Category Archives: hypocrisy
Does A Voice for Men really think that firebombing is a form of non-violence?
Reading through some comments on Men’s Rights hub A Voice for Men the other day, I ran across a fairly bloodthirsty contribution from an MRA with the charming nickname Brutal Antipathy, suggesting that the Occupy Wall Street protesters needed a bit of what he called “the ol’ Tienanmen Square treatment.”
Mr. Antipathy’s rhetorical outburst struck me as fairly typical of the tough-guy rhetoric that the site’s regulars love to indulge in — though usually the targets of the rhetoric are feminists, not Occupy Wall Street activists.
So I was a bit surprised to see site founder Paul Elam respond with this:
It seems a little odd for Elam to claim to be shocked — shocked! — to find such rhetoric on his site. Elam, after all, seems to positively revel in making his own vaguely threatening pronouncements towards his ideological enemies.
In a recent fundraising appeal, for example, Elam let out all the stops:
We now have a team of individuals that goes beyond what we advertise on our pages, and we are gearing up to add a new doomsday prophesy to 2012. Let’s put it this way: The fembots better hope the Mayan’s were right about next year, because they would rather deal with that than the things we are cooking up. …
Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.
Elam is purposefully vague about just what he means by “inflicting pain,” but it is hard not to read this comment as a threat of something dire.
Others on the site are similarly fond of this sort of vague, threatening language. MRA blogger Fidelbogen, recently brought on board as a contributor to AVfM, let loose in a recent comment on those who think MRAs should tone down their rhetoric towards feminists and other enemies:
Apparently, Elam believes that the deliberate vagueness of these kinds of threats makes them shining examples of Gandhian non-violence — or at least that it gives the site the requisite “plausible deniability” if — when? — someone actually moves beyond the threats to actual violence.
It’s ok, evidently, to talk about “inflicting pain” on your enemies, so long as you don’t specify just how. It’s ok to boast about frightening your enemies, to muse about “stalking” individual feminists, to post their personal information online, and so on and so on.
Heck, apparently it’s not even a problem if someone, using the personal information provided on the site, actually tracks down individuals targeted by Elam and pals and quite literally kills them. As AVfM managing editor John the Other put it in a recent post (which I wrote about here):
And what if they get killed David? What if rather than be arrested – as promoters of hate, and public advocates of murder, what if these depraved and murderous female supremacists come to harm at the hands of a citizen. If that happens, it will mean that a society’s system of law, designed to prevent hate organizations, and to allow redress of grievance through non violent due process is gone, wiped out by your ideology of violence and hate.
Nonetheless, JtO, like Elam, insists that “I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
But all this dancing around the issue of violence is rather a moot point, given the one rather striking exception that Elam has allowed to his “no explicit advocacy of violence” rule.
And that is the terrorist manifesto he’s been hosting on his site since last summer.
I’m referring, of course, to the lengthy manifesto written by Tom Ball, a man who burned himself to death on the steps of a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire last summer in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court.
Ball has been hailed as a hero in numerous articles on AVfM, and he is mentioned in an “invocation” in the new theme song for AVfM Radio.
The manifesto is posted on AVfM — in its “activism” category.
What sort of “activism” did Ball advocate? Hint: It involves Molotov cocktails, and government buildings.
In his words (emphasis mine):
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. … [T]he dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out. …
There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy- feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of a FEMA
At this point the AVfM editors cut Ball off in mid-sentence, and insert this “Editor’s note”:
Editor’s note:
Several paragraphs in this copy of Mr Ball’s original letter have been omitted. The omitted paragraphs contained detailed instructions on the manufacture and use of simple incendiary devices.
If you are really interested in seeing the omitted sections, you can find the complete manifesto elsewhere in the Mansophere.
Ball was quite serious about all this, and hoped that his self-immolation would inspire other “activists” to “manufacture and use” his favored sort of “simple incendiary devices,” as the AVfM editors gingerly put it. Ball himself was a bit more blunt:
I only managed to get the main door of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, NH. I would appreciate it if some of you boys would finish the job for me. They harmed my children. The place is evil. So take it out. …
And bring a can of spray paint to these fires. Paint the word COLLABORATORS ( two L’s with an S on the end) on the building before you burn it.
Ball frankly acknowledged that if others followed his suggestions, people would die:
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
How does Ball’s explicit advocacy of terrorist acts directed at government buildings, acts that if carried out would almost inevitably mean the deaths of people within those buildings, square with Elam’s purported no-advocacy-of-violence policy for his website?
