Category Archives: MRA
>Incredibly Strange Antifeminist Bedfellows: Kay Hymowitz defends her attackers
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| Damn you, you monsters! This scarf does NOT make me look gay! |
This is just embarrassing. A bit over a week ago, the Wall Street Journal published a chunk of antifeminist polemicist Kay Hymowitz’ new book Manning Up, which argues that young men today have turned into a generation of immature pre-adults as a result (to simplify only slightly) of excessive exposure to Judd Apatow movies and to young women who won’t let them step up and be real men. The article stirred up quite a tempest in the tea-pot that is the Men’s Right’s/MGTOW world online. Completely missing the antifeminist implications of her argument, manosphere men attacked her for impugning the honor of young men and their video games, and for generally being, to quote a few typical comments, a “bitch,” an “entitlement whore,” a “cunt,” “a fugly tranny skank,” and someone who “on her best day … has a face that reminds me a mule my uncle used to own.”
Now Hymowitz has responded to all this vitriol by penning … a partial defense of her attackers for the Daily Beast. While she notes that there are elements of “backlash” and, yes, misogyny in the rage of the manosphere, she’s quick to equate this manosphere tantrum with the feelings of men in general (as Amanda Marcotte has already pointed out), and to suggest that there are legitimate reasons for the hate. Which apparently have to do with, er, male frustration with having to ask women out for dates. Yes, that’s her real argument. Let’s let her explain:
[T]here’s another reason for these rants, one that is far less understood. Let’s call it gender bait and switch. Never before in history have men been matched up with women who are so much their equal—socially, professionally, and sexually. … That’s the bait; here comes the switch. Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure.
At this point, Hymowitz launches into a tired old litany of male complaints about the alleged horrors of post-feminist dating: OMG, in this crazy mixed-up world of ours, men don’t know whether or not to open doors for their dates! Some women want to pay their way on dates, even when they make as much as or more than the dudes dating them … and others don’t!
Men say they have no choice. If they want a life, they have to ask women out on dates; they have to initiate conversations at bars and parties, they have to take the lead on sex. Women can take a Chinese menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday nights, and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day.
As Marcotte points out, Hymowitz is essentially echoing one of the dopiest of manosphere complaints about the ladies, “that they’re all different people, instead of easily controlled sexbots.” Indeed, on many manosphere sites, one gets the impression that women are, or should be, a bunch of interchangeable sperm receptacles, differentiated only by how high they score on a “hotness” scale of 1-10. If you think of women this way, no wonder you’re confused when women have, you know, actual personalities and shit.
But here’s a hint for the angry dudes of the manosphere: once you realize that women are not all the same person inside, you can turn this fact to your advantage, by deliberately seeking out women who are actually compatible with your own personality. Don’t like paying for dates? Then find a woman who likes paying her own way! (Just don’t be shocked if she finds your retrograde ideas about women repulsive.) I know that this may come as a shock to some of you guys, but there are men out there who actually find women’s distinct personalities … interesting. Stimulating. Attractive.
Back to Hymowitz. As strange as it is to see her parroting some of the dumbest manosphere complaints about women and dating — some women want one thing, while other women want something different! some say they want good guys but then they date bad boys! — even stranger is her notion that manosphere rage has its roots in frustrations about dating. Given that she’s not a complete idiot, there are only two possible explanations for this strange conclusion of hers. One, she’s so eager to find evidence for her thesis that empowered women are the root of male immaturity that she is willing to overlook the crazy misogyny of angry MRA/MGTOW dudes because they, too, blame women for their dating woes. Or two, that she has not actually given the blogs and forums of the manosphere much more than a cursory glance. I think it’s a bit of both.
The list of manosphere sites she mentions in her article bear out the second of these theses — it’s simply cut-and-pasted from her 2008 article Love in the Time of Darwinism, and it’s pretty clear she hasn’t revisited any of them since then. Or, in one case, ever: EternalBachelor.com isn’t a Men’s Rights or MGTOW site at all. but a skeleton site for a web magazine “coming soon” whose only content at the moment consists of photos of buff, shirtless guys (and a page where you can order t-shirts, presumably to keep the poor fellas from freezing to death). I can only guess that Hymowitz meant to refer to the Eternal Bachelor blog, which has itself been dormant for more than three years.(Another site she links to, Nomarriage.com, is also “under construction.”)
Kay, if you read this, please take a moment to peruse some real MRA/MGTOW and related forums, like, say, The Spearhead, and take a look at some of the comments there. For example, this one, about you — which, last I checked, had gotten 33 upvotes and only a handful of downvotes from the Spearhead peanut gallery:
I wish I could reach through my computer screen and punch this bitch. …. this stupid bitch is using the pain of innocent men destroyed by the same misandric system that publishes her shit to make more money and she is probably part of the feminazi conspiracy to appropriate and colonize the growing MRM. …
WTF is up with jewish women? They seem to be the most misandric of all. They demand that baby boys get their dicks chopped off and grown men too, I have hooked up with a few and they all got weirdly gitty knowing I was uncut and then sad when they realized I wouldn’t get chopped up and submit to their version of a sky god. I mean, really, WTF? I haven’t read much into the torah but just scanning the feminists and other feminazi loons it’s is obvious that there are a lot with jewish names. … Really, I don’t get it and am not trying to sound like a nazi but I must be missing something.
