Category Archives: oppressed men
The All-Singing, All-Dancing Men’s Rights Movement
Not a picture of Jade Michael and the FTSU Crew
The Men’s Rights Movement now has a theme song! A couple of talented young men calling themselves Jade Michael and the FTSU Singers Crew have put together a catchy little grunge rock number they call Go My Own Way, which will now serve as the opening music for the A Voice for Men internet radio show.
As AVfM head cheese Paul Elam puts it, straining his prose-generating abilities to the breaking point as he attempts to find words eloquent enough to describe this new musical masterpiece:
Jade Michael, artist, professional musician and MRA, founder of Artistry Against Misandry, has taken his talent hammer and given it a mighty swing to our benefit. He has forged, in the fires of his own passion, the new theme song for AVfM Radio, titled Go My Own Way. It is not to be confused with the similarly titled offering from Fleetwood Mac, Go Your Own Way. No, not in the least. Jade, with his band, Jade Michael and the FTSU Crew, have produced a veritable anthem for the red pill crowd. It is replete with a great, purist rock sound, a touch of humor, attitude, and a ton of gut level, red pill honesty. Pay close attention to the end for the invocation of Thomas James Ball.
Without further ado, here’s the song:
You can find the full lyrics on YouTube and on AVfM. But I thought I’d share a few of my favorite bits.
The song starts off by addressing one of the most savage injustices faced by men today: evil ladies who expect men to hold doors open for them.
And we’re through with holding doors
Entitlements abound
You say that we still hold you down
And you cop that attitude
No remorse or gratitude
Seriously, ladies, would it hurt you to say “thank you” once in a while, to the men who literally enable you to walk through walls, by holding open the doors you would otherwise be unable to open? To paraphrase Barbie: Doors are hard!
Then there’s this bit:
You’re obsessed with my ability
I won’t be your utility
I’ll never carry you
And I sure won’t marry you
Women around the world, consider what you’re losing here: no longer can you expect to marry guys who hate you so much they made a song about how they won’t hold doors open for you!
And let’s not forget:
Cos’ the time has come to fuck your shit up
The time has come to fuck your shit up
The time has come to fuck your shit up
Perhaps I’m missing some of the subtleties here, but this sort of suggests to me that Jade and the Gang are not so much Men Going Their Own Way as they are Men Still Hanging Around Acting Like Assholes — not MGTOW but MSHAALA.
I appreciate the efforts of Jade Michael and the MSHAALA, but I can’t really help but think of this little song-and-dance number, from the excellent Belgian horror film Calviare (The Ordeal), as the Men’s Rights movement’s unofficial anthem.
In case you’re wondering, this scene makes a little bit more sense in the context of the movie itself. A little bit. It’s actually quite a brilliant little film with some interesting gender stuff going on in it, if you can deal with fairly violent horror films. But, oh my lord, TRIGGER WARNINGS for pretty much every trigger there is.
NOTE: In case you’re wondering about the song’s reference to Thomas Ball: Ball burned himself to death outside a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire last year in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court. He hoped that his suicide would inspire other men to start firebombing courthouses and police stations. (This wasn’t mere rhetoric; in the lengthy manifesto he left behind he provided tips on how to make effective Molotov cocktails.) Naturally, many in the MRM have hailed him as a martyr for Men’s Rights.
Vectorman vs The Space Libbers
Superman was an MRA!
Never underestimate the grandiosity of an MRA in a snit. Here, from The Spearhead, is some dude called ConShawnery suggesting that dudes grousing about women are basically the equivalent of superheroes facing down the evilest of supervillains. He also has some thoughts about cunts.
To women, a man who has seen the truth about them is a dangerous animal, a vector of viral information that, if allowed to spread, will bring their matriarchal palace crumbling down. A man like that is literally the most dangerous thing to women and they know this. This is why 18-year-old daughters will abandon their fathers, mothers their sons, wives their husbands, sisters their brothers – as soon as it becomes clear that he’s taken the red pill.
This is also why “cunt” is such a dirty word while “pussy” is not. “Pussy” is adoring (whether it’s derogatory doesn’t matter), “cunt” is not. A man who uses the word “cunt” is a man for whom the magical hold of vagina has worn off, and he must be excluded from polite society at all costs, lest he infect other men.
59 upvotes, 0 downvotes, last I checked. Nothing more courageous than telling a gang of grumpy misogynists exactly what they want to hear.