You’ll have to ask him. I have no fucking clue.
Some of those video game princesses ain’t so Peachy
Why can't they all be like Princess Peach?
It’s almost impossible to catalogue all the ways men are oppressed by women in contemporary gynocratic society. There are so many! For example, did you know that men are oppressed by female characters in video games? I know, right? The last bastion of red-blooded manliness, invaded by imaginary ladies!
Luckily, the fellows at MGTOWforums.com are on the case, exposing this foul virtual misandry. I Am started off a recent discussion on the subject by asking
WTF is with empowered women in video games now? …
I see a new trend in the video/computer game world and that is the increase in strong playable female characters.
Now, I am no hardcore gamer but I do play computer games often and the recent one I have been playing recently is Shogun 2 total war. Now for those who don’t know what this game is, it is a strategy game based on the military of feudal Japan. I recently bought an upgrade for the game the other day and guess what one of the strongest military units was? Nuns. I shit you not. The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game. Somehow I doubt that in real life a nun would have swung a sword or used a spear faster and harder than a feudal warlord, and this game was based on history.
Clearly nuns are incapable of manlike swordplay, though it is true that they are capable reenacting famous internet panda sneeze videos. (I have seen video proof of this.) But Shogun 2 does not depict them sneezing like pandas. It depicts them fighting.
This is an outrage because video games are meant to be a perfectly accurate reflection of reality. Obviously there is nothing even slightly unrealistic about any of this:
Most of us dudes are in fact capable of karate-chopping heads in two. We just don’t like to show off all the time.
I think I have the right to ask steam and other gaming companes: WTF with the subliminal brainwashing? What now when I buy or play a game women will be doing all the ass kicking? …
I call bullshit on this subject. Video games are the last place for guys to hang out and now women are taking over. Why not just save us the trouble and instead of eliminating our fantasy world just throw us in work camp to provide for thier bastard children (literally speaking) while they shit all over us…wait they already do that.
I Am is not the only dude who’s noticed this alarming femtrend. Goldenfetus added his observations:
I’ve noticed this too, and it drives me insane. Was co-oping Gears 3 last month and there’s a point where 2nd player has to take over a female character. Almost ruined the game for me. It may seem minor, but once you’re aware of this type of brainwashing it’s impossible to ignore. There’s no way a slim female could keep up with the massive battle-hardened male Gears in that kind of environment. They would be a liability as they are in real life combat.
Exactly! By contrast, the male characters in Gears of War 3 are all completely accurate representations of real-world men.
This is what dudes look like, for real.
Goldenfetus continued:
You’ll see the same thing in most stat-based role-playing games as well, where you have the option of a female player character – like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, D&D, etc. The women never have any strength or intelligence penalties compared to the males. … They want to give the impression that people of any race, gender, and sexual-orientation are interchangeable – that there are no differences in ability between them, and that only a bigot could think otherwise. I’m sick of it too.
At the very least, female characters should be depicted as carriers of cooties.
Despite the very serious subject matter – video game misandry is never funny! – Xtc tried to lighten the mood with a little humor:
It would be hilarious to portray the female characters realistically. If you chose the female character in your FPS [First Person Shooter] she would have to move very slowly, dragging the gun around. You could build in some extra shake to the crosshairs to represent hopeless accuracy. Every time you needed to reload your gun, instead of just pressing a button, you’d have to find a male character and go through some flirting dialogue options to persuade him to do it for you. One out of every four missions the game would tell you that you were sitting out this one due to ‘women’s issues’.
Calloway, for his part, offered some historical perspective:
This is nothing new. I got heavy into gaming back in the late 90’s and even back then they had Tomb Raider, S.I.N., etc. Even in the original Unreal, you played as a big-breasted female.
I saw a documentary on the making of the original Tomb Raider once. The lead character, Lara Croft, was originally going to be a man. They saw him as an Indiana Jones-type character. Then, one of the designers suggested it be a woman because “if you’re going to be playing a game for hours, you might as well have something good to look at”. …
When you first take the red pill, it’s amazing the things you see. It’s as if you had blinders on before, and all of sudden they’ve been removed, allowing you to actually understand what you’ve been seeing.
Yep. And what you’ve been seeing is Lara Croft’s ass. Lara Croft’s ass oppresses men! The red pill tells me so!
Also, those tiny misandrist shorts just make the gynpression worse.
Now we come to the clincher.