Somehow, I don’t think the rage in this comment has much to do with confusion over whether or not guys should open doors for their dates.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Shovel ready
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| The Ideal Woman, apparently. |
Freud asked: “What do women want?” Mel Gibson answered the question in that movie in which he could read their lady minds. I never saw it, but I’m guessing based on Gibson’s behavior since making the film that women want lots of drunken anti-Semitic tirades and verbal abuse.
Anyway, over at A Voice For Men, MRA elder Paul Elam doesn’t really give a shit about what women want. But he knows what they deserve, and what they don’t deserve. Which turns out to be shovels and love, respectively. As he explains in a recent comment:
We don’t need to teach young girls to marry for love; we need to put shovels in their hands and put them to work in ditches, digging their way to self sufficiency. We need to leave them to their own survival devices so that they can learn some humility …
But what we most need to teach young girls is that until there are social pressures established that place firm boundaries and limits on their hypergamous instincts, that they cannot be trusted with love, as women in this culture have been proving for 50 years … .
Keep shoveling, Paul.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>No Sperm for Feminists!
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| Don’t let her have it! She reads Pandagon! |
Hey, fellas, you know that stuff that comes out of your penis when you masturbate? Whatever you do, don’t give it to a feminist! No matter how nicely she asks! Especially — I repeat, ESPECIALLY — if she wants to put it in her vagina. It is the KEY TO EVERYTHING!!! Rebel, commenting on angry-dude mecca The Spearhead, explains:
If feminists do not breed, they will disappear. …
We have complete control over female reproduction, CONTRARILY to what most think. We hold the spark of life in our hands (polite form..)
Simple: NO DNA TRANSFER is it.
That’s why I said: don’t give your seeds.
Without them, women become TOTALLY powerless.
If we set our minds to it, collectively, two generations at most and the problem is gone.
I say:”Breed the suckers out”. Period. Don’t have sex with feminists.
Don’t have sex with those who hate you.
Breed the feminists OUT!!
Our grandchildren will then have a working society back.
I actually think this plan will be remarkably easy to implement. I don’t really think many feminists are lining up to collect sperm from Spearheaders.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
Godwin’s Law, upside-down and backwards
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Meet Stu. Stu hates feminsts. But he hates manginas even more. You might even say that Stu hates manginas the way Hitler hated Jews. No, I’m not comparing Stu to Hitler. He happily compares himself to Hitler in this comment on A Voice For Men.Phew, I’m glad you [Paul Elam] said feminist hating is an honorable and viable political act because I certainly hate them. … The real object of my hatred are those that enable these people. The ones that are actively engaged in creating the environment of misandry that we live in now.
For those people, career feminists and manginas, my hatred would be on par to Adolf Hitlers hatred of a super rich gay jew who was raping his arse. Out of these, I hate career manginas the most. There would be no mercy for these arseholes if I could be dictator for a day, they would soon be living what is left of their lives in extreme misery.
Emphasis added. This comment, Hitler and all, got more than three times as many upvotes as downvotes from the assembled mob site’s readers. Of course, Stu’s comment is in response to a post titled “The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever,” which means that these upvoters are people who enjoyed a post titled “The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever” so much that they stuck around afterwards to compliment the author, so, you know.
This, by contrast, is the sort of comment that gets downvoted on A Voice For Men, and which inspires the post’s author, Paul Elam, to tell the commenter “fuck that, and fuck you. Let me say that again. Fuck you.”
EDITED TO ADD: When I posted this piece last night, that second comment had virtually no upvotes; you had to click a link to even see it. I hope at least a few of the upvotes it now has were from the regulars on that site.
Another heartening sign: the critical response Elam’s “Rape … whatever” screed got on the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit. His response to the criticism is rather telling. I’m generally not a fan of the Men’s Rights subreddit, as you might imagine, but there are some decent people who comment there and it is much less hateful than almost all of the other MRA/MGTOW/etc sites I regularly read.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Memo to angry dudes: Not all the women who hate you are feminists
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| Disdainful women: Not always feminists. |
Given how much of their time they spend attacking feminism and feminists, manosphere dudes can be surprisingly incompetent at telling just who is and who isn’t an actual, bona-fide feminist; they’ve got terrible fem-dar.
Case in point: Last Saturday, annoying social conservative polemicist Kay Hymowitz published a piece in the Wall Street Journal taken from her new book “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” in which she argues that young men today have degenerated into puerile pre-adults, led astray by an assortment of villains including, but not limited to, Maxim magazine, Comedy Central, Seth Rogan and, if the subtitle of her book is any indication, rising women. You may vaguely remember her first rehearsing this general argument in a similarly annoying City Journal piece a couple of years ago called “Child-Man in the Promised Land.”