Bicycle-riding ladies and other threats to manly order
Click on the pic to see it in its full-sized glory!
So I linked the other day to Kate Beaton’s awesome comic about the obstreperous velocipedrix (inspired by the cartoon I used to illustrate this post). But since then I’ve had bicycle-riding-ladies on the brain and I thought it was worth another post. Besides, it gives me an excuse to use the cartoon above, which Beaton linked to in her Hark, A Vagrant post.
The notion that bicycle- (or velocipede-) riding women are inherently hilarious (or inherently evil) may seem a tad quaint now, but back in the late 19thcentury, when bicycling really took off, these cartoons were every-fucking-where.
And what was so unsettling – even scary – about the specter of women on bicycles? As historian Clare S. Simpson explains:
The independent mobility of cyclists raised genuine alarm for their physical, if not moral, safety; simply put, the bicycle could easily take women to unsavoury places where they might be endangered physically (for example, by being attacked), or morally (for example, by being seduced into imprudent conduct with intemperate company). . . . Drawing on previous knowledge of the kinds of women who deliberately made themselves conspicuous in public, that is, prostitutes, there would be a strong tendency to conclude that cycling women were far from respectable: not exactly prostitutes, perhaps, but possibly women of loose morals or with an undeveloped sense of propriety.
Now why does this sound oh-so-familiar? Because it is so scarily similar to many of the arguments I run across amongst Men’s Rightsers and Manospherians today. Change a few words here and there, and we could be talking about the Slutwalks, and the ludicrously overblown “criticism” of them we’ve seen from MRAs and misogynists generally, who insist again and again that women must be “held responsible” for their actions.
What actions? Going outside dressed in something more revealing than a nun’s habit. Going outside at night. Not reacting with gratitude when dudes patronizingly lecture them on the perils of being a woman in public. It’s the same old shit: the “independent mobility” of women is pissing off a lot of men even today.
That’s why so many MRAs got so angry about the case of Lara Logan, the CBS news correspondent who was sexually assaulted while covering the protests in Egypt last year — many in the MRA camp weren’t so much angry at those who assaulted Logan as they were at Logan herself, for daring to cover political unrest in another country … while being a woman.
That’s why it always strikes me as a little odd that MRAs routinely describe their movement, such as it is, as a new one. It’s not. Theirs is a reactive movement, and a reactionary one – and not just because some of them literally think women should be denied the right to vote. It’s because so much of what they obsess about is the same old shit that pops up whenever women have stepped up and challenged their traditional roles.
Of course, these guys aren’t simply angry at women doing traditionally masculine things – from going where they like, on bikes or foot, to covering world politics. They’re worried that newly “masculinized” women will turn men into a bunch of emasculated pussies.
While poking around to find more cartoons to illustrate this post with, I happened across several that show just how persistent this worry is. Take a look. The first couple are from the turn-of-the-twentieth century; the third is from the 1970s. Notice a theme here?
This same old theme is handled a bit more subtly today, as this bit of clip art shows. Note the pink apron, in case you didn’t get the point: a man washing dishes is an emasculated wussy.
Of course, in the Manosphere, things are not quite so subtle. It’s telling that amongst MRAs and other modern misogynists the insult of choice for feminist men is “mangina.”
Here’s how one little manifesto defines the term. (I’ve edited out a lot; it’s pretty fucking repetitive, though students of misogynist psychology may wish to read the whole thing here.)
Manginas are pseudo-men who fixate their lives on getting a sniff of the female genitalia (figure of speech) at the expensive of others and by betraying real men.
Manginas see women as an ultimate being, places them on a huge pedestal, mind focuses only on sex or the satisfaction of women all the while not giving two bits a damn about his fellow man. …
A mangina is not a man, and we wouldn’t dare honor them by gracing them with the title. …
A Mangina seeks continuous approval from females thereby becoming their servant.
Manginas support women’s issues which are against his fellow men. Someone who espouses feminism but is really being suckered into a form of chivalry in which women’s interests take precedence over men’s. Unaware that they are merely “useful idiots”, doing what women want in the vain/hope of getting laid. When his usefulness is over she tosses him out with the rest of the rubbish. …
A Mangina is a self-depreciating man who subconsciously hates himself and blindly believes women are superior to him. He has been raised to think masculinity is inherently wrong – perhaps even a genetic/evolutionary/social flaw – and must be corrected by embracing his “feminine side” to the point of losing the very qualities that make him male.