When you try to get romantic with the imaginary ladies in video games, they don’t act like Roissy and those dudes say ladies act. I mean, you can’t even neg them! As Dave sadly pointed out:
I remember about 12 years ago playing the Baldur’s Gate rpg series and there were some romance dialog paths between your character and some of the women who could join your group but you had to treat them very nice. You couldn’t give them any attitude or make fun of them otherwise it would be over.
Basically you have to be a total mangina towards women in most games if you want to bed them.
Even imaginary ladies are stuck up bitches!
The horror!
I had a
MRAs: Let’s bring back torture devices for women!
Actual 16th century Scottish "Scold's Bridle."
When you think they can’t get any creepier, they do. Here’s a disturbing new Men’s Rights meme-in-formation I’ve recently run across.
In a late-December rant about anti-porn feminist Gale Dines, the self-proclaimed “Male Renaissance Agitator” who calls himself Fidelbogen wrote:
In olden days of rough village justice she’d have gotten the scold’s bridle, or the the ducking stool, or the stocks. And quite right.
A couple of days later, regular A Voice for Men commenter DruidV, perhaps inspired by Fidebogen’s post, made a strikingly similar suggestion on that site:
I urge all Men here to have a look at wiki’s description of what was commonly known as a scold’s bridle, or the Branks. For whatever foolish reason, this item was done away with some time ago. This invention to end Men’s suffering, needs to be brought back into public acceptance and application, post haste, imo.
So let’s take a look at the Wikipedia page he linked to and see just what exactly this “Scold’s Bridle” was:
A scold’s bridle, sometimes called “the branks”, as well as “brank’s bridle” was a punishment device used primarily on women, as a form of torture and public humiliation.[1] It was an iron muzzle in an iron framework that enclosed the head. The bridle-bit (or curb-plate) was about 2 inches long and 1 inch broad, projected into the mouth and pressed down on top of the tongue[2]. The “curb-plate” was frequently studded with spikes, so that if the tongue moved, it inflicted pain and made speaking impossible.[3] Wives that were seen as witches, shrews and scolds, were forced to wear a brank’s bridle, which had been locked on the head of the woman and sometimes had a ring and chain attached to it so her husband could parade her around town and the town’s people could scold her and treat her with contempt; at times smearing excrement on her and beating her, sometimes to death.
Emphasis mine.
I will be charitable and assume that both Fidelbogen and DruidV were joking. That is, they don’t literally want to strap women’s heads into ghastly torture devices, smear them with shit and beat them to death. They just think that the very notion is hilarious.
Whether the suggestions were made seriously or not, they’re still pretty hateful. Given that Fidelbogen was recently taken aboard as a regular writer for A Voice for Men, and that DruidV’s comment on that site got mostly upvotes (and no criticism) from the regulars there, would it be fair to call A Voice for Men the “underbelly of a hate movement?”
I’m not sure why that particular phrase popped into my head, but somehow it seems all too appropriate.
Manosphere dudes: Let’s set up fake feminist blogs to take down feminism!
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog disguised as a cat.
Over on the always repugnant In Mala Fide, a guest blogger by the name of What is To Be Done recently offered his comrades in the “anti-establishment / man/ biorealist / HBD/ reactionary / racist / patriarch / tradcon / whatever blogosphere” what he evidently sees as a revolutionary suggestion: instead of trying to fight the evil feminists with “well-reasoned arguments,” why not simply set up fake feminist blogs, and post shit on them to make feminists looks bad?
WITBD explained:
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a saboteur. We are naturally smarter than the feminists (in fact, objectively better in every conceivable way), and in addition, we are well-trained in deception by our studies of game. In other words, it’ll be a piece of cake for us to mimic their arguments and appear to them as really smart girls who really know their shit.
Really? Because no one I’ve ever run across in the manosphere has managed to pull off a particularly convincing impersonation of a really smart anything. And in order to effectively parody something, you have to actually understand it first. Given some of the truly odd things MRAs and manospherians believe about feminism and feminists – see my post on Operation Alimony yesterday for one recent example — I’m somehow thinking that the only people dumb enough to be fooled by these “false-flag-feminist” blogs will be other, yep, MRAs and manosphereians.
Nonetheless, WITBD claimed that’s he’s already started putting his little plan into action:
I have already begun false flag blogging myself. At this stage, giving the link would ruin the whole thing. But it’s out there. And “false flag blogging” returned only 87 results, of which only a few actually seemed to discuss what I’m talking about, so for the time being it seems nobody is watching out for it. Not that they’d be able to tell anyway.