To point out a simple fact that should be evident to all but the most hardened manosphere misogynists: not everyone who says critical things about men is therefore a feminist. Indeed, many of those who say the worst things about men aren’t feminist at all.
And in fact, as should be very clear to anyone who actually sits down to read her work, Hymowitz is no feminist. If the reference to “the rise of women” as a villain in her book’s subtitle isn’t enough of a clue, let me point you to several of the many articles she’s written attacking feminism — for example, accusing feminists of ignoring the precious wisdom of Evolutionary Psychology, going “AWOL on Islam,” and just generally being “obsolete.”
But the basic fact of Hymowitz’ antifeminism seems not to have penetrated the consciousness of many of her critics in the manosphere, where her latest WSJ has produced a flurry of angry denunciations from dudes who take her stale tranditionalist bromides as the latest in evil feminazi-ism.
On Happy Bachelors she’s derided as a “typical second-wave hag feminazi.” On The Spearhead, one commenter dismisses her as “yet another smug, AA-promoted female token who can’t grasp what she and her feminist sisters have done to men.” On MGTOWforums.com, yet another misguided commenter snidely asserts that “Jewish feminists do not age well.”
Blogger Rex Patriarch, meanwhile, proclaims her op-ed to be a “a typical feminist rant about how wonderful women are and what disappointment men have become,” and accuses her of sour grapes:
That’s right ladies do us men a favor, go away and keep telling yourselves you don’t need any sour grapes.
You ladies are the ones that need to grow up and face reality. Wanting both the full benefits of feminism and marriage without any responsibilities is understandable. I would take that deal if I could get it too but since I can’t I exercise my natural right to not participate in the stacked deck you have to offer. That deal means jumping through the endless and ever increasing hoops of expectations it’s going to take to just get to the break even point in a sham marriage with an entitlement princess that western women have become.
Thanks but find some other sucker to be your jumping poodle, I will take video games instead.
As a fellow video gamer and something of an overgrown child-man myself, I’ve got nothing against anyone offering a good sensible critique of Hymowitz’ basic thesis; unfortunately, so far all I’ve seen on the topic from MRAs and MGTOWers have been little more than crude misogynist (and sometimes anti-Semitic) insults, most far cruder than the remarks I’ve quoted here.
But here’s a hint: you can’t really offer much of a critique if you start off assuming that she’s driven by an ideology she actually hates.
EDITED TO ADD: Speaking of good sensible critiques of Hymowitz, here are a couple from actual feminists. ECHIDNE of the snakes takes on Hymowitz’ “extreme definition of masculinity,” which seems to suggest that “Men can only be men if women remain girls.” Meanwhile, Jill at Feministe notes that life is not really much like Judd Apatow movies and makes the point that what Hymowitz derides as “extended adolescence” is in fact “an intelligent and fair reaction to a new economy and new gender models.”
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Family planning: Not a Dude Issue
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| Note to MGTOW: Not actually how it works. |
Oh Men Going Their Own Way, why must you be so confusing? MRAs and MGTOWers complain all the time about how unfair it is for women who somehow magically get preggers after having sex with them to decide to actually keep the kids and saddle them with — gasp! — some of the cost of raising said kids. So you’d think manosphere dudes would all be fervently in favor of easy access to abortion or, at the very least, birth control.
Not so much. Because apparently for quite a few of these dudes, the desire to gloat over the misfortunes of women actually outweighs their desire to protect themselves from the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.
Or so I am forced to conclude after reading this thread on MGTOWforums.com dealing with the recent passage in the House of a bill blocking funding of Planned Parenthood — an event that strikes many of the commenters as hi-larious.
Apeiron offers this nugget:
Yes i saw the femms frothing at the mouth on their boards.
Well you know what bitch, we have to make cuts, lots of cuts …
Good news is if the sluts see the cuts they might keep their legs shut and act accordingly.
The appropriately named womanhater presents his own analysis of the sexual politics of abortion:
Well – the twats replaced the husband and father with the state. Now they’ve bled that hubby and father dry. Of course, there’s no replacement cock/sucker for the state. Have fun girls!
Rock adds:
[F]eminism cannot be defeated without cutting out funding. … The neverending supply of manginas and white knights will keep it going unless these same people run out of money. And that is what’s happening. Who would’ve thought the bad economy could have a good side effect. :)
Forum moderator hasmat concurs:
Want an abortion cuz you couldn’t keep your legs shut? Fine, kill your baby, whore. But, I ain’t paying for it. Not a penny.
But it is intp who offers the most, er, original take on the issue:
Question. What percentage of women would give their daughters up for sacrifice if they could remain young-looking/beautiful in return? I’m guessing a considerable percentage would take the Devil up on that deal. The rationalization hamster in women is strong. They would probably tell themselves I’ll just have another baby later. Or “What about my needs? I have a right to be beautiful!” I ask this because per statistics most abortions occur due to non-health threatening reasons. The woman simply does not want to have a kid yet. She wants to keep screwing like a man (riding the carousel) until the last possible minute.
