Category Archives: hypocrisy
>Conned by a young rake? It’s all feminism’s fault.
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| Oops. Wrong picture. |
A fiftysomething British woman is seduced and abandoned (and ripped off to the tune of £40,000) by a twentysomething con man, and it’s all the fault of … feminism? The Elusive Wapiti, a right-wing Men’s-Rightsy blog, writes about the case of one British woman let herself be charmed by a sweet-talking young fellow on Match.com and, despite an endless stream of obvious lies from him which should have kept the alarm bells in her head ringing continuously, agreed to meet him in South Africa, and ultimately hand over a huge chunk of her life’s savings to him. Her actions were incredibly stupid; the story is pathetic and sad.
And according to The Elusive Wapiti, feminism is to blame. And it actually kind of is. But not for the reason Wapiti thinks:
Today’s exhibit is a Brit named Caroline Gates-Fleming, a twice-divorced middle-aged woman desperate to maintain her relevance in a culture that, thank you feminism, shackles feminine worth to her ability to attract a man.
Huh? Apparently I’m not up-to-date on the latest anti-feminist stereotypes. I thought feminists were all supposed to be man-hating lesbians, living alone with their cats and their “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” posters. But apparently it’s feminism — not, say, our sexist society — that makes women feel like they’re nothing without a man. Wapiti continues:
Hilarity ensues when a being that is accustomed to easy-come-easy-go male attention since the age of 15 experiences the shock of watching her attractiveness slowly die, after decades of taking it for granted and kicking perfectly good men to the curb.
The “perfectly good men” are her ex-husbands, though I’m not sure how Wapiti has determined that she cast them off for no good reason. No matter, Wapiti is just warming up. He returns to his main theme: Feminism bad!
[T]hanks to feminism, the old morality that once protected women from the siren song of their gonads has been stripped away. Used to be that women in their late 40s / early 50s were respectable housewives and grandmothers in stable if somewhat less than satisfying marriages, and slut-shaming and other social conventions kept them there, safely ensconced.
Ah, the good old days, when women stayed married, no matter how miserable they were, and gave up their sexual desires once they hit, say, the age of 47.
Now we discover that supposedly mature women instantly morph into priapic young boys–subbing vulvas for penises of course–given the right stimulation to their egos and hopes of emotional intimacy long since gone.
Damn you, evil feminism, for convincing women they might possibly have sex in their late 40s or — gasp! — older! Quite possibly with younger men! I mean, it’s not like men in their late 40s ever want to have sex with women younger than they are. I have never, ever heard of that happening, ever.
EDIT: Added a sentence in the second paragraph to make my point clearer.
>Debate Drama: Dalrock is a Lying Liar
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Debating Men’s Rights Activists can be a lot like arguing with a kid who puts his hands over his ears and shouts “la la la I can’t hear you!”
During my abortive debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence, I had a hard time getting him to respond to my arguments; instead, he devoted much of his energy to arguing against experts I never cited and arguments I never made.(EDIT: See all my debate posts and some commentary here.)
Now the blogger “Dalrock” has decided to weigh in on the debate — despite the fact that by his own admission he didn’t actually read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, he completely misrepresents my argument:
His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right.
Either he didn’t read more than a paragraph or two of what I wrote, or he’s incapable of understanding logic, or, well, he’s a lying liar.
At the moment I’m leaning towards the first explanation; I’m being generous here.
But it’s hard to see the next bit as anything but, well, that lying liar thing.
Mentioning my post responding to Elam’s disgraceful “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post, which was not even part of the debate proper, Dalrock ignores Elam’s obnoxious provocation and brings up a similarly obnoxious, similarly disgraceful Jezebel post from several years back, in which several Jezebel staffers and a host of commenters there gleefully admitted to beating up boyfriends. (Elam and I both mentioned it in our posts; it was Elam’s excuse for writing his post in the first place.)
According to Dalrock, my response to the Jezebel post went roughly as follows:
The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count. He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves. And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
Even aside from the dopey boxing metaphor, this is simply fiction. Let’s break it down.
He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.
I didn’t say that.
Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.
I didn’t say that.
And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
I didn’t say that. He’s simply making shit up. Or, as some might put it, lying.
If you want to know what I did say, you can see it here.
When I pointed all this out in Dalrock’s comments, he responded with:
You mean you weren’t really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?
Yeah, the fact that you made a dumb boxing joke means it’s totally ok to lie about what I said.
To my regular readers: Sorry about all the drama here. To paraphrase Bob Dole, I’m just trying to get these guys to “stop lying about my record.”
Also: Elam himself poked his head up in the comments to Dalrock’s post to offer a response of sorts to my final debate post; needless to say, it’s pretty feeble. You can read it here, and if you skip down a few posts you should be able to read my response to it; I will also be appending it to my original post.
>QuoteOTD: The Nerd Rage Virus
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The last time we checked in with the Pro-Male/Ant-Feminist Technology blog — a blog which, you may recall, is ostensibly devoted to the notion that technology is going to kick feminism’s ass, and how this is a good thing — the resident anonymous blogger was complaining about feminists (including me) who engage in “shaming tactics” that are, like, totally unfair to MRAs, because all MRAs want to do is have an honest debate on the merits of their ideas. Today, however, he talks a bit about a new computer virus, Stuxnet, and fantasizes about a virus designed to take down feminist websites:
Imagine what an anti-feminist Stuxnet would do. It would specifically target computers belonging to NOW (the National Organization of Women) and other women’s groups, child support agencies, family/divorce courts, women’s studies departments at universities, etc. Perhaps it could target something as specific as feminist websites and blogs … An anti-feminist Stuxnet would be [easy] to create. Unless it seriously wants to attack databases, an anti-feminist Stuxnet does not require even a minimum of specialized knowledge besides being able to identify its target systems. Creating an anti-feminist Stuxnet will be within the skills of at least a significant fraction of malware programmers (if not most or all). This means that in the near future there probably will be an anti-feminist Stuxnet.
Well, that’s one way to win the war of ideas.