His fantasies got more and more extravagant:
Think long term. The endgame is to build a big enough presence that coming out as a fake feminist generates buzz in and of itself. Imagine if it came out that the founder of Feministing was actually a men’s rights activist.
And that he could fly, and shoot lasers from his eyes! Imagination is fun!
(Note: The founder of Feministing is not actually an MRA, or a man. Nor can she fly or shoot lasers from her eyes.)
WITBD continued fantasizing:
Eventually, our false flag bloggers will coordinate with our legitimate bloggers and have “debates” where both sides are controlled by us.
And where the only people paying attention are you guys.
If you feel you are getting really good at this, attack some prominent feminists for not being feminist enough. I don’t even know what that would mean, but, hey, this is feminism. Nonsense is our bread and butter.
Wheels within wheels!
Some on In Mala Fide thought this was a dandy idea. Frost wrote:
Fuck yeah. Awesome post. …
[W]e need to get bold and creative with how we fight the war for the best minds in the western world. False flag blogging is a wide-open front. Especially if you’re new to writing and aren’t yet confident in your voice – and unless you have written many thousands of words already, the truth is your writing is probably going to suck – a false-flag blog would be a great way to hone your skills while only having to actually write at the level of typical mid-twenties gender studies grad student.
Here’s a post of mine that sadly didn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s one of my own personal favourites:
http://www.freedomtwentyfive.com/2011/08/an-open-letter-to-the-manginas-of-the-internet/
I submitted it to The Good Men project, Manboobz, and a few other Mangina sites as a guest post, but sadly no one bit. These people are just so easy to parody, it’s ridiculous.
Regular Man Boobz readers may have a rather different assessment of how effective his parody was.
Others on In Mala Fide were a bit more skeptical of the “false-flag” idea. As out-and-proud racist thwak put it:
It sounds like a good idea, but it won’t work. Its been tried by white people on counter racism forums and they always got busted. We used to call it the “nigger impersonation syndrome”.
A white person would sign up with a name like “Jamal” and speak ebonics… but they always got busted cause at some point they hafta come out of “nigger cloak” to practice racism; i.e, say and/or do something a black person would not say/do.
Sure, they have the option of coming on the discussion board and pretending to be a full time nigger, but how does that advance the racist agenda? …
The “black White Supremacist” stuck out like a nun in a whore house everytime.
And got busted everytime.
Gosh, it’s almost as if black people are actual human beings and not just racist caricatures. And that real black people can somehow magically spot the difference between other real black people and racist assholes posting in “ebonics.”
Huh. Could the same happen with feminists?
In a followup post, WITBD dismissed the critics as uncreative cowards. And it turns out that fake blogs are only the starting point in his grand plan.
The fact is we are not the alt-right. We are the new left. We are the oppressed proles … They are the establishment. We lost “our” country. They control it all now. We have blogs. And a handful of churches and seasteading. Sucks.
Now it’s time to move on. We have to take these pieces of shit down and that means we must use leftist tactics. This kind of blogging operation is the beginning of a long march to infiltrate and undermine their institutions.
Sounds like someone has been reading Mao’s Little Red Book!
Playing around? Real men fight to win, period. We fight feminism specifically because it’s the weak point of liberalism. Read your Sun Tzu. Attacking the entire rainbow coalition at once is madness. You always attack the enemy where he is weakest.
And the weakest links are the ladies, naturally.
[N]ot all women actually benefit from feminism. They may think they win at first, but we know full well that feminist sex and the city-type women lose big time: no kids, no committed alpha, no nothing. Most women don’t benefit, and many women are recognizing this.
Right now among women, feminism is high status and actually being feminine is low status. But all women instinctively want to actually be feminine, and they have better life results when they do. We all know about how to manipulate women’s idea of status. This should be easy to work out.
If we take out or marginally disrupt feminism, and pull lots of white women out of the coalition, it crumbles in short order.
Oh no! Not the white women! Don’t take the white women!
High-IQ thundercunts are major war engines of the regime, and especially the childless ones. They actually run the agencies, corporations, HR departments, universities, etc. Without them, the enemy has a harder time operating. As well, white women are blatantly used as bait to recruit minority men into liberal groups.
Anti-feminism is something that we know well … and it is something that the other elements of the liberal coalition actually somewhat agree with us on because its not like the blacks, Mexicans, Arabs etc. are keen on empowering their women. All men of all races have common ground in dealing with the unique female brand of bullshit and thus are potential sympathizers on this issue.