Women acting like men; men acting like women. These were the bugbears of the velocipedrix-hating, women’s-suffrage-opposing assholes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; they were the bugbears of the protoypical woman’s-lib-hating chauvinist pigs of the seventies; and they remain the bugbears of an astonishingly large number of those in the Men’s Rights movement today.
And that’s why it, too, will end as a joke, remembered as a quaint holdover from earlier times rather than the progressive civil rights movement it sometimes pretends to be.
In the meantime: Kate Beaton, fucking hilarious, right?
NOTE: I found a whole bunch of awesomely retrograde cartoons from bygone days while looking for the illustrations for this post. I’ll be posting some of my favorites soon.
Russell Brand deals the Feminist Conspiracy a serious setback. But Operation Alimony will prevail!
Uh oh! I just discovered this, currently the top story over on the Men’s Rights subreddit:
Yes, my sisters (and honorary mangina man-sisters), Russell Brand has dealt a severe blow to Operation Alimony, which (as you well know, at least if you’ve been attending the meetings) is our dastardly Feminazi plot to destroy the patriarchy by getting pretty ladies to marry and divorce rich dudes and take all their money.
You may remember our wild revelry when we heard that comrade-ess Heather Mills had walked off (no jokes please) with £24.3 million of Paul McCartney’s man money. And the joyful tears we shed when we heard that Mel Gibson’s ex-wife had (reportedly) scored a cool $425 million in her divorce settlement.
Russell Brand has just spotted a large pile of Katy Perry's money
But today, we shed only the bitterest of tears. We have not only been thwarted, but we’ve also been exposed! Damn those Men’s Rights Redditors and their evil allies at the Daily Mail!
The comments in the r/mensrights thread show that they understand our evil plans all too well. How can we respond to Aetheralloy’s withering critique?
Feminists see the absurdity of their own pushed polices?
LOL no. No they won’t. I’d sooner expect scientologists to ask their psychiatrist if they are in a cult.
But ladies! Do not despair! Russell Brand may have set back our efforts, but he, and his Reddit allies, shall not defeat us!
Ladies, you know what to do. Get yourself all prettied up, hit the town, and snag yourself some rich dudes! Let’s see how many of these guys we can have married off by the end of the year.
Marrying (and divorcing) rich dudes: it’s the feminist way!
I had a
Fighting the Scourge of MisPandry
Mispandry hurts everyone.
The BBC is taking a lot of heat for including a panda in a list of the top 12 female “faces of the year” for 2011. As the Daily Edge explains:
While the men category featured 12 actual men, the women’s page featured 11 women and one panda, albeit a female panda.
There’s a new Twitter hashtag — #pandagate — for those who wish to express brief thoughts on the matter.
I too, am outraged. A panda on the female list but none on the male list? This is blatant discrimination against male pandas. Mispandry, if you will. And it is discrimination against pandas generally.
ALL OF THE ENTRIES IN BOTH LISTS SHOULD BE PANDAS!
This is just one more example of mispandrist Anti-Pandaism in contemporary culture.
Here you can see more anti-Pandaism in action – notice the crowd laughing – laughing! – at this panda’s athletic prowess.
And here is some footage obtained from an illegal underage panda fighting ring.
Is Reddit nothing more than a collection of rape jokes and pedophilia apologias?
Nope! As the totally scientific chart above shows, it also contains: generalized misogyny, racism, atheist dickbaggery, and last but not least: lots of pics hosted on imgur!
Here, some recent data, most of which I have borrowed from ShitRedditSays. I’ve put the number of upvotes for each post in brackets, when relevant.
Rape jokes:
Guys, you’re not making enough rape jokes! [+856]
“I’d fuck her until the neighbours complained about the smell.” [+250] [Bonus points: Also a murder and necrophilia joke!]
Rape clock [+36]
Redditors mock a rape victim! [Assorted upvoted posts]
Pedophilia apologia:
Admitted pedo and child porn fancier compares himself with Gandhi [+83]
More goodness (by which I mean badness) from that thread, courtesy of SRS.
Oh noes! Evil anti-pedos threaten free pedo speech! [+25]
He’s been shamed into deleting it by you. Are you happy now? For the record, mattperrin said “Why does she have to be 18? So she can be in porn? Very very few girls enter porn, and if you’re just talking about being sexually aroused by her, that’s okay for anyone 13+”.
