Category Archives: MRA
>Scott Adams: I meant to do that!
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| Easier to believe than Scott Adams. |
There’s a classic scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in which our hero falls off his bike in a spectacular fashion in front of a bunch of kids. Instead of lying there in misery and shame, he quickly gets up, dusts himself off, and says, somewhat less than convincingly, “I meant to do that.” If you’ve never seen the movie, or simply want to relive the moment, here it is.
It’s perhaps the oldest, crudest, and most utterly transparent strategy ever invented to recover from an embarrassing mishap: we either pretend that nothing happened, or that whatever did happen was all part of our super seekret master plan all along. We’re not the only animals that do this. Cats do it. Birds do it. Even drunk squirrels do it.
Now we can add Scott Adams to the list. Recently, as regular readers of this blog will be aware, the Dilbert mastermind caused a bit of a contretemps on the internets by posting a blog entry so astoundingly idiotic, and so patronizingly misogynistic, that it managed to offend Men’s Rights Activists and feminists alike. Adams managed to make himself look like an even bigger idiot by pulling the blog post down in what seems to have been a futile attempt to make the controversy go away, only to find it reposted on an assortment of sites; some have begun to wonder if he actually understands how the internet works. (Things posted generally cannot be unposted.)
I wrote about the whole embarrassing spectacle here, and when I posted a version of that piece up on Feministe, Adams showed up to defend himself– badly – by insisting that his critics were too dumb and/or emotional to understand his oh-so-subtle argument. He then insisted, puzzlingly, that we actually weren’t his critics at all: “You’re angry,” he wrote, “but I’ll bet every one of you agrees with me.” Naturally, this did not advance his cause.“Mr. Adams,” wrote Feministe commenter Sheelzebub, speaking for many, “thank you so much for coming back here and entertaining us with your special brand of epic fail.”
But rather than letting this whole thing die, Adams has come back with even more detailed, and even more transparently ludicrous and contradictory, explanations as to why he wrote the post in the first place, why he subsequently deleted it, and why he decided to defend himself in such an obtuse manner on Feministe and (apparently) elsewhere. The whole embarrassing spectacle wasn’t an embarrassing spectacle at all: He totally MEANT TO DO IT. As Feministe commenter Laurie sarcastically summed up his new claims, the whole thing was apparently “a form of sophisticated performance art,” and the controversy it generated was all “part of Adams’s master plan in the first place. He’s pulling all the strings. BWAHAHAHAHA!”
Yeah, right.
So let’s go through his new explanations. Prepare for a bumpy ride.
Adams wrote the original post, he says, in a deliberate attempt to send the Men’s Rightsers into a frenzy:
I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”
This part of Adams’ explanation actually rings true. Originally, you may recall, Adams decided to let his readers pick the topic of his next blog post for him. When he saw “men’s rights” jump to the top of the poll results, he knew, as he put it, that “the fix was in. Activists had mobilized their minions to trick me into giving their cause some free publicity.”
This is in fact true; MRAs on Reddit, and perhaps elsewhere, did indeed flood his site to vote for their pet issue.
And so, even though he agrees with some of the Men’s Rights agenda, Adams says he’s been suffering from a “wicked case of ‘whiner fatigue.’” In a world full of “financial meltdowns, tsunamis, nuclear radiation, and bloody revolutions,” complaining about men having to open doors doesn’t seem like such a big damn deal.
So far, so good. But it’s about here, as he gets into his decision to take the post down, that Adams’ explanations go completely off the rails. Indeed, he’s got two distinct, and almost completely contradictory, explanations for why he took the post down.
First, he says he deleted the post, even though he knew people would repost it, as a sort of “meta joke” apparently designed to rile up feminists and garner even more attention. As he explains, somewhat less-than-lucidly:
A few people appreciated the meta-joke of removing the post. If you didn’t get it, read the deleted post, consider the feminist backlash, then think about the fact that I took down my post and ran away.And to those of you who triumphantly scrounged up a copy of the deleted piece from Google’s cache, republished it, and crowed that I don’t understand how the Internet worked, I would politely suggest that perhaps I do.
Adams goes on to suggest that the seemingly obtuse and arrogant comments he left on Feministe (and, apparently, elsewhere), were part of the same Puckish strategy of provocation:
I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day.