Ignoring the rest of intp’s, ah, speculation, I have to wonder: what exactly is wrong with “screwing like a man?”
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>A New Low in Victim-Blaming, Part 2: In Mala Fide on Lara Logan
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| From In Mala Fide |
The reaction of the “manosphere” to Lara Logan’s reported sexual assault in Cairo has been highly revealing, to put it mildly. And what it reveals about the assorted Men’s Rightsers, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artists, and others who make up the manosphere is pretty ugly.
Take, for example, Ferdinand Bardamu’s posts on the subject. On Tuesday, Bardamu, whose antifeminist blog In Mala Fide is widely linked to in the manosphere, spat forth a snide, sarcastic rant that attacked Logan for having the temerity to even set foot in Egypt. He started out dismissive:
Apparently, a CBS lady reporter got raped while covering the revolution in Egypt. For some reason, we’re expected to feel sorry for her.
Then turned up the sarcasm:
Oh, what a symbol of courage Miss Logan is! What a beacon of determination and grit and…no, seriously. I can’t go on.
Fuck Lara Logan. Fuck her and the shit-for-brains idiot who thought it was a good idea to send a WOMAN to report from a war zone. …
Of course, Bardamu ignores the simple fact that is is dangerous to send ANY reporter, male or female, into the midst of a revolution — indeed, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 140 attacks on journalists in the Egyptian unrest so far; one journalist was shot and killed. Despite this fact, it is an undeniably good thing that some reporters (male and female both) are willing to risk their lives to cover wars and revolutions and other dramatic, dangerous, and important events. No one has suggested that the attacks on male journalists mean that men should not be covering these events. No one is mocking the male journalists who were attacked. (Well, almost no one. Bardamu refers in passing to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, also famously attacked while covering the events of Egypt, as a “twinkle-toed pansy [who] couldn’t handle the heat on the streets of Cairo.”)
For Bardamu, though, Logan’s story is one of a woman foolishly trying to make her way in a man’s world:
You send a chick into a situation like the one in Egypt, you might as well hang a sign around her neck that says “FREE FUCKTOY”. I don’t care how many disaster areas she’s reported from, how many awards she’s won, it was going to happen eventually. …
Sucks that Lara got raped, but she had it coming. [Emphasis in original]
To Bardamu, this case is evidence not only that women journalists should not be sent to cover the Egyptian revolution but that they should not be allowed to leave their home country at all:
[O]f COURSE Lara shouldn’t be sent on another foreign assignment again! She, nor any other women should be allowed to be a foreign correspondent for their own safety.
And then, after arguing that Logan “had it coming,”and that any western woman who has the temerity to leave her hotel room and step out into the streets of Cairo should expect herself to get raped sooner or later, Bardamu then suggests that Logan may be making it all up:
There’s a non-zero chance that she didn’t get raped at all, and that she made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. …
I have no evidence that she’s not telling the truth, only a tiny feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s been growing year by year, with every venal vixen who falsely accuses a man of rape because she wants fame, or she feels like a slut after sleeping with the guy, or she’s mad that he slept with her best friend the day after, or whatever else.
Naturally, in the comments, many of Bardamu’s fans agreed that women women who trespass into male spaces deserve whatever happens to them. According to “John”:
Women do not belong in men’s locker rooms, Mike Tysons apartment at 2:00 a.m., drunk in a bar bathroom with the Steelers quarterback, and they sure as hell don’t belong “reporting” in the middle of a revolution. Women should not go to Frat Parties dressed like sluts and get drunk with the expectation that “nothing will happen.” …
This woman, Laura Logan, is not just an idiot – she is an adulterous whore. She shares this unfortunate circumstance with tens of millions of others of her sex, and deserves no pity whatsoever.
For some, the case was not just another excuse for “slut shaming” but evidence that the very notion of equality between the sexes is wrong. As Brett Stevens put it:
American women are rape targets worldwide. They are known to be clueless, friendly, and most of all, sexually easy. If a woman chucks her sexual favors out the door at the drop out of a hat, why not just go the extra mile and apply pressure? … We take these girls from comfy suburbs and send them into war zones and riots and wonder why they get gang raped. Amazing cluelessness, arising from our insane idea of “equality.”
There were other comments even worse than these — e.g., this one — but I don’t have the heart to post them here.
But Bardamu’s retrograde notions were also challenged in the comments — mostly from those who saw his noxious post linked to on feminist sites and on Twitter, but also in a few cases from actual fans of his blog.
This reaction inspired Bardamu to post a second piece on the Logan story, one even more narcissistic and self-righteous than the first. After taking on some of his critics (most notably Molly of Progressive Blogic, whom he labeled a “premenstrual whiner”), and casually referring to Logan as “an unwilling cum dumpster,” Bardamu tried to pretend that it was him, and not the feminists, who had the best interests of women at heart.
Lara Logan had no business being in Cairo, or anywhere in that part of the world for that matter. All of you leftie feminist tossers screeching about “rape culture” have her blood on your hands. How many more have to suffer before your lies are discredited?