So this is his grand plan: for racist white dudes like him (and much of In Mala Fide’s readership) to build a sort of antifeminist rainbow coalition with “blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, etc” … in order to take down feminism … in order to weaken liberalism … in order to screw over the “blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, etc.”
Yeah, that’s totally gonna work.
Gay men! Fear the lesbobo fempocalypse!
Gay men, stop falling for these man-hating ladies!
Gay men, when will you learn that feminists are fickle friends? Christian J. – the blogger behind What Men Are Saying About Women and the inventor of the MRA two-dot ellipses – offers gay men a trenchant warning about the evils of these seemingly friendly “allies.”
Fascinating how gay men are of the opinion that they are seen as humans where feminists are concerned. I am not quite certain how many more times we have to demonstrate that feminists loathe gays, with a passion, the male type ofcourse, not the lesbobo version..
Yes, obviously the lesbobos — much like lesbos, but with twice as much bo — have no problem with male hating. But gay men need to open their eyes to what is really going on.
Feminists have jumped aboard the Gay Rights Movement in order to spread their own male hating message. A message that the Gay Community appears to ignore. When feminists call for the removal of all men, the Gay man is definitely not exempted, I cannot understand how they can be in denial of that fact, that certainty..
Also, that whole “gay marriage” thing you guys are always on about is really kind of pointless, since the evil ladies have already ruined marriage for everyone:
Feminists are only concerned about destroying marriage and families and the Gay community can help there as well by demanding that marriage should be renounced as null and void.
Of course, the lesbobos love feminism, and vice versa. Or at least they profess to:
Feminism and feminists only support lesbianism as most of the radical feminists are lesbians and they possess sufficient toxicity and male hate in order to spread their anti male loathing. They attached themselves to any movement they think they will have some advantage or benefit to spreading their elitist, sexist message..
But gay men?
Ignore these warning at your own peril. Feminists will dump you faster than typhoid when they have achieved their own outcomes. It’s that simple..
FIGHT THE TWIN EVILS OF LESBOBOS AND FEMINISMISM!
TWO DOTS GOOD, THREE DOTS BAD!
IGNORE THESE WARNING AT YOUR OWN PERIL!
Off-topic: Anti-gay Alabama politician caught secretly donating sperm to lesbian couples in New Zealand
Bill Johnson's sperm (artist's conception)
This is completely off-topic, but, yes, that headline is true. Legitimate news sources that are not The Onion are reporting that former Alabama gubernatorial candidate Bill Johnson, a right-wing republican with an anti-gay fetish, is now facing a scandal of sorts for donating sperm to lesbian Kiwis. Yep, a man who ran on an anti-gay-marriage platform is helping lesbian couples who want to have children.
Seems that Johnson (and his johnson) have been in New Zealand working on earthquake relief — and secretly helping out women who want to get pregnant with his sperm, and financial donations. As the New Zealand Herald reports, Johnson has been on the internets
using the online persona “chchbill” to meet women who want help to get pregnant.
Under that persona, he has discussed making donations to at least nine women without the knowledge of his family in the US.
Three of the women are now pregnant, and Johnson has assisted another three with donations in the past month. It is believed he has been in communication with at least another three women to discuss sperm donation.
So why is the conservative pol being so, well, liberal with his sperm? Because he wants the world to have more Bill Johnsons in it, and in this particular task his wife cannot help. You see, as he explained to a NZ Herald reporter,
I am married to the most beautiful woman in the world. When I married her I knew we couldn’t have any more children. She had a hysterectomy 10 years ago. … If life’s circumstances had dealt me a different hand I wouldn’t be doing this. It is not the hand that life has dealt my wife.
Reproduction and having children is as basic a human need as eating.
Apparently his wife does not fully agree with this assessment, nor was she aware what he was doing with his evenings off in New Zealand. The Herald again:
Johnson, who has a degree in chemistry and is a member of the international high-IQ club Mensa, said he had told his wife he wanted to act as a sperm donor. The couple had sought counselling shortly after. He said he left believing she was aware he was going to continue.
Asked if his wife knew he was donating sperm, he said: “She does now.”
As do we. She’s not happy about any of it. The ironies abound.
More on the story at the Huffington Post.
MRA: Men have it great, and that pisses me off! Also, women are as dumb as baboons.
Typical females! Sitting on their giant red asses while men do all the work!