But, he says, this wasn’t the whole story. And so he sets forth his second explanation for why he took down the original post:
I didn’t take down the piece just because I thought doing so would be funny, or because I wanted attention. Those were bonuses. The main reason is that when a lot of drive-by readers saw the piece, and they didn’t know the context of this blog, it changed the message of the post to something unintended. As a writer, unintended messages are unbearable.
You might notice that this new explanation does not so much complement but completely contract his earlier explanation: in the first scenario, Adams portrays himself as a “meta joker,” a deliberate provocateur, trying to rile up readers outside of his normal audience with a puckish prank.
In the second scenario he portrays himself as a writer deeply concerned about being misunderstood, and troubled that his words were being misinterpreted by “drive-by readers” outside of his normal audience, a situation he describes as “unbearable.”
In other words, after telling us that he pulled down the post in an effort to rile people up and garner even more attention, he tells us he that he really didn’t like the extra attention his words were getting, and that he pulled down the post in an attempt to cut the discussion off. As he puts:
Men thought I was attacking men, and women thought I was attacking women. The message changed when the context changed. I saw that developing, so I took down the post.
There is, of course, a simple way for us to cut through this confusion: to recognize that Adams’ talk about “meta-jokes” is almost certainly utter bullshit.
My theory as to what actually happened is much more straightforward, and fairly similar to Adams’ second explanation: Adams wrote a post designed to rile up MRAs, and it did. But once the discussion spilled over beyond the relatively safe confines of his own blog, with its sympathetic – or is that sycophantic? – audience, he had second thoughts, and in a moment of peevishness he took the post down, hoping the whole thing would just go away. It didn’t.
Then the whole debate got a second wind after feminists, myself included, noticed his post, and noticed that it happened to be crammed full of patronizingly misogynistic bullshit. Unable to simply wish away the criticism, Adams waded into the fray. Unwilling to, or simply incapable of either justifying his original post or apologizing for it in front of an audience of non-adoring non-fans, Adams simply asserted that none of his detractors understood what he *really* meant. So far, he has not given us any explanation as to what this might be.
Instead, in his post as in the discussion on Feministe, he simply repeats his assertion that those who have criticized his post are too emotional or invested in the issues to truly “get it.” The culmination of this line of, er, “reasoning” is this bit of passive-aggressive fuckery at the end of his post:
To the best of my knowledge, no one who understood the original post and its context was offended by it. But to the women who were offended by their own or someone else’s interpretation of what I wrote, I apologize.
This sounds like it might be his last word on the subject. No such luck. Like a terrier worrying a bone, Adams still hasn’t quite let this one go. Today, Salon ran a couple of articles on the controversy, including an interesting interview with Men’s Studies doyen Michael Kimmel; Adams urged his minions readers to rush over and defend him in the comments against the “the poorly informed [who] are in full unibation mode over their shared hallucinations of my Men’s Rights post.”
“Unibation?” Apparently they speak a different kind of English up Scott Adams’ ass.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys
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| I’m walkin’ here! |
Pierce Harlan of the False Rape Society has broken past the limits of mere logic, arguing that the fact that a small number of guys at a couple of events have put on women’s clothing to raise money for women’s causes means that rape culture doesn’t exist. That seems to be the main message of a post of his today with the baffling title “Boys in bras, boys in heels, boys in pink — all to raise money for women’s causes: Is this the ‘rape culture’ we hear so much about?”
Harlan, posting as “Archivist,” complains about several recent campus events, in which college guys have literally put on heels (to raise money and awareness about sexual assault) and bras (to raise money for breast cancer research). Harlan isn’t thrilled about the causes themselves: he has sneeringly derided sexual assault awareness as “a supposedly good cause” and, while acknowledging that breast cancer research is theoretically a good thing, he’s evidently tired of hearing about it.
But he seems even more hot and bothered about the cross-dressing by guys he calls “chivalrous clowns,” describing the bra-wearing as “creepy” and deriding the guys “prancing around in high heels.” Apparently, as Harlan sees it, these fellows are just doing it to impress the chicks:
young men will do pretty much anything to help, to curry favor with, and to be admired by young women.
It is heinous to suggest that attitudes of sexual aggression and dominance over women are normalized, rationalized, and excused by the alleged beneficiaries of “patriarchy” in our culture. In point of fact, the foolish young buffoons in heels and bras are far more representative of young masculinity in our culture than is the young rapist.