Sorry, but a guy who refers to any women, much less a woman who has been raped, as a “cum dumpster” pretty much forfeits any right to be taken seriously on the subject of what is best for women.
About a week ago, Bardamu reported that he’d taken a Psychopathy Test on OkCupid, and had scored an impressive 31 points, which put him in the ranks of the “True Psychopaths.” His posts on Logan — full of narcissistic rage and utterly lacking in basic human empathy — seem to bear out this diagnoses all too well.
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Factchecking a list of "Hateful Quotes From Feminists"
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| Making a list, checking it twice. |
Periodically, in the comments here, someone will post a dubious list of “evil feminist quotes” they have found on some Men’s Rights or antifeminist website. These lists are always faintly ridiculous, filled with decades-old quotes from a handful of radical feminists (most notably, Andrea Dworkin), most of whom have been soundly criticized by other feminists and whose ideas have been rejected by the majority of feminists today. The lists also tend to be very sloppily put together. When I’ve gone to check the accuracy of these lists, I’ve invariably run into problems — one quote may have come from a character in a novel, another may be a quote that doesn’t reflect the author’s own point of view, and so on.
Recently, one of the antifeminists who regularly comments here (Cold) posted a link to one such list, helpfully titled “Hateful Quotes From Feminists.” It’s fairly typical of these sorts of lists: many of the quotes are decades old, there are ten quotes from a single radical feminist — yes, Andrea Dworkin — and the list is sloppily put together.
I decided to give this list a fairly thorough fact-checking. And the results were, well, more or less what I expected, which is to say that the list was a sloppy mixture of truth, half-truth and outright falsehood.
The story, in brief: Some of the quotes I checked were indeed accurate — or mostly accurate. But several quotes were simply imaginary, or uttered by fictional characters; one was a complete misrepresentation of what the author was saying; two were paraphrased, which is to say, words put in the mouths of feminist authors by feminist critics; some were from obscure or anonymous sources, and in a few cases it wasn’t clear if those quoted were feminists at all; several were improperly sourced. There were a number of quotes that didn’t specify where they were from, and which turned out to be impossible to check. And then there were a couple of quotes which were not actually hateful at all.
I didn’t check everything in the list, but –if you have the patience for it — let’s go through what I did check, as a sort of case study in the shoddiness of much antifeminist propaganda.
Let’s start off with the very first quote:
“In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies, p. 129.
We’re off to a bad start here. This is not a quote from MacKinnon. The words were in fact written by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, the actual authors of “Professing Feminism,” a polemical book critical of feminism. They purport to summarize the views of MacKinnon and Dworkin, though, as Snopes points out in its debunking of the false quote, both M and D have specifically stated that they don’t believe intercourse is rape. Apparently the quote was attributed to MacKinnon in a column by right-wing columnist Cal Thomas, which is evidently how it entered the land of antifeminist mythology. Somewhere along the line, Catharine had her name changed to Catherine.
Then there’s this alleged quote from Andrea Dworkin:
“Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”
According to Wikiquote, this quote is quite literally fictional:
The first appearance of this quote is from P: A Novel (2003) by Andrew Lewis Conn as a quote from the fictional feminist “Corinne Dwarfkin”. The original reads “In capsule form, my thesis is that heterosexual intercourse is the pure, distilled expression of men’s contempt for women.” In the slightly altered form given above, the quote is attributed in several books to Andrea Dworkin. Neil Boyd, in Big Sister (2004) attributes the quote to Letters from a War Zone, however, this quote, nor any one with similar phrasing, appears in that work.
Indeed, our listmaker seem to have a lot of trouble quoting Dworkin correctly. A bunch of the quotes are taken from her book Letters From a War Zone, which I happen to own. The first quote I checked was this one:
“The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape.” Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 114.
It’s a weird quote, which sounds a lot like it’s coming from the the middle of a complicated argument. That’s because it is. And when you read what precedes it, it becomes clear that it’s NOT a statement of Dworkin’s own beliefs. She was in fact summarizing (in her own words) the beliefs of “male supremacist” sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson. It may or may not be a fair summary of their views, but that’s not the point: it’s NOT what she thought. Later in the paragraph, in fact, she compared these views to Hitler’s.
The other quotes from the book are more or less accurate. Words are missing, moved from one sentence to another, verb tenses are changed; they’re very sloppy transcriptions, but at least they aren’t complete and utter misrepresentations of what Dworkin wrote.
There’s also quote from Andrea Dworkin that’s listed as being from “Liberty, p. 58.” Dworkin never wrote a book called Liberty. But I found the quote in what seems to be a scholarly work; it’s evidently from Dworkin’s book Our Blood.
Finally, there are a few other alleged quotes from Dworkin; they don’t have sources listed for them. I found the quotes elsewhere online — but only on dubious “quote pages” and other iterations of “evil feminist” lists. They sound Dworkin-ish, but given the listmaker’s track record I have no faith that they are actually real, correctly transcribed Dworkin.
