Category Archives: MRA
>The Spearhead: You don’t have to be crazy to post here, but it helps. Scratch that: You DO have to be crazy.
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| Don’t ever say this to the guys at The Spearhead |
These days I mostly ignore the people who attack me and this blog online, because I’m sick of internet drama and have no interest in stirring that particular sort of shit. But there’s one discussion going on at the moment that I think is worth mentioning, because it provides as interesting snapshot of the manosphere at the current moment.
Over on The Spearhead, a certain MRA who used to comment here at great length is suggesting that Spearheaders tone down their rhetoric so that “a site called mamboobz.com” won’t quote them and, by exposing their crazy talk to the light of day, possibly make the men’s rights movement look bad.
Never mind that the regulars at The Spearhead aren’t all MRAs and I don’t identify them as such. That’s not the point. The point is this:
The person making the suggestion is Eoghan. And his mild and in fact quite sensible suggestion has not gone over well with the locals. Indeed, one of the regulars, SingleDad,compared him to “a Jewish person in Germany telling all the others who are complaining about their fears as they are loaded on the trains headed for the concentration camp to quiet down or the Nazi’s might get angry.” Another added, “I won’t make you wet your panties by calling you a mangina, especially since you seem to be either a doofus or a cunt.”
After a bit more back and forth, SingleDad came back with what can only be called a direct threat:
You sir are a traiter to your gender. .. You would hold our hands as they lead us into the gas chamber.Your a collaborator. You know what men do to collaborators, right?Expect the same from me. Count on it.
Again, SingleDad isn’t talking about me. He’s talking about Eoghan. Eoghan! As anyone who has been reading the comments on this blog for any length of time is well aware, Eoghan is about as far from a feminist as you can get; indeed, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool MRA ideologue, and I actually banned him here some time ago because of his consistently disruptive behavior. But because he challenges not what they say but the way they say it, the guys at The Spearhead evidently see him as some sort of fem-symp if not the equivalant of a Nazi collaborator.
Naturally, all of Eoghan’s posts have been heavily downvoted by the regulars, and the attacks on him, including SingleDad’s threat, have gotten multiple upvotes.
I’m not going to post a bunch more comments from this surreal “debate.” Obviously you all can head over and read the whole thing if you like. But I thought this one, from Poester00 and actually directed at me, was kind of telling:
Mr Manboobz is a low down slime, using comments posted here by third parties and NOT articles to attack this site.
Since I don’t think he is stupid and he’s extremely persistent at what he’s doing, it’s highly probable that he is either:
- being paid to continue by some interested third party with deep pockets, or
- is a victim of systematic child abuse by his mother or other female relative(s), so has been “Joe Bidened”
OR BOTH.It may be just a “job” to him but his words are supporting the hurting of real people. People will remember his words and what goes around comes around.
What goes around comes around?
Poester99, I’m not quite sure you understand the concept of karma.
Here’s what I did: I quoted some repugnant shit some dudes said on a web site, and made some sarcastic remarks about these comments.
Here’s what you did: you falsely accused my mother of child abuse.
I’m having a really hard time seeing how I’m the bigger asshole in this scenario.
Also: the paid shill thing? Not true. But if some “interested third party with deep pockets” wants to empty these pockets into my bank account, and won’t interfere with what I write in any way, I’d like to suggest that they contact me, like, right now.
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>How to get upvoted in MensRights on Reddit
>So a restaurant owner in Hamilton, Ontario decided to delight his male patrons by installing a urinal shaped like a woman’s mouth with bright pink lips.
The urinal sparked a protest from a feminist organization, and after receiving more than 1000 letters on the subject, the restaurant owner removed the urinal.
The regulars in MensRights on Reddit heard about the incident, and the following conversation took place. You may want to note the numbers of upvotes and downvotes each comment got.
(Yes, the last guy did use the obnoxious term “retard.” There is some irony there. Somehow I suspect that is not why he was downvoted.)
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Misogynists attack Daniel Hernandez for saving Gabrielle Giffords’ life
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| Daniel Hernandez |
I made the mistake of posting my previous post about the failure of empathy in the reaction of many misogynists to the Arizona shootings without first stopping by The Spearhead. There, below a post lauding the heroism of Daniel Hernandez, the gay congressional intern who ran towards the gunshots to assist the fallen Giffords and literally save her life, I found some comments even stranger and more vile than the others I have quoted in my last post. Instead of lauding Hernandez’ lifesaving act of heroism, they attacked him for helping a woman.