There’s not a lot of logic in this, er, argument, but in an earlier posting Harlan elaborates on the distaste he feels towards the “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” event, which was held at the University of Montana (clearly a hotbed of radical feminism).
It would be downright shocking if this or similar events ever prevented a single sexual assault from occurring because: (1) prancing around in high heels and similar useless stunts has nothing to do with preventing sexual assault; and (2) the vast majority of young men who strutted their stuff and who participate in such events are highly unlikely to ever rape a woman. …
If we want to curb sexual assault, we need to teach our young people the truth, but the truth doesn’t jibe with the current rape meta-narrative that holds only one gender responsible for stopping it. …
Young people generally do not understand that women experience much greater after-the-fact regret than men do. Sometimes feelings of regret are translated into feelings of “being used,” and sometimes feelings of “being used” are misinterpreted or purposefully misconstrued as “rape.”
Asking the police, a judge, or a jury to sort out what happened in an alcohol-fueled tryst based on a “he said/she said” account puts an impossible burden on our law enforcement and judicial apparatuses. …
There is no “rape culture”; there is no “rape continuum.” Rape is committed by social deviants, not the nice boy next door. It is almost a certainty that none of the charming young buffoons who strutted around in women’s heels yesterday will ever rape a woman. …
The sad, politically incorrect fact of the matter is that young women have far more power to stop rape than innocent young men by not putting themselves in situations where rape is more likely to occur.
There’s a lot of bullshit condensed into these short paragraphs. There’s victim-blaming, of course: do we regularly attack murder victims for “putting themselves in situations where murder is likely to occur?” There’s his weird complaint that actually investigating and prosecuting date rape puts an “impossible burden” on police and the judicial system: should we simply stop enforcing laws against all crimes that are hard to investigate or prosecute? And there’s his unwillingness to accept the simple fact that rapists all too often do look exactly like the “nice boy next door.” As for his complaint that these events target the wrong people, see here for an argument as to why it makes sense to raise awareness specifically amongst those men who are NOT likely to rape women.
In the past a few MRAs have asked me why I put the False Rape Society blog in my “boob roll” — and formerly in my “enemies list.” This is why. Spreading blatant misinformation and blaming victims: these are not exactly good ways to actually reduce the number of men falsely accused of rape.
And here’s another thought for the MRAs reading this, Harlan included: if you are truly as concerned about testicular or prostate cancer — or any other male malady — as you so often and so loudly claim to be, take a few moments away from your constant complaining about feminism and/or women, and actually hold a fund raiser yourselves. In a comment on his latest post, Harlan writes: “My problem is this: how about an event to raise funds for male suicide, etc. once in a while?” You know how events like these happen? PEOPLE ORGANIZE THEM. There is nothing stopping MRAs from organizing such an event on their own. How about it, guys?
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Earthquakes and Ideologues
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| A scene in Haiti, after its earthquake. |
Sometimes The Spearhead, probably the internet’s leading angry-man site, seems like a giant interactive game of “pin the blame on the feminists.” When uprisings broke out in Tunisia and then Egypt , you may recall, W. F. Price — head honcho at The Spearhead — suggested that the unrest in both countries was a male reaction to the excesses of feminism and female power.
Now he’s returned with an even stranger article, comparing the current disaster in Japan with the very different outcome of last year’s earthquake in Haiti– and blaming women in general and feminists in particular for the far more lethal outcome in Haiti.
You might think that the staggering death toll in Haiti — estimates range from 92,000 to more than 300,000 — might have something to do with the fact that it’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a weak and corrupt government and almost nothing in the way of intrastructure. And that Japan’s relative resiliance in the face of an even more powerful earthquake might have something to do with the fact that it’s a wealthy nation — the world’s third most powerful economy, with a GDP per capita about 30 times greater than Haiti’s — with a great deal of experience in handling earthquakes.
But Price has a rather different, and highly peculiar, explanation: Haiti suffered more because it’s a “matriachal” country, unlike properly “patriarchal” Japan. Comparing “matriarchal Haiti’s and patriarchal Japan’s respective responses to natural disaster,” Price writes that
in Haiti the women are still living in open encampments well over a year after the quake, [while] Japanese women are already sheltered, which is necessary, because it is still cold in northern Japan this time of year. …
Price goes on to argue that Japan is doing better by its men as well. While in Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, the UN and some relief organizations targeted aid towards women — who tend to literally get pushed aside in the mad scramble for food supplies otherwise — Price argues that
Japanese men … have it far better than their Haitian counterparts as well. There are no foreign troops pointing guns at them and denying them food, they are taken care of and respected if old, and given jobs and a place in society if young. Perhaps most importantly, They are given the opportunity to do what men often do best — they are allowed to take care of their families and communities.