It’s bizarre. How hard is it to find hair-raising quotes from Andrea Dworkin? Dworkin was so radical that most feminists disagree with her, sometimes violently. You could practically pick a sentence at random from almost any of her books and chances are good it would offend somebody — including me. A number of her writings are available online. How lazy and sloppy do you have to be to fuck up your Dworkin quotes like this?
Let’s now turn to Marilyn French’s famously fictional quote:
“All men are rapists and that’s all they are.” Marilyn French in People, February 20, 1983
Oh, the quote is real — she wrote it — but it is not a statement of French’s beliefs. Nor did it originate in People magazine. It is a line of dialogue from her book The Woman’s Room. Wikipedia, take it away:
Following the rape of Val’s daughter Chris, Val states (over Mira’s protests), “Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relationships with men, in their relationships with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes” (p. 433). Critics have sometimes quoted Val’s dialogue as evidence of French’s misandry without noting that the passage is only spoken by one of many characters in the novel.
Now, it’s true that this sentence was quoted in People magazine — in the issue of Feb 20 1979, not Feb 20, 1983 as claimed. It’s not clear from the rather sloppy People article that this is a line from the book, but it is.
In the article, French notes that the book is partly based on her experience — drawing on the emotions she herself felt after her own daughter was raped.
“Sometimes I felt so violent about it and how the courts treated her,” French admits, “that there seemed no recourse but to go out, buy a gun and shoot the kid who did it, and the lawyers too. I couldn’t help my own child.” Plenty of that rage made its way into The Women’s Room. “I’m less angry now. Being too deep in anger corrodes your interior.”
So, again, it is very clear that the “all men are rapists” quote is meant to reflect a character awash in rage and pain; it is not an ideological statement of misandry.
The “Hateful Quotes” list also contains a bunch of quotes from people I’ve never heard of; they’re obviously not major feminist figures, and may not even be feminists. Gordon Fitch? Never heard of the guy, and can’t find anything about him online.
Hodee Edwards? Never heard of her either, and I can only find a handful of mentions of her online, but she’s mentioned in the footnotes of a Catharine MacKinnon book, and it looks as though she is, or at least was, a feminist with Marxist leanings. But there is no way to even find out what the source of the quote is — a book, an essay, a quotation in a news story? — much less actually find the source and confirm that the quote is real.
EDITED TO ADD: I’ve been contacted by Hodee Edwards’ granddaughter, who tells me that her grandmother never said or wrote the quote attributed to her; while Edwards was indeed a Marxist and a feminist, she was not anti-sex. (The faux quote in question claims that all sex is rape.) Edwards has recently passed away, and her family members have been, the granddaughter tells me, “very distressed to learn that this quote has somehow been linked to my grandmother’s name on the Internet.”
Then there’s Pat Poole:
Melbourne City Councilwoman Pat Poole announced her opposition to renaming a street for Martin Luther King: “I wonder if he really accomplished things, or if he just stirred people up and caused a lot of riots.”
Who the hell is Pat Poole? I looked her up, and yes, she was a city councilwoman in Melbourne, Florida, but I was unable to find out much beyond that. Is the quote accurate? I don’t know. There’s no source given, and I can’t find the original quote online. Is she actually a feminist, or is the author of the list simply assuming she is one because she’s a woman?
And then of course there is the anonymous “Liberated Woman” whose quote ends the list. She definitely sounds like a feminist. We just don’t know for sure if she or the quote are real.
Moving on, I can’t help but notice that a number of the allegedly hateful quotes are in fact not hateful at all. Take, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich’s quote about the family, which is in fact part of a sharply written essay on “family values.” You can find it here.
Here’s another distinctly non-hateful quote:
“Women take their roles of caretakers very seriously and when they hear of someone who’s taken advantage of a child, they react more strongly than men do.” – Kathleen C. Faller, professor of social work at the University of Michigan
Faller, if she did indeed say this, may or may not be correct, but it’s hard to see how this is “hateful.” Women on average spend much more time caring for children than men do and it may well be that, on average, they react more strongly than men. I couldn’t find the quote in question — again, this is because the listmaker didn’t actually provide the source — but her faculty web page is here.
Then there’s this “hateful” quote on religion:
“God is going to change. We women… will change the world so much that He won’t fit anymore.” Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions.
The quote is real; Goldenberg is indeed a feminist theologian. But here’s a little newsflash: There are lots of people in the world, feminist and non-feminist, who do not believe in traditional notions of God. Or in God at all. Nietzsche famously said “God is Dead,” Richard Dawkins says God is “a delusion,” and about 80 zillion internet athiests (many of them not feminists in the slightest) regularly compare belief in God to belief in unicorns, fairies, and Santa Claus.
I checked out a few other quotes on the list. The Hillary Clinton quote is accurate; the source is here. The Barbara Jordan quote appears in a Texas Monthly article here.