Men’s Rights Activists generally like to pretend that the world is some kind of feministy dystopian hellscape for men. No so the gentle MRA philosopher who calls himself Cooter Bee. In a recent post on A Voice for Men, he admits frankly that
In absolute terms, men have never had it better. Our lives are longer than ever before. Especially in the western world, we are not nearly as plagued by violence and disease as our grandfathers. Never in history have we had as much economic opportunity or as much latitude to choose our own careers and our ultimate station in life.
Well golly. Sounds like life is pretty good for us dudes.
We are clearly neglected and abused relative to women, but is that really a legitimate comparison? Is that any more meaningful than measuring how we are doing compared to squirrels or dolphins? There are a few men who do cross-over and become women but I never heard of even one who did it to gain access to all the goodies that go with being an entitlement skank. I know of few men who would be anything else despite the supposed unfairness.
So what is the beef? Could it be that even though men are doing better than ever that the level of ingratitude is also disproportionately high?
Uh oh. Do I smell some “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” coming up?
Let’s face it. Men are and always have been where it’s at when it comes to sustaining this world. In former days, men used to get some credit for it. Not now. Scorn, vitriol and blame are the thanks we get for making this world livable. Biting the hand that feeds you was always a no-no. Perhaps that’s what eats me.
Hmm. Given that most women work, and that women make up roughly half the work force, it seems to me that most women are actually feeding themselves. Statistics on all this are readily available.
I am starting to tire of all the stats and data.
Statistics? We don’t need no stinkin’ statistics!
Isn’t the fact that we don’t like what is going on enough reason to change it?
So you’d rather fight against imagined ingratitude than real injustices?
Ironically, after acknowledging that he’s primarily motivated by feelings, not fact, Mr. Bee accuses women of not being able to deal with gender issues rationally:
Talking equity among men is useful because men are capable of equity. Exceptionally few women are capable. Talking about equity to a typical woman is like talking particle physics to a baboon.
We want it the way we want it and so it should be done. No other justification is significant.. We have it good but want it to be better still.
Well, at least he’s being honest about it, I guess.
EDITED TO ADD: The comments on this post on AVfM are, of course, a treat. Here are some choice excerpts from my favorite one, posted by a fella calling himself DruidV:
[D]id any of you ever stop to consider the very first expendables in this gendercidal war against us?
You know, those accomodating Men of the sixties and seventies who were just trying to do the “right” thing. Those Men, who reluctantly but dejectedly gave up their lives and livelihoods so that millions of poor, oppressed wimmin could enter the work force (and completely FUBAR it, btw) in the name of ekwality.
Was there ever any kind of token memorial statue erected by the wimmin, to honor these displaced Men who were forced to hand it all over to their future political enemies? Was there even ONE?
Ever?
My grandFather just happened to be one of these very first Men to be displaced from his job by a woman, at the hands of the government. He never fully recovered from the loss, to be sure. But hey, who gives a shit right? As long as some loud-mouthed, 1960′s hatchett wounds could feel “liberated”, umm sorry-I meant to say “Empowered(tm)”, it made no difference how many Men were sacrificed…
So, yeah, let’s get working on that memorial, folks! I wonder if we could get Maya Lin to design it?
Katherine Heigl: Ballbusting bigot?
That's not funny?
Most people who hate Katherine Heigl hate the actress because she seems like a bit of a diva, or because she keeps appearing in annoying rom-coms, including one with Ashton Kutcher that hurts my head when I even think about it. The fellas at Register-Her.com have another reason: she hates balls. As in, testicles.
Well, not really. What the Register-Her fellas are worked up about is a PSA she did for Funny or Die in which she claims to be in favor of neutering pets not because she loves animals but simply because she hates balls so much. At one point she declares, tongue firmly in cheek:
I can’t cut the nuts off human men … yet. So, I’ve dedicated my time to the neutering of dogs, cause that’s legal.
The joke here, as any rational person can plainly see, isn’t that cutting off balls is inherently hilarious. The joke is that an actress with a reputation as a diva is basically doing her critics one better by portraying herself as a deranged, narcissistic, supremely creepy ball-hater. And she’s spoofing her own bad reputation for a genuinely good cause: reducing cat and dog overpopulation and therefore the number of unwanted animals that are put to death in our nation’s animal shelters.
Of course that’s not how the fellas at Register-Her.com see it. And so they’ve put Heigl on their faux “offender registry” as a “bigot.” Their explanation?
The actress’s willingness to endorse male targeted sexual mutilation betrays a bigoted indifference to sexual violence, and justifies her inclusion on this registry in the category of bigot.