Pedo joke … perfection! [+100]
General Misogyny (and creepiness):
Ha Ha! Girls can’t work cameras! [+636]
Girls only like thugs and they’re all dumb and why oh why won’t they go out with a nice guy like me? Did I mention I hate women? [+assorted massive upvotes]
Help me prove to this guy feminism is no longer needed. (Please do not use profanity and words like “cunt” though.) [This whole discussion is sort of delicious; our pal ThingsAreBad, aka JeremiahMRA, pops in to argue that feminism was never needed because everything was peachy back when women couldn't vote.]
I’d fuck her right into a broken hip. [+588] [Referencing Helen Mirren.]
Racism:
“I just had sex with my first black guy, and believe me it’s true what they say…he stole my t.v.” [+477]
“No no no, that will just attract more rapists.” [+70] [BONUS POINT: Is also a rape joke!]
Atheist douchebags:
Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists, by Rebecca Watson. As you’ll notice, her examples from r/atheism contain many massively upvoted rape and pedophilia jokes, not to mention lots more generalized misogynistic douchebaggery. The circle is complete!
But generally speaking you can pick almost any random highly upvoted post here for endless more examples of what makes even atheist activists hate Reddit atheists.
Which have helped to inspire this meme.
Pics on Imgur:
Top posts on (my) Reddit at the moment:
Then again, random pics of cute dogs and squirrel-riding frogs are certainly preferable to more angry racist rapey hatey pedo-justifying crap. So, yay imgur, I guess? (At least when it’s not being used to post still more angry racist rapey hatey pedo-justifying crap.)
AgentOrange and the Screencaps of Feminazi Doom
Santa is no longer interested in bringing joy to girls.
Christmas came early for the MRAs this year. Earlier this week, a generous soul calling himself AgentOrange posted a 165 MB present online for them, an assortment of super-secret internet postings from a private forum connected to the RadFem Hub, which Mr. Orange collected by bravely going behind enemy lines and, er, screencapping a bunch of shit. As the OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE declared:
[B]oth feminists and MRAs alike, have been anxiously awaiting the promised complete files of screen shots and associated materials collected by Agent Orange.
These files are apparently so vile and incendiary that Mr. Orange has deemed it necessary to reveal the personal information of some of the RadFemHub commenters. Not to encourage anyone to stalk or harass or harm them, just so that those offended by them can do whatever it is people do when personal info is leaked on the internet that doesn’t involve stalking or harassing or harming them. Send them postcards?
But in any case there is no reason whatsoever to think that a group of really really really angry people who love making threats on the internet and think their opponents are as bad as Hitler could ever do anything that would be in any way problematic.
So, you might ask, what dastardly secrets do these new files disclose? Oddly, the PRESS RELEASE doesn’t actually specify. The AgentOrange website doesn’t say either. And the 165 MB download is just a bunch of files with no explanation.
But I have spent some time going through these files myself in a completely random manner, which is evidently what AgentOrange expects everyone who downloads the files to do. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t spent that much time on this. I’ve really been quite busy with other things. But I have spent some time. More than twenty minutes, anyway.
So let me share with you some preliminary findings.
Here, straight from the AgentOrange files, are some RadFems discussing a news story about a male midwife who thinks that mothers should embrace the pain of childbirth as a “rite of passage.” (Click on the teensy image on the right to get it full-sized.)
Apparently some of those RadFems don’t think this is a good idea! One of them says:
Does he even know what uterine cramps/contractions even feel like?
Another adds:
I read that and rolled my eyes. … If only it were possible to subject mister midwife (my ass) to the joyous pain of childbirth. I guess a swift kick to the balls is as close as he’s ever going to come to it.
Clearly suggesting that a male midwife suffer pain similar to what he suggests women should suffer is nothing short of GENOCIDE!
But wait, there’s more! Another woman writes:
There is no reason why women should have to endure pain like this in this day and age.
That sounds exactly like something HITLER would have said! (If you replace “women” with “Jews” and “no reason” with “every reason.”)
Still another adds:
This is phenomenally stupid, and completely out of step with current pain management theory and procedures.
Is there no end to this feminazi depravity!?
Oh, but there’s more, much more. In this thread — click the image to the right — the evil RadFems complain about guys trying to pick them up in a creepy manner. One of the ladies suggests that a good way to get the guys to leave you alone is to tell them you’re a widow.
