Category Archives: MRA
That fake screenshot on A Voice for Men? It wasn’t faked. A correction, and its implications
Mistakes were made.
So you remember that dubious screenshot (see the bottom of this post) that appeared on A Voice for Men, and that I wrote about last week in several different posts? The one that looked like the most obvious fake in the history of obvious fakes, but that AVFM’s managing editor Dean Esmay insisted was the result of some sort of weird computer glitch?
Well, it looks like he was actually telling the truth. And I owe him — and A Voice for Men — an apology for suggesting otherwise.
Men’s Rights Redditor: Beware the stealth Sarkeesians infiltrating our industries!
Sneaky Anita Sarekeesian, trying to hide behind a stack of video games.
So Angry Harry, the dotty old British uncle of the Men’s Rights movement, has a post up vaguely warning that the virus software company Symantec just might soon have some sort of shareholders revolt on its hands because it dared to put a bunch of men’s rights sites on a “hate sites” blacklist, blocking access to them for some users of Symantec’s Rulespace software.
That’s kind of an old whine at this point, but what captured my fancy was this recent discussion about Harry’s article in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Oh, where to begin with all this? I’m charmed, of course, by the idea that feminism is just ruining things — ruining things! — for all the nice ladies in the tech world. I mean, it’s not like feminists have anything to complain about with regard to sexism amongst male techies. They’re just complainy complainers. Ladies in tech are doing just fine, thanks! Don’t take their word for it. Take the word of some random dude in the Men’s Rights subreddit for it.
But the real treat here is Hamakua’s nightmare vision of an army of secret “imbedded” Anita Sarkeesians infiltrating major corporations and … doing what, exactly? Secretly making videos about sexist tropes in video games in hidden compartments underneath their desks, like that secret nap compartment George had built under his desk at work on Seinfeld?
Beware the stealth Sarkeesians!
(Found this through the AgainstMensRights subreddit.)
More #Fidelbogenisms from @Fidelbogen, brave Counter-Feminist Tortoise-Fighting Ant Warrior of Truth
This is actually the picture of himself he uses for his YouTube vidoes.
I know I just wrote about it, but our Counter-Feminist pal Fidelbogen’s Twitter feed is turning into the funniest thing on Twitter next to 80sDonDraper.
Up from misogyny?
A couple of interesting reads:
Check out Escaping the Friendzone: The story of a former right-wing MRA on Jezebel Groupthink, a confessional mini-memoir by a dude who traces his “transition from misogynist, homophobic, right-wing MRA to raging intersectional feminist atheist leftist.”
Meanwhile, that guy who just got that rapey pickup manual funded by Kickstarter, Ken Hoinsky? Well, he’s apparently been quite upset by the criticism and is now pledging to make the manual entirely non-rapey. No, really. He met with the guy who started the petition about his book, and released an apology of sorts saying, among other things:
The concept that someone could interpret what I was writing to be a rape guide shocked me at first. But I took a long look in the mirror and absorbed all the great feedback coming in from across the Internet…
Here is what I realized: In the most offensive and controversial parts, I chose my words poorly. Very, very poorly. I meant one thing and people were reading another. THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM. I needed to seriously evaluate every last word of my writing to make sure I wasn’t encouraging sexual assault in any way, shape, or form.
Ben Kassoy of DoSomething.Org … graciously offered to meet with me to provide alternate opinions and insights to help remove all of the potentially harmful advice. I am proud to say that his was the first of many meetings I will be having with anti-rape and anti-abuse organizations and experts to make sure that the advice I am offering is free of any tinge of sexual assault or rape vibes. I will be rewriting Above The Game under their guidance and insight.
Right here, on abovethegame.info, I will be starting an international dialogue on how we remove the negative stigma and shame that drives men to seek out seduction advice in the first place. My name may have been martyred in the press, but I will be using this opportunity for good.
The answer isn’t censoring all dialogue surrounding the issue ala Kickstarter’s statement on banning all men’s dating guide projects. Women’s rights and “male seduction guides” can and should coexist …
P.S. To my loyal followers from reddit, you should already be aware my writings are not intended to encourage rape. So rest assured the final book will be in the same style you are used to. I’m just taking us to the next level.
Frankly, it doesn’t sound like he’s really learned much of anything from the experience yet, but if he actually follows through with his promised meetings with anti-rape activists he might. We’ll just have to see how that goes.
John The Other debates John The Other on MRA misogyny, loses
John Hembling: Open mouth, insert foot.
So the other day someone asked the Men’s Rights subreddit “Why do people think you guys hate women?”