One commenter calling himself Traveller put it this way:
The “hero” saved a female politician, Democrat, probably some sort of feminist getting affirmative action at stellar level, and following some sort of feminist agenda. That “hero” probably until that day went around breaking the legs of working men who hesitated to pay 99% of their income to a feminist government.
Lower down in the thread, Peter-Andrew:Nolan(c) went further, saying
When men STOP being stupid arseholes and STOP saving the lives of ‘women andchildren’ THEN the women might notice how much we do for them.
In some ways Hernandez is also a traitor to men. IF he had just stood by and let this woman bleed to death because he was ‘afraid that she might accuse him of sexual harassment for touching her when she was unconscious’ and then been willing to take the heat of the lies and hatred and bile that women would throw at him for doing so? THEN he would have contributed to remedying the situation. And we would have one less female politician passing hate legislation against men. A net GAIN for men. …
Hernandez did something akin to a Jew helping a Nazi SS officer who will gladly throw him into a gas chamber. How is this ‘heroic’?
A few comments down, anonous agreed that:
The best thing any man can do is NOT step up to the plate and act heroic, but simply shrug ones shoulders at a time of crisis and say, ‘not my problem’. Whilst walking off to the nearest strip joint.
Men coming to the aid (especially of women) only get demonized anyway (Titanic anyone?) and never get a given a break in feminazi countries like the us/uk/aus. …
When men start being indifferent to wimmin … will men be truly free.
On The Spearhead, readers can upvote comments they like and downvote those they don’t. All of these comments had multiple upvotes (the latter two getting a dozen or more each) and only a handful of downvotes.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>A failure of empathy: Misogynists respond to the Arizona shootings
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One thing I am struck by again and again as I read the blogs and the message boards of the manosphere is how little basic human empathy I see there, towards women in general and towards feminists of both sexes. We see it in the routine references to women as “whores” and “cunts” and other terms that reduce them to their genitalia.
We see it in the profound lack of empathy for women injured or killed. You may recall my recent post about an MRA blog that basically celebrated the possible death of a missing Las Vegas dancer. The body of the murdered woman, Deborah Flores-Narvaez, has since been found. The news inspired a moderator of the Happy Bachelors Forum to start a topic entitled “Dirty skanky whore found dead.”
And of course we’ve seen similar reactions to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six others. While many in the manosphere responded to the shootings like normal human beings (displaying honest shock and horror) and others responded like typical internet paranoids (wildly speculating on how this meant the government would take away all our rights), there were others who found ways to blame women for the shootings or to twist the issue into one of men’s putative oppression. On NiceGuy’s MGTOW Forum, one commenter found an ingenious way to blame women for the shooting:
He [was] probably dumped by a girl and that’s what started him on the road to crazy batshit loonery. I can’t think of any other factor that could more quickly drive a man to violence than women.
Others complained that the news coverage was slanted by evil feminism. From the MGTOW proboards forum:
it pisses me off when i see all this outrage on the news and from the public knowing that if it was a congressMAN who was shot, everyone would be wondering what he did to deserve it.
this really shows you how society values women over men. and she’s not even dead!
Over on NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum, one member complained that Giffords was getting most of the news coverage and that the six others who were murdered in the attack, most of whom were probably men, were being ignored:
This is yet another example of how Femerica values female lives more than male lives. In the eyes of most Americans, men are less human than women.
The male judge gets a mention because he is a lackey for the interests of the elite. Even though he is dead, since he is a male, his death is presented by the media as less of a tragedy than the non-lethal shooting of a female politician with a good chance for recovery.
The death of the young girl was portrayed as third in line in terms of level of tragedy. By American standards, it was a tragedy because she possessed a vagina, but since she was not grown enough to be a full-fledged feminazi, her death was less of a tragedy than the non-death of the female politician.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the four unnamed dead people were men. If they were men, they would be considered less human than the others. They are not even human enough for the media to investigate and name. Their death, by American standards, was a tragedy but less of a tragedy than the non-death of female politician.
This comment is jampacked with an assortment of bad assumptions. To correct the most obvious of them: Giffords has gotten most of the coverage because this was not a random murder, but an attempted political assassination. Gender has nothing to do with it. When people talk about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, they rarely mention the three others who were also wounded that day. (Except for James Brady, and that’s because he has gone on to be an influential gun control advocate.)
The male judge has gotten a good deal of attention, but isn’t the main focus of the coverage because he was not the target of the assassination attempt. The girl has gotten attention because she was a child. The other victims were not named at first because authorities had not yet notified their next-of-kin. There were three men killed in the attacks, two women, and one girl.