Let’s set aside for a moment that it is a tad early to be declaring, er, “mission accomplished” in the Japan crisis, especially with the specter of a nuclear reactor meltdown looming. Price is a man with an agenda, and he moves fairly quickly to his grand conclusion: The two disasters, he argues,
give us an opportunity to ask ourselves what kind of a society we want to live in. Do we want, as the feminists would have it, to be helpless, disease infested, homeless and starving if we face hardship, or do we want to have the ability to come together and pull ourselves up from the rubble? For the sane people of the world, the choice is clear.
Yes, that’s right. Feminism is the party of helplessness, disease, homelessness and starvation. Anyone who’s just made the argument he made really shouldn’t be offering any opinions on the sanity of others.
Before we get into a critique of Price’s argument, such as it is, let’s pause for a moment to ask how his novel thesis was received by the Spearhead regulars. While a few commenters did take him to task for ignoring economics, others took his absurd argument and ran with it. (This is The Spearhead, after all.) Alucin declared,
Feminism is a crime against humanity. What happened in Haiti regarding food distribution will be repeated again and again as long as feminism prevails. Fighting feminism is something good people do on behalf of humanity. The men and women of Japan will get their lives back together again far more quickly than the matriarchal people of Haiti.
The future is patriarchal. It’s just a matter of which form it will take and when the West will re-masculate.
Epoetker took it a step further, adding a bit of racism to the misogynistic mix:
Haiti is a land of men who look like men but think like women. Japan is a land of men who look like women but think like men.
Rebel, meanwhile, found a grim humor in it all:
The Haitian case is proof positive that feminism is exactly like AIDS.
No matter how many die, feminism will be the last thing to die.
It was planned that way.Whichever way you look at it, the answer is always the same: feminism is a religion of death.
Feminists are death worshippers.That leaves very little hope for the future.
Life is so short and we worry too much. And it’s so futile.
One day we will all be Haitians. LOL!!
A note: These aren’t a couple of weird comments I’ve “cherry picked” to give a distorted picture of the discussion. In fact, these comments got anywhere from 20 to nearly 70 upvotes from Spearhead readers, and almost no downvotes. There were many other comments, also heavily upvoted, agreeing with these general premises. If you don’t believe me, go take a look yourself.
Numerous other commenters, I should also note, offered frankly racist interpretations of “the tale of two earthquakes,” blaming the greater scope of the disaster in Haiti on what one commenter called its “largely negro, largely indolent society.” While some objected to the racism, many clearly racist comments got numerous upvotes from the Spearhead crowd. (The comment I just quoted got 60 upvotes and 20 downvotes.)
Getting back to Price’s argument, let’s try to unpack the various layers of bullshit here. First of all, Haiti is no matriarchy. Yes, women often head up households there. But they don’t run the country, by any measure.
Life in Haiti is no picnic for men, but women have it even worse; as one human rights group noted in a recent report, “Haitian women experience additional barriers to the full enjoyment of their basic rights due to predominant social beliefs that they are inferior to men and a historical pattern of discrimination and violence against them based on their sex. Discrimination against women is a structural feature in Haitian society and culture that has subsisted throughout its history, both in times of peace and unrest.”
Rape is a constant threat, and, as a recent article in the Los Angeles Times notes, it “wasn’t even considered a serious criminal offense in Haiti until five years ago. … Before 2005, rape was considered an offense against honor, or “crime of passion,” meaning it was a minor infraction in which the perpetrator would go free if he agreed to marry his victim.”
The earthquake only made the situation worse for women. Rapes are especially widespread in the camps that sprung up in the wake of last year’s earthquake. Instead of “tak[ing] care of their families and communities,” as Price would put it, many Haitian men have instead preyed on women and girls, sexually assaultng them and stealing their food and other supplies. This is not, to put it mildly, a country suffering from an excess of feminism or female authority.