There were a lot of ridiculous answers to that question, but one of the most ridiculous (and one of the most highly upvoted) responses came from our old friend John Hembling, the blabby Canadian videoblogger and A Voice for Men “Editor in Chief” also known for some dopey reason as John The Other. He explained:
The History of Feminism, as told by the Men’s Rights Subreddit
Let’s take a trip down memory lane with this short history of feminism, helpfully prepared for us by mountainmansOG in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
I learn new things about feminism every day! Thanks, Men’s Rights subreddit!
@Fidelbogen is killing it on Twitter with his antifeminist bon mots #NotReally #SeriouslyTheyreAwful
So our old friend Fidelbogen the Counter-Feminist Agent of Male Renaissance has gotten on the Twitter. And even though he hasn’t yet figured out how to replace his generic egg avatar, and has managed to amass only 44 followers (one of them me), he’s been tweeting up a storm in the last couple of days.
Indeed, he’s so proud of his recent tweets that he screenshotted a bunch of them and put them on his blog under the title Casting Your Breadcrumbs Upon the Water. (Huh. I thought the expression was “Cast your bread upon the waters.” Maybe Fidelbogen is hoping to recruit some ducks?)
Anyway, I thought I’d give his timely tweety wisdom a somewhat wider audience. I hope he won’t mind.
Can you all suggest some more Fidelbogenisms for him to post?
From the mouths of trolls: Rape is unneccessary if you’ve got “game.”
So my Mighty White of You post — about the demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit — drew the attention of Obsidian, a longtime Manosphere blogger who has been described by some of his comrades as “the Blackest Man of the Manosphere” (not that this is much of an accomplishment in that lily-white world). He stuck around for some not-terribly productive discussions of race and feminism, pickup artistry, and I can’t remember the rest because I just sort of stopped caring after a while.
But there was one thing he said — a passing remark in a long comment — that stood out to some of the commenters here, and which I thought was revealing enough to warrant highlighting in a post:
I don’t support rape for a very simple reason – because it’s not necessary. A Man with Game doesn’t need to rape anyone.
That … is not a good reason to “not support” rape.
Really, that’s probably the worst reason to “not support” rape besides “I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to rape anyone today” or “I might muss up my new suit raping someone.”
Do you really need to search for reasons to “not support” rape beyond, you know, the idea that violating other people for your own selfish pleasure is wrong?
PUAs: Even the ones who aren’t directly advocating sexual assault have some pretty fucked up ideas about rape.
Google is Censoring Men’s Rights Searches and These Totally Not Fake Screenshots Prove It [CORRECTED]
The Man Boobz Internet Research Lab
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the AVFM screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
I feel a little guilty. Men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men had to “withdraw” one of its posts earlier this week after I demonstrated conclusively here that the site had used a fake screenshot to try to back up the article’s strange claim that Google searches for “violence against men” in fact returned mostly results related to violence against women. (It doesn’t. Try it.)
Thing is, A Voice for Men had been hoping to use that post to boost its claims that Mens’s Rightsers, and men in general, are being “censored” and otherwise stymied by feminist-dominated Internet power players like Google and Facebook.
Mighty White of You
So here’s an interesting chart. Guess what it represents?
A) The membership of the David Duke Fan Club
B) The racial breakdown of the most successful Liberace impersonators
C) The demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit
Well, ok, that was too easy. It is of course all of the above. I’m guessing. It’s definitely C, at least, as this chart was prepared to show the results of the 2013 Men’s Rights subreddit demographic survey.
Now, you might say, well, isn’t Reddit itself a pretty white place? And you would be right. But the Men’s Rights subreddit seems to be a bit whiter — and a lot less black — than Reddit as a whole, if Quantcast’s estimates of Reddit’s overall ethnic breakdown are accurate.
In other completely non-surprising news, 89% of Men’s Rights Redditors are men. And a lot of them are libertarians. MRAs complain endlessly that we pigeonhole them as a bunch of entitled white dudes. They’re really not doing much to challenge that assumption.
The most important issue to these fellas (and the small minority that aren’t fellas)? Survey says: False rape accusations.
Other critical issues to the Men’s Rightsers include “custody rights” (which is a bit odd because 92% of those surveyed have no kids), “legal discrimination” (whatever that means), “education discrimination” (this is a thing?), and “male disposability.”
“Male birth control” and “paper abortion,” while relatively less important to the Men’s Rightsers, each got hundreds of votes.
I’m surprised “friendzoning” isn’t at the top of the list, but unfortunately it wasn’t one of the choices. I blame misandry.