Meanwhile, on this very blog, a regular antifeminist commenter who calls himself Random Brother has made clear that he doesn’t extend basic human sympathies to feminists. Asking whether or not Giffords is a feminist, he explains:
I want to know if she has spent her whole career passing laws that harm men. I want to know this before I commit any sympathy to her. If she was a great politician who tried hard to help her constituents, was fair and just then she has all of the sorrow in the world from me. …
If she was a typical politician, a bigot or a man hater, why should I care?
Setting aside for a moment the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that Giffords is any any way a “man hater”: Because she’s a human being?
Sadly, this failure of empathy isn’t confined to the manosphere, as Marianne Kirby notes on The Rotund:
Empathy is, in its simplest form, the ability to acknowledge the thoughts/reasoning/emotions of another person as valid. It is, so to speak, being able to see where they are coming from even if you do not agree. … Empathy is, I think, coming to the realization of our own humanity and the humanity of other people – we are all simply people. …
[W]hen politicians depend on hate and violent rhetoric to stir up their followers, no good can come of it. … It teaches them that these people who believe different things are “the enemy” – that they are a danger and must be eliminated.
Is it any wonder that some people reach a point where the literal elimination of those who are different becomes the end goal?
For a long time I labeled the MRA/MGTOW blogs I’ve put in my sidebar as my “Enemies List.” It was a partially tongue-in-cheek reference to Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” But many people took it literally, and some (even if they didn’t) worried that this kind of terminology could lead to precisely the sort of dehumanizing of the “enemy” I’ve been criticizing here. In the wake of the Arizona shootings, and after pondering several eloquent emails sent to me on the subject, I’ve decided to change my “Enemies List” to, well, a “Boob-roll.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “boob” as “a stupid or foolish person; a dolt.” The people I write about may be — at least in my mind — wrong, and foolish, and sometimes hateful assholes, but they are people.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Pee-ple Power
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| Future revolutionaries? |
On January 1, 2010, a day that will live in … calendars from last year, the blogger at The Futurist published a long-winded crackpot screed called The Misandry Bubble, which rehashed a bunch of standard-issue “manosphere” memes — doofus sitcom dads oppress men! beta man can’t get laid! marriage sucks! — in one exceedingly pretentious package. While rampant misandry and uppity women were destroying American civilization from within, he argued, the “Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation” would rescue us all and put those dirty feminists and White Knights in their place. One of the Horsemen? Virtual reality sex toys for men.
To say that Mr. Futurist was optimistic about his ability to predict the future popping of the “misandry bubble” is a wild understatement. His manifesto, he declared, was
a guide to the next decade of social, political, and sexual strife … As the months and years of this decade progress, this article will seem all the more prophetic.
Naturally, with so many in the manosphere being pretentious douches who like having their own crackpot notions repeated back to them in pretentious language, The Misandry Bubble was a smashing success, and became for a time the talk of angry-man town.
I’ve been meaning to write about it for awhile, but that would have required me to actually reread the damn thing.
But Mr. Futurist has beaten me to the punch. On January 1, 2011, “exactly 365 days after The Misandry Bubble was posted,” he posted his long-awaited followup. It starts off as portentiously (and pretentiously) as his original manifesto:
We have completed the first year of the decade of The Misandry Bubble, and I remain as convinced as ever that The Misandry Bubble will correct by 2020 no matter what due to the Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation. However, there is much to lose if the correction is turbulent, rather than orderly. Millions of innocent men and women can be saved from wrenching misfortune if we act now to fight the culture of misandry that is cancerously pervading the entire Western world.
So how does one fight such a hydra-headed menace as modern misandry? Mr. Futurist, borrowing a page from third-world revolutionaries, suggests that what is needed to save “millions … from wrenching misfortune” is a “a simple, low risk solution that enable this small civilian force [of MRAs] to wage asymmetrical warfare against misandry.”
This solution?
Urinal flyers.
Yep. His grand plan to save civilization from “misandry” is for a super seekret guerilla army of angry dudes to put up little posters above urinals in public restrooms suggesting that dudes taking a piss … go read The Spearhead, or some other manosphere site with “a professional appearance and clean format.” He calls this campaign “URLs @ Urinals.”
I shit you not. (Or perhaps that should be “I piss you not.”)
Here’s his explanation:
Male restrooms in public buildings have urinals. When a man is using a urinal, he has no choice but to see the blank wall that is directly in front of his face above the urinal at eye-level. Every man taller than 5’2″, whether young or old, rich or poor, is a captive audience for that brief passage of time. …
If a man sees a flyer that provokes a jolting thought where he leasts expects it, he will remember it for a long time to come. Those of us who have studied and practiced Neuro-Linguisting Programming (NLP) will recognize this as a very strong anchor, and thus ensure that he will remember the seed planted in his mind in many future instances of standing in front of a urinal. The periodic recollection will be unshakeable, due to such a strong anchor being planted. Whenever he hears of yet another such situation again, he will think back to the thought evoked by the flyer he saw on that day.