No, Haiti is in dire straits mostly because of its extreme poverty. Anyone looking at the history of natural disasters can plainly see that they tend to cause far more chaos and misery and death in poor countries than they do in rich ones: In highly patriarchal, and poverty-stricken Pakistan, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake killed an estimated 75,000, though the quake there was an order of magnitude weaker than Japan’s.
I’m not sure why I feel the need to remind readers of these basic points; the absurdity of Price’s arguments should be immediately obvious to anyone not blinded by misogyny. Sometimes I wonder if Price even believes all of the shit he shovels. Stupidity would be easier to forgive than that level of cynicism.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Scott Adams to Men’s Rights Activists: You’ll never win an argument with a woman
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| Scott Adams: Sometimes dumber than Dilbert’s boss. |
So Scott Adams — the Dilbert guy — has a blog. About a week and a half ago he made the mistake of asking his readers to give him a topic to write about. Well, some MRAs heard about this, and, being MRAs, decided that they would flood his site with comments urging him to write about Men’s Rights. And so he did.
What they got from him wasn’t quite what they hoped. Really, though, it wasn’t what anyone would have hoped. So much so that Adams decided to take his post down, saying that it had gotten “a bit too much attention from outside my normal reading circle.”
Luckily, through the voodoo of Google, we can still see the original post. Adams started out, depressingly enough, by more-or-less agreeing with MRAs on a wide assortment of their pet issues big and small — from men paying more for car insurance to the alleged anti-male bias of the legal system. Much of what he wrote made as little sense as many real MRA rants; even his little jokey asides fell completely flat.
We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?
Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.
Add to our list of inequities the fact that women have overtaken men in college attendance. If the situation were reversed it would be considered a national emergency.
After more or less agreeing that men are getting a raw deal, Adams dismissed the complaints of women upset that women earn less than men; to Adams, this is because they are naturally timid souls who don’t know how to ask for raises.
So far, so not-so-good. But then Adams pulled the old switcheroo on his MRA readers, who up until this point were presumably giddy with excitement.
Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:
Get over it, you bunch of pussies.
Uh oh! Shaming tactic! MRAs love directing vagina-based insults at others — mangina anyone? — but they hate hate hate it when anyone directs a vagina-based insult at them. To be fair, calling someone a pussy is not much of an argument.
But here’s where Adams pulled a sort of double switcheroo. After insulting Men’s Rights activists, he did them one better with a bizarre, brazen misogynistic argument that seemed to have been cribbed from some of the more idiotic comments on the various MGTOW message boards. It turned out that the reason Adams thinks men should “get over it” is that … well, read it for yourself.
The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
What what what?? This is the sort of shit you expect from some low-grade misogynist loser on The Spearhead. But no, this is Scott Adams, internationally famous cartoonist and bestselling author. Instead of trying to explain just what the fuck he means by all this, Adams continued on with a very strange, and strangely sexual, chess metaphor:
How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression just to get something better in the long run? It’s called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen. If you’re still crying about your pawn when you’re having your way with the queen, there’s something wrong with you and it isn’t men’s rights.
Apparently In Scott Adams’ world, chess players don’t get all their kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
After a few more paragraphs that, frankly, don’t make any more sense than what I’ve quoted so far, Adams seemed to realize that maybe he shouldn’t have really suggested that women were a bunch of retarded children. But instead of going back and removing that from his post, he dug himself further in with a weird and completely unconvincing denial:
I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.
As far as I can figure out his weird and convoluted argument, it is this: The world really is unfair to men. But you’ll never win this argument with a women — you know how they are. So keep quiet and maybe … you’ll get to fuck the queen?
No wonder he deleted the post.
Completely off-topic observation: Every time I hear the name Dilbert, the song Dilbar Dil Se Pyare, from the 1971 Bollywood hit Caravan, gets stuck in my head. So let’s see if I can get it stuck in your head:
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Sticking it to The Woman
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| A “Wacky Package by Tom Bunk. |
We have spoken here before about the imminent threat to civilization posed by misogynistic douchebags “going Galt,” shrugging like Atlas and depriving society of their hard work and staggering genius. Indeed, in the comments of this very blog, one of our own resident MGTOWers, Cold, explained how he was sticking it to The Man — er, The Woman — by not paying taxes on some of his earnings, thus becoming what economists call a “free rider”on government services, and what the rest of us taxpayers call a “tax cheat.”