The quote from Catherine Comins — a favorite “evil feminist quote” amongst MRAs — has its origins in a Time magazine article, but it is not actually a quote from her; it is someone else’s summary of what she told Time in the article in question. Nor do we know the full context in which she spoke.
I don’t have the time or patience to fact-check the rest of the list. If anyone out there happens to have time and/or patience, or happens to own any of the books that are cited as sources, feel free to fact check it yourself and post your findings. (EDITED TO ADD: triplanetary has risen to the challenge, and has factchecked the rest of the list, as well as offering some excellent commentary on the alleged “hatefulness” of many of the quotes. You can find the post here.)
The numerous errors in this list — some minor, some huge — say something not only about the creator of this list but about all those who’ve distributed this list without, clearly, bothering to check anything in it . (Or, in the case of Cold, to contine to distribute a list he’s pretty sure is less than reliable.) Is this the result of laziness, or dishonesty? A bit of both, I imagine.
But I think this list is also a symptom of the tendency of many in the Men’s Rights movement to inflate the evils of their opponents. So many MRAs are so determined to prove that their supposed oppression is worse than that of women, and so determined to blame it all on feminism, that they need to make their opponents larger than life and twice as nasty. Given that the feminism they fight is largely a paranoid fantasy, bearing very little resemblance to feminism as it actually exists in the world today, it’s hardly shocking that a number of the quotes on this little list are fictional — and that none of the MRAs posting this list here and there on the internet seem to have even noticed (or, if they have noticed, to care, or at least to care enough to stop distributing the list). When you’re fighting phantoms in your own mind, the truth doesn’t really matter, does it?
Given how poorly this list held up to my fack-checking attempts, from now on I will consider this list and others like it spam, and delete any comments that link to them.
If any of you antifeminists still feel the desire to post “evil feminist quotes” in the comments here, you may do so, but only if you (or the list that you link to) provides clickable links to the original sources of the quotes in question. If you can’t provide a link to the source, I’ll delete it.
When I quote from MRAs and MGTOW-ites and other misogynists on this blog, I provide links to the sources. What’s so hard about that?
EDIT: Fixed links, and a few verb tenses.
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>Valentine’s Day, Massacred
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Don’t let it be said that the dudes of the manosphere aren’t ready for Valentine’s Day. Oh, they haven’t been ordering little teddy bears and giant bouquets of flowers for their sweeties. They’ve been getting ready to throw a fit at the very notion of the ersatz holiday.
Marc Rudov, a self-described MRA, “relationship expert” and all-around asshole, has been trying to organize a boycott of VD for several years now. “There’s nothing romantic about coercing men to oblige female entitlement,” Rudov recently told AOL News. “Valentine’s Day artificially and unilaterally caters to women. It’s the media’s annual male-bashing fest.”
Over on The Spearhead, grizzled MRA veteran Zed has written not one but two articles attacking VD, which he describes as “Extortion of Insincere Materialistic Tokens of Affection Under Threat of Emotional Violence Day.” Meanwhile, Paul Elam — never one for subtlety — has one-upped old Zed, denouncing the holiday as “a socially coerced day of hyper-entitlement for a generation of princess leeches.” Endorsing Rudov’s boycott, Elam seems especially incensed by the omnipresent “Every Kiss Begins With Kay” ads that clutter the airwaves every year as VD approaches.
One commenter at The Spearhead summons up his inner comedian:
There’ two types of VD. One is a potentially serious affliction that can be caught from sexual relations with a woman. Symptoms include tiredness, lack of sex drive, acute pain in the groin region and loss of work productivity. It’s difficult to treat as the parasite responsible is very demanding and difficult to get rid of.
The other is a bacterial infection treatable with antibiotics and rest.
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| Marc Rudov: Trying to hypnotize you with his teeth. |
It’s almost cute, all this energy and anger. These guys seem to really think that they’re the first people to ever have an issue with Valentine’s day, the first people to ever get irritated by “every kiss begins with Kay.”
But, guess what? Lots of people hate Valentine’s day. I generally find it pretty annoying myself, and the Kay commercials, which basically suggest that the women of America are jewel-hungry prostitutes and the men their johns, set my teeth a-grinding. Granted, I’m generally been most hostile to VD when I’ve been single, but when a couple of years ago I discovered that my then-girlfriend was a really really really big fan of the holiday (and not a fan of my more laid-back approach to it) it was actually one of the things that led me to break up with her a few weeks later.
You know who else hates Valentine’s day and the blizzard of retrograde sexist advertising that accompanies it? Lots and lots of women, especially those of the feminist persuasion, who generally don’t take kindly to the insinuation that women are diamond whores. Indeed, a couple of weeks back, hundreds of the mostly women of Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes subreddit happily upvoted a topic with the title “If I see one more freakin’ “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” commercial I am going to find whoever is responsible for that nonsense and take a big fat poop on his face. “
Hell, Valentine’s Day hatred is everywhere. In the London Times, Helen McNutt — a woman, if her first name is any indication — spelled out “20 reasons it’s okay to hate Valentine’s Day.” Meanwhile, the Onion News Network ran a hilarious piece on the “Annual Valentine’s Day Stoning Of a Happy Couple .”
