masculine approval; they can receive non-sexual validation from their female friends — and that validation is less likely to be connected to the brutal “sturdy oak” ethos of the Guy Code.
And they are less likely to participate in the relentless onslaught of cruelty towards their gay and lesbian peers.
These are lessons that the Men’s Rights Movement — or whatever rises up to supplant it — will have to learn if it wants to be a movement that really benefits boys and men, straight and gay alike, instead of indulging regressive, self-defeating and often dangerous fantasies of manhood that demonize “fags” and women alike.
>QuoteOTD: I Love a Parade
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You know, I didn’t bother reading the whole thing, which has something to do with Carl Paladino, and apartheid, and elephant poking, whatever that means, but this little nugget stood out in the latest post on In Mala Fide, a generally retrograde Men’s Rights-ish blog:
“Gay culture” … has about as much cultural legitimacy as redneck jokes. A bunch of nearly-naked men marching down a major city street beating each other with riding crops and wearing makeup is not a legitimate expression of culture, any more than a group of married dudes finger-fucking their wives on a giant vagina float would be an expression of culture.
I’m not sure that’s really a good comparison, and his whole argument sounds a tad homophobic to me, but I will say this: I would totally go to that parade.