He’s not the only manosphere dude who has concluded that the best way to screw over all those evil wimminz who are leeching off the government tit is to, er, leech off the government tit themselves. The guy calling himself AfOR — a prolific commenter and one-time contributor to the False Rape Society blog — explained his similar strategy in a comment on angry-dude megasite The Spearhead:
The wimminz are always directly dependent upon “no questions asked” money, usually from the public purse, and even those in industry only get away with it because the way is lead by the public purse.
Starve them of cash and you starve them of oxygen, they will literally die of starvation, and raise blue murder screaming to their last breath.
The only way to starve them of cash is to starve the State of cash, fuck the State, it can’t be fixed any other way and is now the enemy.
So how does one go about starving the state (metaphorically) and hopefully some actual women (literally)? With some slackery and/or tax fraud!
The only way to starve the State of cash is either live off welfare or work self employed and keep two sets of books, run the black / cash economy for what you can, and good accounting for what you can’t where everything is a deductible expense.
If you pay into the State, you are paying into the wimminz defence fund.
Since AfOR only rarely gets to see his kids, he figures it doesn’t matter if his brand of slacktivism destroys the economy — and possibly leads to them getting killed.
I couldn’t have less contact with my kids if we had had TOTAL economic meltdown and they had died in the ensuing chaos, so frankly speaking total economic meltdown holds nothing very scary for me, I have a set of skills that will always be in demand (a brain, two hands and a mechanical aptitude)
Nope! He’s footloose and fancy free!
Freed from needing to cater to the ex bitch and freed (prevented by force of Law actually) from any obligation towards my kids I can go live in my fucking car, it provides 12 VDC to power my laptop and charge my smartphone, and I can tether my smartphone to my laptop and get internet access anywhere I can get a phone signal.
In siding with the wimminz the State has made me the very thing it fears the most, the worker who can go anywhere on a whim, the worker who can work in the black (cash) economy, the worker who is very hard to track and profile … the worker who has no interest in taking on a debt burden or otherwise “boosting” the economy, the worker who can’t be bribed to vote appropriately because he doesn’t have a McMansion, corporate job, mortgage, etc etc. …
I guess Ayn Rand would be … proud?
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>If you don’t agree with me, angry dudes will kick your ass
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Anyone who’s seen Taxi Driver will remember Travis Bickle’s late night soliloquy on the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, [and] junkies” he saw every night driving his cab. “Someday,” he told himself, “a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
Of course — SPOILER ALERT! — what he really meant by “a real rain” coming was that he, Travis Bickle, would lose his shit and start shooting people.
Bickle wasn’t the only one to mix his predictions with a heaping helping of threat. Those who predict the end of the world at the hand of gods or men or some vague terrible cataclysm are all too often rooting (secretly or openly) for the civilization-destroyers they are ostensibly warning against. We saw this the other day amongst those MGTOWers who are now talking giddily about how complete economic collapse will serve to put foolish women and their “mangina” pals in their proper place.
And we see it again and again in the Men’s Rights movement, when MRAs sternly warn their detractors that if people don’t start listening to them, and pronto, the men of the world will rise up and, well, kick the shit out of everyone who opposes them. This is a warning only in the sense that a mafioso telling someone that, if he doesn’t pay what he owes, his legs just might possibly get broken, is a warning; by all reasonable definitions, it is a threat. As opposed to the leg-breaking, the threats of these MRAS aren’t very specific threats, but they’re threats of violence nonetheless.
I ran across one recent example of this sort of “warning” in the comments to Paul Elam’s piece on misandry — or at least what he labels misandry — in the Good Men Project’s package on the Men’s Rights movement. (My own contribution to the debate is here.) Here’s “Factory,” responding to another commenter who pointed out that some of his wording in an earlier comment had been awfully violent:
Who said I was interested in proving I wasn’t violent?
In point of fact, I continually warn people that if these issues are not MEANINGFULLY addressed, and soon, there will be a LOT of violence (see: Middle East) that we MRAs won’t be able to stop.
And frankly, if it comes to that, society (and all the women in it along with the men) flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.
Your hubris as a movement is causing a lot of men to be angry. You all vastly underestimate both the anger, and the ubiquitous nature of this anger.
We MRAs do nothing except act as weather vane and map. That’s why we have no central authority, or funding, or organization of any kind. We are average guys mad enough to stand up like we do. There are a LOT more guys that are just as mad, but content to let others lead.