And if you want your VD hatred live and direct, you can always monitor Twitter for bitter anti-VD tweets.
Indeed, VD hatred has become so omnipresent that the folks at Slate, hoping to gin up some pageviews with some well-timed contrarianism, ran a piece — get this — actually defending the holiday. “I’m almost afraid to say it,” the piece began, “I have plans for Valentine’s Day. … If I’m lucky, there may even be chocolate and flowers involved.”
Like a lot of VD haters, I have plans for February 15th. They definitely involve chocolate, bought at a steep discount.
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>Rapist babies and internet threats
>
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| How the hell did I get mixed up in all this? |
The manosphere is in an uproar about a public service TV ad from an anti-violence group that portrays a baby boy as a future rapist. Some MRAs are attempting to refute the ad’s implication that improperly socialized men are prone to violence by posting and upvoting … violent comments and veiled threats online. And apparently some non-veiled death threats as well.
A few days ago, you see, W.F. Price, head honcho at The Spearhead, wrote a critical piece about the endeavors of one Josh Jasper to draw attention to sexism in Super Bowl commercials; Price also pointed out that Jasper, CEO of the Riverview Center, a nonprofit serving domestic violence and sexual assault victims in Illinois and Iowa, had put out an earlier commercial that, in Price’s words, “impl[ied] that baby boys are all potential rapists.”
Despite the source, that’s actually a more or less accurate description of the ad, which depicts a happy little baby boy as a future rapist. I’m just not quite sure why that’s so objectionable; after all, every baby, male or female, is a bundle of possibilities, some good, some bad. (Hitler was once a happy, gurgling baby.) The point of the ad is that parents can have an effect on how their kids turn out; if you raise your son to be a violent, misogynist asshole, he may well end up a rapist.
As much as I agree with this basic sentiment, I’m not going to defend the ad. It’s terrible. Generally, I’m not a fan of using babies to make political points — it’s trite and manipulative, to begin with. And in this case, it’s worse than that: portraying a baby as a future rapist seems rather hamfisted, given that babies are often victims of abuse themselves.
Judge for yourself; here’s the ad.
All this said, the flaws of the “rapist baby” ad in no way excuse the response it’s gotten from some of the more hotheaded in the Men’s Rights Movement and the manosphere in general. On his website, Peter Nolan declares that the ad “promote[s] hatred of male babies”; on The Spearhead, Poester99 goes even further, accusing Riverview Center of “promoting violence against baby boys.” Which is, of course, completely absurd. (Even besides that, as Jasper has pointed out on his blog, the Riverview Center serves male victims as well as female ones.) It’s hard to know if the people spouting this nonsense honestly believe it, or if they are using the baby in the ad even more cynically and opportunistically than Jasper is.
Unfortunately, the MRA reaction has gone well beyond simple rhetorical overkill. A number of comments on The Spearhead, many of them with dozens of upvotes, are essentially threats — some vague, some not-so-vague — against Jasper himself. duke writes that:
Mangina creeps like Josh Jasper should suffer the same fate as Nazi sympathizers after WWII-taken out and shot after a five minute trial.
Avenger adds:
If men really were as violent as he claims they would have shut him up long ago. One good beating and this mangina would never open his mouth again.
Firepower, meanwhile, goes after Jasper’s … first name:
So long as males tolerate sissified males named “Josh” – pissing even on our SuperBowl – these gender traitors will only feel encouraged to increase their anti-male slurs.
Over on A Voice For Men, meanwhile, MRA elder Paul Elam insinuates that Jasper, far from being a sissy, is a violent “alpha puke” — and calls on his fans to dig up dirt on him:
This man deserves consequences for his actions.
Some history on Josh is known. We know he was a marine and we also know that he was a Los Angeles police officer. Two areas for sure where the capacity for violence is a plus. Add to that the fact that he was on a Domestic Violence task force and this bad apple starts to stink a little more. …
Anyone want to take any bets on whether this alpha puke ever busted heads as a cop, simply because he could? It leaves one to wonder – especially given the intellectual violence he is so obviously willing to inflict on male children – just what sort of skeletons are in this douche bag’s closet.
If they are there, I would love to get my hands on them and rattle them together for the world to hear.
And on Men-Factor, antifeminist blogger ScareCrow (who used to regularly post comments here) posts the email addresses of The Riverview Center’s mostly female board of directors, urging readers to “vent your anger” on this “bitch-hive,” adding “I aim to destroy it.”
I don’t have the patience or the stomach to sort through the comments on the YouTube page for the ad to see what other vile shit has been posted there.
I can only hope that most of this violent language is just standard internet tough guy talk, and won’t result in real violence in the real world. Even if you believe that Jasper’s ad commits a sort of rhetorical violence against male babies — which I think is a ridiculous reading of the admittedly idiotic ad — it does not justify actual violence against anybody.
EDIT: I should have let this one sit a little before putting it up. I’ve made various changes to strengthen and clarify my argument.
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