You see now that feminism is all about DECEPTION!
Maybe it should be called Deceptionism!
Ok, ok, just one more. In a thread called “I’m mad as hell” — right over there on the right again — one commenter complains about getting a computer virus.
She’s so mad she says she’s even considering downloading Ubuntu and forgoing all Microsoft products, which are frequently targets of viruses! What? Huh? DOES NOT COMPUTE. BZZZZZZZ. LADY USING LINUX ERROR ERROR. *$^*$()*%(*$$$$$$$$. EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN.
CARRIER.
REBOOTING.
FLUSHING CACHE.
Ok. I’m back. Another commenter there says something about castrating guys who write viruses.
That does seem a little excessive. Though I don’t think she means it literally.
I will return to this topic later, after I recover.
In the meantime, if you want to see the most ridiculous comments on the matter from Reddit’s Men’s Rightsers, you can find some of them collected together here. Among the highlights:
This isn’t public shaming, its outing criminals that are planning your genocide.
A story of a plan of naziesque proportions is about to broken.
I think we can all agree that feminism inevitably heads down the road of male genocide.
MRAs, more melodramatic than emo kids.
Oh, and by the way, two of the Reddit quotes above come from a fellow known on Reddit as Sigi1, but who may be more familiar to Man Boobzers as Eoghan. Without clicking on the links, can you guess which two?
This post contains:
Homeless girls: A frugal alternative to pricey prostitutes!
Fellas! Want sex, but don’t have the money to shell out on prostitutes? Hate the time and effort it takes to talk a non-professional sex-having women into having sex with you? A recent post by Advocatus Diaboli on the always delightful In Mala Fide offered an elegant solution for horny but frugal men. In a post titled Pooning on a Tight Budget, AD explained the technique that has worked for him:
Getting poor, but good-looking, young girls (18-23) to have sex with [you] in return for some timely financial help.
Turns out that women who are poor and desperate can be exploited for your own sexy purposes!
Of course, it’s not always quite as easy as it might seem.
I should be upfront that getting amateur women to have sex for money can be tricky as most of them believe that they are not whores. Moreover, poor young women often have “boyfriends” and white knight orbiters. So I created a set of filters and rules to screen out the most problematic types.
According to AD, all you have to do is to:
Avoid all girls who have obvious and serious drug and mental health issues or have lived on the street for over 6 weeks at a stretch.
Happily for you, that still leaves lots of girls ripe for the picking! AD suggests you focus your attention on:
Freshly homeless young girls, especially those who hangout in mixed groups.
The safest ones are those who are into pot, drumming, dreadlocks et cetera. You can find them in many larger cities in the spring and summer. While I would never trust them with any significant amount of money, many are reasonably decent human beings.
You might not think you’d have much in common to talk about with these women – what with them being “reasonably decent human beings” and you being a “completely reprehensible pile of shit” – but you’d be surprised.
Strike up a conversation with them, engage them and see where it leads. But you must make it plainly obvious that you are interested in them sexually, but that all favors require reciprocation. Once you get to know them, a decent round of drinks, snacks, money for pot, a small necessary item of clothing, decent dinner with booze will almost guarantee you a good lay (or at least a couple of BJs).
And if you crunch the numbers you’ll see it’s really quite a frugal solution.
Your initial financial hit for hanging out with them is very small, and once they are sleeping with you.. it will often work to about $30-60 (cash equivalent or cash) per session. You may also get freebies..
But girls don’t necessarily have to be literally homeless to be desperate enough to sleep with you for money. Nope! You may also find great cost-savings from targeting:
Girls who are not homeless, but are just hanging on.
How do you find these lovely ladies? Keep an eye out for women working really shitty jobs that don’t pay shit! You’ll find them conveniently located
in smaller retail stores or businesses that pay minimum wage with no tips. Build a rapport and be fairly upfront about your interest, but do not come across as desperate. Go to her workplace and talk to her when you are in that area, but do not stalk her.
Yep, it turns out that even desperate women can be creeped out. So play it cool! Stalking’s for fools!
There’s another possible hurdle: other dudes.
Such women often have “boyfriends,” however, they are often just as poor or poorer than her. You can get pussy as long as you are firm about the need for reciprocation. This category of girls might be more willing to give BJs than having ‘real sex.’ But do you really care?