And there are a growing number of men that take Feminist (and ‘official’) dismissal of mens issues as indication that ONLY violent revolution will lead to change.
And speaking for myself, if it ever comes to violence, I will stand aside, and feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done…but I won’t lift a FINGER to stop it.
Just like people like you are doing right now.
Notice the not-so-subtle, and rather thoroughly bungled, rhetorical sleight of hand here. Factory paints the violence as something he won’t indulge in (but won’t stop) — forgetting that in the very first sentence he admitted that he was himself violent. He refers to MRAs as little more than a “weather vane” for male emotion — but somehow later in the paragraph they are leading things. He claims that he will “feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done,” but this is only after stating in no uncertain terms that he thinks “society … flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.”
So, yeah, this is as much a “warning” as the hypothetical mafioso’s reference to broken legs.
Naturally, Elam himself stepped up to second Factory’s emotion, declaring that “[m]en, when disenfranchised and pushed to the edge, have frequently become violent.”
On his own site, Elam has been much more frankly threatening. Recently, telling off one commenter who had the temerity to actually question the gospel according to Elam, he finished off a long rant about male anger with this:
I would not suggest that treating half the population, the stronger half at that, with too much continuing disregard is a very good idea.
Thinking they will never come out swinging is a stupid, stupid way to go.
This kind of logic might best be called the Appeal to an Ass-kicking. The structure of this argument could be broken down as follows:
1) Source A says that p is true
2) If you don’t agree that p is true, Source A (or perhaps some other dudes) will do you bodily harm.
3) Therefore, you’d better fucking agree that p is true.
This is probably the oldest and crudest form of logic there is, and one that is popular amongst many animals as well. (My cat is a master of it, at least when p = “you will give me treats now.”)
Perhaps the best way to respond to it is the way that the commenter calling herself fannie responded to Factory on the Good Men Project:
You’re arguing that men are going to be so angry they’re not going to be able to control their rage and are therefore going to start inflicting mass amounts of violence upon others.
I’m not sure a feminist could be more defamatory of men than you are being.
MRAs sure are misandrist.
I, and feminists like me, think men are better than that.
Me too.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Check out my post on "Misogyny in the Men’s Rights Movement" on the Good Men Project
>
My contribution to the Good Men Project debate over the Men’s Rights Movement — talking about misogyny in the movement — is up now.
Batman on an elephant says check it out.
>Rocking Panda Says: Check out the Good Men Project today (and tomorrow)
>
The Good Men Project Magazine is running a bunch of articles on the Men’s Rights Movement this week. My contribution to the discussion, looking at misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement, will be going up tomorrow. But in the meantime, check out what they’ve got up now, including pieces from Amanda Marcotte, Hugo Schwyzer, and, at the other end of the spectrum, Paul Elam, who seems to be trying to tone it down a bit, at least for this audience. (More thoughts on that later.) Rocking panda will be waiting here for you when you get back.
>Feminists: Lizard-brained sperm-hunters
>
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| Men: Do not do this. |
Our good friend Herbal Essence — the Spearhead commenter, not the shampoo — is back with some profound insights into the true nature of feminism. Forget all the stuff you may have learned in your Women’s Studies courses. Forget what you read about on Feministing. “Feminism” is just a convenient rationalization for a primal female hunger. A hunger for cupcakes? A hunger for shoes? No, silly — a hunger for sperm. Feminism is all about getting hold of sexy, sexy sperm. Herbal explains, in a comment that garnered him 81 upvotes from the manly men on The Spearhead:
Feminism is not a worldview based on coherent thought. It is the desires of the female lizard-brain rationalized. Feminism is based on a woman’s reproductive strategy – my vagina makes me special, I must obtain sexy sperm, I deserve to be protected, and I deserve to get resources.
I don’t know about “protection” and resources for women and their special vaginas, but you might think that there would have to be a more efficient way for the ladies to get sperm. After all, most guys produce that sexy stuff by the bucketful, and the vast overwhelming majority of the poor little sperms that men produce so prodigiously end up dying unsung and unrealized in condoms or kleenex.