Mr. Futurist refers to this strategy, with utter seriousness, as “piercing the Matrix.” You know, like in The Matrix.
All that remains to be done, besides purchasing a roll of tape, is to come up with some appropriately “jolting” posters. Mr. Futurist has already come up with a bunch of them. They won’t win any awards for clever design, or clever wordplay, or even “World’s Greatest Grandpa,” but, hey, if they’re printed up on sheets of paper they can indeed be considered flyers. Here’s one:
And another one, perhaps my favorite:
Our good friend ReluctantNihilist from Reddit — who apparently is none other than Jay Hammers, whom you may remember from my The Worst of the Men’s Rights Movement post — has already come up with a few of his own slogans:
The Constitution no longer protects men and boys.What happened?
Chivalry is Dead And Women Killed It
Why do men die younger than women?It’s not just biological.The truth may surprise you.
Buying That Girl Drinks Will Get You Nowhere
All it will take to bring these sorts of messages to a million men, Mr. Futurist estimates, is a mere 1000 hours of collective action, printing up and posting these little flyers in the men’s restrooms of America. “Which could,” he explains,
plant a seed in the minds of hundreds of thousands of them.
Which could lead to tens of thousands of them reading the websites introduced in the flyers.
Which could result in several thousand more men becoming fully educated about the various dimensions of misandry that are silently enslaving them.
Now, Mt. Futurist realizes there will be naysayers amongst the evil misandrists of the world. As he explains, with typical understatement:
Already in a stupor of castrative bloodlust, ‘feminists’ will be tipped into hysteria by the thought of more men being sent information from outside the plantation. Their reactions will span the whole range of derangement, from demands for taxpayer-funded armed guards to apprehend flyer posters, to feminists barging into men’s rooms to inspect for evidence of ‘misogyny’, to calls for outright bans on urinals themselves as ‘male supremacist’ appliances, to increasingly bold statements regarding the need to reduce the male population to a fraction of what it currently is … .
Also, he observes, some people might actually tear down the flyers. But do not be daunted, good men, for
that action is futile as due to the viral nature of ‘URLs @ Urinals’ they have no idea where or when the next flyers will be posted. They will, as mentioned before, double down on their pedestalization of women. But they can only double down so many times, and this will accelerate the process of them cracking under the burdens of their ignorance.
So onward and upward, urinal-flyer-posting men! I guess I’ll have to check back in a year to see if the revolution has begun.
>Wasn’t that an Adam Sandler movie?
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Ladies, watch out! Over on the Happy Bachelors Forum, a fellow calling himself ac101202 has figured out a sneaky way that guys can escape you gals doing that whole marrying-a-dude-and-divorcing-him-and-taking-all-his-money thing you ladies like to do. All it requires is a little bit of fake-gay marriage on his part.
Imagine if two straight men got legally hitched (emphasis on straight). No expensive ceremony, no grueling engagement process, just signing the contract. Then, they go on and live their separate lives as bachelors. Because of their legally married status they … Cannot get remarried legally. This means if they get married with a women, come divorce time she will be unable to legally claim any of his property as they are not legally married. Bigamy and polygamy is illegal so all marriage contracts signed after the first are not recognized as valid by a court of law.
Oh, you sly dog you. Such a clever idea. And so original!
>Quiz: Jezebel … or Andrea Dworkin?
>Here’s one easy way to tell if someone is from another planet. Specifically, Planet I’m-So-Crazed-by-My-Hatred-of-Feminism-That-My-Brain-Has-Imploded. They post comments on Reddit containing this sentence:
Hmm. I’m not what you’d call a big fan of Andrea Dworkin, but I have read her work, and unless my memory is faulty, I don’t recall her writing much about Ryan Gosling, lip stain, or baby giraffes.
So here’s a little quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jezebel and Andrea Dworkin. Some of the quotes below come from recent Jezebel articles; some come from Dworkin. I also threw in a quote from Ryan Gosling as well, just for the hell of it. So who said what? (Answers below.)
a) Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality.b) I freely admit that I watch some shitty, shitty television, and if it weren’t for my sense of shame, I’d probably watch a lot more of it. I can’t get enough of The Bachelor, which combines the most terrible aspects of dating, the weirdest aspects of arranged marriages, and sociopaths.c) The sexual colonialization of women’s bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women’s bodies. In this system of male power, rape is the paradigmatic sexual act.d) Women’s bodies are possessed by men. Women are forced into involuntary childbearing because men, not women, control women’s reproductive functions. Women are an enslaved population–the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses.e) Pie is just fine as a partner for the weak coffee of church basements, for Thanksgiving, for dessert at a roadside cafe in Harmony, Minneosta, but for high falutin’ snacking, you cannot beat the elegant convenience of the cupcake.f) If I eat a huge meal and I can get the girl to rub my belly, I think that’s about as romantic as I can think of.