Presumably the fellas at Register-Her will next go after the people who have posted the more than twenty thousand YouTube videos that feature dudes getting hit in the nuts. Surely these videos, which feature actual violence against actual human balls are a far graver threat to the balls of the world than even Katherine Heigl.
The Register-Her Action Squad might start by tracking down the (admittedly quite ingenious) ball-hating dudes involved in this video.
And then move on to all the ball-hating bigots featured here:
And here are 50 more:
Better track down the ghost of Scott Joplin, too, for providing the music to the last one from beyond the grave.
“And what if they get killed?” A Voice for Men as an antifeminist Witchfinder General
So John the Other has responded to my post about A Voice for Men’s “bounty” on the makers of the SCUM video. It’s a fairly unhinged rant, even by his standards. Here’s the money quote:
It’s a bizarre bit of circular logic: if some deranged asshole literally kills one or more of the videomakers, this is proof that the Swedish justice system isn’t working, which therefore justifies the deranged asshole’s actions. So the existence of vigilante violence justifies vigilante violence that justifies vigilante violence.
Since when is making a video a capital crime?
After all this, John rather bizarrely claims that “[u]nlike David Futrelle, I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
That’s because, according to his daft logic, shooting the videomakers would count as “self defense,” because evidently someone posting a video on YouTube that you don’t like is equivalent to someone coming at you with a knife.
While challenging AVfM’s “bounty” — without actually defending the video in any way — apparently means that I support murder. Go figure.
Vincent Price as the Witchfinder General
But dwelling too much on the specifics of this one case is to miss the larger point. A Voice for Men has essentially set itself up as a sort of antifeminist Witchfinder General. In the 1968 cult film of that name, you may remember, the corrupt Witchfinder tested whether the accused were witches by lowering them into water; those who floated were judged guilty, and burned at the stake. Those who sank were innocent, but dead.
Paul Elam and his sidekick John have a similar approach. They intend to do feminists harm, to “fuck their shit up,” regardless of what they’ve done or said. None of those who have been placed in the Register-Her “registry” as “bigots” deserve to be smeared or harassed (or put on the phony “registry” in the first place). But if you look at what they are ostensibly there for, well, you’ll discover that it matters not at all to Elam whether they sink or float. The point is to harass feminists; almost any excuse will do.
One of those on the “registry,” a radical feminist who posts online as Vliet Tiptree , has indeed said some fairly vile things about the male gender; she is the only one who might conceivably be described as a “bigot.” But others are there on trumped up “charges” based on highly tendentious readings of some of their writing; it’s clear that they’ve been targeted mainly because they have been publicly critical of the men’s rights movement.
Meanwhile, another of the alleged feminist bigots is not a feminist at all, but rather a traditional-minded “mom blogger” who aroused Elam’s fury by saying that she didn’t want male daycare volunteers taking her daughter to the bathroom, and for suggesting (incorrectly) that men make up 99% of abusers. (She has since apologized, but remains on the “registry.”)
And one recent candidate for inclusion, a feminist blogger whom Elam has pledged to “stalk,” seems to have made it on Elam’s naughty list simply because she has helped to highlight how pervasive harassment of women and feminists is online. Complain about harassment; get harassed. But Elam’s “critiques” of her are all suspiciously vague. It’s not clear if he has read even a single one of her blog posts. Nonetheless, he promises her that
by the time we are done you will wax nostalgic over the days when all you had to deal with was someone expressing a desire to fuck you up your shopworn ass.
In a post from some months back, Elam offered a similarly psychosexually charged justification for his campaign to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” Directly addressing the “feminazi scumbags reading this right now,” he declared:
I am not going to stop. You see, I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Let’s repeat that last bit for emphasis:
the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Does anyone still doubt that the aim of A Voice for Men and Register-Her.com in publishing personal information of their enemies is to intimidate – indeed, to terrorize?
Does anyone still doubt that their campaign is driven by hate?
Does anyone still doubt that they don’t give a shit if their actions cause someone to be physically assaulted or even killed?
Showdown: #MenCallMeThings versus The Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics
The most common “critique” of the #mencallmethings hashtag that blew up on Twitter last week was that the women posting examples of misogynistic shit they got called online were making a big deal out of nothing. As the always-charming Ferdinand Bardamu so memorably put it:
It’s funny, then, that when MRAs find themselves described with less-than-flattering language they have a strange tendency to act like they’ve suddenly been struck with a case of the vapors. Witness the reaction of MRAs when someone calls them the “c-word.” No, not “cunt” – “creep.” As one outraged Men’s Rights Redditor recently put it, in a comment with 30+ net upvotes:
Creep shaming is probably one of the most insidious and anti-equality things you can do. The ability to label men as “creepy” is just one privilege that women enjoy, and a constant source of fear of ostracizing that all men must fear in our society.