Apparently, though, feminists only want sperm when it comes as a part of a package deal which involves being married to a captive sperm- and money-producer. Because there is nothing — besides sperm, of course — that feminists like better than the traditional nuclear family. That way they can sit on their asses eating bon bons and trying on shoes — all paid for by their long-suffering husbands — while waiting for the next injection of sperm. (You thought feminists likes paying their own way and having their own careers? Ha! Shows how much you know.) Here’s Herbal again:
The whole of Feminism was designed to “free” women from the “restrictions” of traditional society so she could obtain sexy sperm, and then providing a social construct so she could get security and resources without being in the confines of a nuclear family. Thus making more sexy sperm and self-indulgence available. Lastly, that she “deserves” all that because she has a vagina.
And all those traditional-nuclear-family-loving women who claim not to be feminists? Fellas, they’re either lying to themselves, or lying to you.
Women don’t choose to believe in feminism. Feminism is a rationalization of their lizard brain. That’s why you can talk to women who will swear up and down they are not feminists, yet they refuse to give ground on any of the privileges that feminism gave them. The programming is already in her, feminism is just the means to make it a reality. You might as well try to convince female peacocks not to mate with males with impressive plumage.
Fellas, I think Herbal here has made it pretty clear why you need to protect your sperm from the feminists. If you make the mistake of actually having sex with one of these creatures, keep a bottle of tabasco sauce handy, and squirt it into your used condoms to make sure she doesn’t fish them out of the wastebasket later to use for her own evil ends. And if you’re jizzing into kleenexes, flush those down the toilet, pronto. If you just throw them out, beware: gangs of feminists rove the alleys of America, much like raccoons, raiding trash cans in search of sexy, sexy manstuff.
Be careful out there.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>With a Cherry 2000 on top
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| Silly poster! Melanie Griffith does not actually play Cherry 2000 |
Manosphere dudes, especially those waiting impatiently for the day when sexbots replace women, could actually learn a thing or two from one of my favorite dumb 1980s films, Cherry 2000, which I happened to catch (for about the third or fourth time) the other night.
The film, set in a vaguely postapocalptic future, offers an update of sorts to a very old story: Boy meets robogirl. Boy has sex with robogirl in a puddle of water. Boy loses robogirl when her circuits short out because they’re having sex in a puddle of water. Boy hires bounty hunter Melanie Griffith to escort him into the lawless Sector 7 to find him a replacement for his robogirl because her model (the Cherry 2000) has been discontinued. Shit happens. Stuff blows up. Melanie Griffith kicks ass, pouts, and kicks ass again.
The movie sets up a stark contrast between the infinitely pliable and submissive Cherry 2000 sexbot and actual not-so-pliable women. In one early scene, intended as something of a satire of the dating scene at the time, our hero and some of his pals go to a singles bar — where, if they decide they want to get with a sexy human lady, they need to negotiate the terms of the sexual encounter with her and her lawyer, and fill out the appropriate paperwork.
We get to listen in on a couple such negotiations; the women in question are all portrayed as, er, pretty touch negotiators — that is, bitches. One of the lawyers is portrayed by a young, pre-Matrix, Laurence Fishburne. At this point, I suspect most woman-hating, Matrix-loving manosphere dudes watching the film will jizz. in. their pants.
In fact, we get to see a lot of loud and obstreperous women in the film. In one memorable scene, a grizzled old junkyard owner asks his ornery young assistant for a favor:
GRIZZLED OLD COOT: Randa is going to fix us lunch, ain’t you, Randa?
RANDA: [Indignantly] No.
COOT: Well, then, you can just go shit in your hat.
Randa does not in fact fix anyone anything. Manosphere dudes will probably be happy to learn that later in the film — SPOILER ALERT! — she’s shot in the head at point-blank range.
Anyway, long story short: after (barely) surviving assorted assaults from Sector 7 baddies with the invaluable assistance of the ornery Melanie Griffith, our hero is forced to choose between saving her or the robogal he’s devoted the whole movie to finding. Naturally, being a robot-loving idiot, he chooses Cherry 2000 — then, after heading off with her in tow, he realizes that she’s sort of a simpering moron, and goes back to rescue the real woman. Cue happy ending. (Well, happy for everyone except for sexbot-coveting manosphere dudes watching the film, who will probably rush off to their favorite MGTOW forum to denounce the filmmakers as evil manginas.)
The moral of the story? Even the complete idiots who made this incredibly stupid movie realized that real women — with opinions and ideas of their own — are preferable to adoring sexbots.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