ANSWER KEY: What, are you a fucking idiot? Oh, ok, the last one is the Ryan Gosling quote. I really, really, really hope you can figure out the rest on your own.
>Excellent rebuttal of some standard MRA arguments
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ECHIDNE of the Snakes has written an excellent post titled “Eight Anti-Woman Principles of The Most Extreme Types of MRAs.”
It goes through a number of standard MRA arguments and offers pretty persuasive rebuttals of most of them. Among the topics covered: life expectancies of men and women and why this actually isn’t a feminist plot; higher rate of on-the-job accidents for men and why this isn’t a feminist plot; the higher rate of male death in wars and why this too is not a feminist plot; male prisoners; homelessness; and stay-at-home dads. The post also comments on child custody and domestic violence, but without providing real rebuttals on those two issues.
I’m adding this link to my “further reading” post on general critiques of the MRM.
>Hello, Men’s Rights Redditors!
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I just noticed that someone posted a link to this blog on the Men’s Rights subreddit under the title “Male extremist feminists can be even more deluded than female ones…” I would happily respond to this bit of idiocy in the Men’s Rights subreddit itself, but, alas, the moderator there has banned me because I have the subreddit listed in my “Enemies List.” The ban seems a bit silly. I discuss things with people in my “Enemies List” all the time, and they’re free to post here the same as anyone else.
But I have a question for you Men’s Rights Redditors. Since I can’t ask it there, I’ll ask it here, and you can respond here: What have I ever said on this blog (or elsewhere) that is in any way an example of feminist “extremism?” I challenge you to find a single “extremist” statement here, or a single example of misandry. (Note: Saying “oh, the whole blog is extremist” or “it’s obvious you’re an extremist” something along those lines is not an answer; it’s a way of begging the question.)
If I really am some sort of extremist, it should be quite easy to find specific examples of this extremism.
>Rapists are apparently being oppressed by the term "rapist."
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Well, here’s a new one. Apparently rapists are being oppressed by the evil misandrist term … rapist. Or so says a poster calling himself ReluctantNihilist in the upstart MENSRIGHTSMOVEMENT subreddit on Reddit, a tiny little discussion forum (with 12 subscribers) for those who think the regular Men’s Rights subreddit has become a hotbed of radical feminism. Here’s his argument:
The prefix “-ist” means “one who believes in”. … It is a belief system. A misandrist demonstrates a pattern of behaviors that exemplify misandry.
Does a person who commits a rape necessarily believe and engage in a pattern of behavior of rape?
No.
There are a couple of problems with this analysis, starting with the fact that “ist” is, uh, not actually a prefix but a suffix. And that it can simply mean “one that performs a specified action.” Believing may not have anything to do with it: a “typist,” for example, types; he or she doesn’t believe in an ideology of typing. Nor does an “ist” have to do something repeatedly: an “arsonist” is someone who burns shit up, whether that’s once or a hundred times. Our ReluctantlNihilist is evidently not much of a linguist. But let’s set aside these little qualms and continue with his post:
The proper term for someone who commits a rape, or even several, is a raper. “-er” means “one who takes part in”. Determination of whether that person would qualify as a rapist is another matter.
The use of the word “rapist” rather than “raper” is misandrist doublespeak, because even though women rape, too, we know that the term “rapist” is only applied to males.
Uh, I think the term is used for female rapists also. There just aren’t that many of them.
This misandrist doublespeak is subtle but effective. Calling someone a rapist insinuates they have committed multiple rapes and, if set free, they’ll do it again and again. This only fuels rape hysteria.
The more accurate and less emotionally-charged term is:
Raper.
Actually, it’s a fair bet that someone who rapes once will rape again; one study of “undetected rapists” — that is, rapists who hadn’t been caught, which is to say the overwhelming majority of rapists — found that they admitted to having assaulted, on average, roughly 6 victims each.
But let’s set this aside and ask the big question: why exactly should we give a fuck about hurting the feelings of people who rape other people? If “ist” is good enough for Stalinists, philanthropists, proctologists, and, yes, even nihilists, it’s certainly good enough for rapists.
ReluctantNihilist, I am demoting you to a ReluctantNihiler.