When MRAs feel themselves being oppressed by such clearly man-hating language, they often refer to something called the Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics, which, well, catalogues their language grievances in detail. According to the author of the Catalogue,
Shaming tactics are emotional devices meant to play on a man’s insecurities and shut down debate. They are meant to elicit sympathy for women and to demonize men who ask hard questions. Most, if not all, shaming tactics are basically ad homimem attacks.
Such shaming tactics, the author of the Catalogue says, with no evident awareness of the irony, are often used by “histrionic … female detractors who refuse to argue their points with logic” and the male “gynocentrists” who ally with them.
Here are some of the awful “shaming” remarks that get directed at MRAs, according to the Catalogue of Shaming Tactics:
“Stop whining!”
“Suck it up like a man!”
“You need to get over your anger at women.”
“You’re afraid of a strong woman!”
“You are so immature!”
“You are just bitter because you can’t get laid.”
“Are you gay?”
“That’s a sexist stereotype!”
“You need therapy.”
“You make me feel afraid.”
“Weirdo!”
“Loser!”
“You are so materialistic.”
“No woman will marry you with that attitude.”
“You are insensitive to the plight of women.”
Did someone just use the word "creep?"
Is that last one even an insult? It’s a fairly accurate description of a lot of MRAs, who take a certain pride in being “insensitive to the plight of women.”
So now that we’ve seen the horrible abuse that MRAs have to put up with on a daily basis, let’s take a quick look at some of the things that women and feminists regularly get from their detractors, as posted to the #mencallmethings hashtag and sent to Sady Doyle, who originated the hashtag. (These are all taken from a great post she did in the aftermath of #mencallmethings’ big blowup.) I think you will find the comparison instructive. Let’s start with the more straightforward slurs. (TRIGGER WARNING for, well, just about everything in the quotes that follow.)
Slut, cunt, bitch, whore, ugly, dyke, lesbo, unfuckable, crazy, delusional, liar, hysterical, autistic bitch child, feminazi, ballbuster, humorless, heartless whore, man hater, misandrist, stupid little girl, shrieky hysterical moron, airhead, spoiled little princess, stupid bitch, stupid fucking cunt, stupid feminazi cunt, an ugly bitter little woman, cumm guzzling closet lesbian, a pseudo-intellectual Insane Oversensitive Humourless Female supremacist.
Now let’s move on to complete sentences:
“You’re an ugly fucking cunt.”
“That sort of smirk is why God invented anal sex.”
“you’re so ugly you look like you have downs syndrome, you’d be thankful to be raped.”
“hope you catch a sexually transmitted disease or vagina cancer, cuntwit.”
”Stick a dildo up your dry vagina.”
“the only time your mouth should be open is when i’m putting my d–k in it”
“Your just a gay cunt who deserves to be punished.”
“A firm backhand to her whore face would provide her with a much needed attitude adjustment.”
“Fuck you bitch….ya need to get beat like ur pops use to do to u.”
“I hope you never have children, your daughters would be such sluts and end up murdered in a gutter by someone like me.”
You’re “not worth the effort to murder.”
“[The] only tragedy is that a bullet didn’t rip through ur brainstem after u were used 4 ur 1 & only purpose in this world.”
“what a long winded bitch. You certainly do need to be gagged.”
“You’re an annoying bitch with no friends.I’d love to run you over with my truck.”
“you stupid bitch, I should fuck the crazy right out of you.”
”i surely hope that one day you get raped.”
“[You] can’t be a female scientist, that phrase is an oxymoron,”
“it’s painfully obvious you’re a woman, get off the internet.”
“I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore. Your only worth on this planet is as a warm hole.”
“Do you need to file a hurt feelings report?”
As I noted before, despite my general unpopularity in the MRA world, I tend to get fewer of these things than, for example, most feminist bloggers with a similar degree of internet notoriety. But I get them. Here, for example, is the latest comment I’ve gotten from the guy who calls himself Nugganu, a sort of follow-up to a previous comment I quoted earlier in which he imagined me raped by ten black men:
He certainly does have a vivid imagination.
But, yeah, somehow it’s a little hard for me to feel a ton of sympathy for MRAs who so regularly work themselves into a lather over “shaming language” like “creep” and “loser” and “you are insensitive to the plight of women.”