Just remember to keep to your budget!
Restrict your help to less than $200 at any one time AND only after she has put out a couple of times.
And then there’s AD’s favorite category of desperate women:
Girls who are poor, but not homeless and have no “boyfriends” + have moved to the city within the last eight weeks.
You have hit the jackpot!
Just don’t get carried away. Remember: you’re in charge, and she should know it!
Remember these girls can become de facto GFs, but do not restrict yourself to one. While you do not have to rub it in their faces, they should know that you are always looking around for a better deal. But treat them a bit better than type 1 and 2, they do give more per dollar spent on them.
Your accountant will be so, so proud of you!
Just remember:
They will play by your rules as long as they are not too dehumanizing, and they are often cheaper than professional whores.
Now that’s a motto to live by!
Amazingly, not all of the readers of In Mala Fide appreciated AD’s little treatise.
Simon invoked the c-word, before tossing in some racism:
Mate you are one deadset sad cunt. It’s no surprise to know you’re Indian.
Cathater broke out the other c-word:
Pretty damn creepy. You sound like you have no soul. Actually, you might be the first member of a new species: the perfectly rational, purely selfish utility-maximizing agent (Homo Economicus) that Austrian economists and Randroids have always droned on and on about.
Yes, I was as surprised as you are to read an actually reasonable critique of the post on In Mala Fide.
Don’t worry, though, the rest of the comments mostly lived up to the foul standards of the blog.
Ryu worried about the old slippery slope. If you start by suggesting that PUAs target homeless women, the next thing you know they’ll advocate sex with children! And then down the slippery slope you’ll slide:
This is the direction that PU takes one in. I’m surprised that there haven’t been any PUAs who say that during a dry spell we should go to gay bars and pick up men. Just to keep your dick wet, you know.
Savrola returned to the theme of race:
There’s a problem WNs have yet to deal with. Well off second-generation foreigners like AD taking advantage of your impoverished women of older native stock, after they’ve taken your jobs.
Can’t keep ‘em here, can’t send ‘em back.
What to do?
Blog proprietor Ferdinand Bardamu waded in to take a shot at all the “white knights” sticking up for the gals.
ROFLMAO at all these white knights. …
If you want to blame someone, blame the morally debased white women who would rather blow a stranger for $200 then work honestly (pull yourself up by your bootstraps, slob! nobody owes you anything!).
We’re living in Soviet Amerika (and Soviet Kanada). All of your daughters are whores or will become whores, soon as the price tag gets high enough.
Meanwhile, Stoner With a Boner, who sometimes graces the comments section here with his always trenchant wisdom, took a stand on behalf of the real victims here: dudes paying their own hard-earned money to icky ladies for sex.
Personally, I find the idea of clocking more hours at a job I hate just to hand $200 to a prostitute who would probably leave me dying in the street rather than help degrading.
Men, the forgotten victims once again.
This post contains:
Dudes: silent no more!
This tiny kitten actually has nothing to do with the post.
Did Tom Matlack of the Good Men Project – not to be confused with Ben Matlock, fictional defense lawyer beloved by the elderly – swallow one of those mysterious “red pills” I keep hearing about on Men’s Rights blogs? Whatever he swallowed, it’s apparently causing him to hallucinate.
How else to explain his recent post on the GMP site titled “Being a Dude Is a Good Thing.” Now, as a dude who spends a good deal of time every day being a dude, I’ve got nothing against anyone being a dude, provided that’s what they want to be. It’s just that the piece itself is full of some rather strange generalizations that don’t actually seem to be, you know, true, at least not in what’s commonly known as “the real world.”
Rather than try to rebut his argument, because he doesn’t seem to have much of one, let’s just look at some of his loopier pronouncements:
Why do men get blamed for everything?
Uh, because they don’t? Sure, men get blamed for things, but guess what? Women get blamed for things all the time, too, from witchcraft, to divorce, to getting themselves raped, battered or killed. They’ve been blamed for earthquakes, for “inciting” male lust, for killing chivalry and “killing off real men,” for “taking roles intended by God only for men.” Heck, some inventive sorts have even figured out how to blame women for men who are assholes. And this guy has decided that “Black Women are to blame for the disrespect Black Men show towards Black Women.” For endless additional examples, scroll back through the posts and comments here, visit any of the blogs on my “boob roll,” or simply continue living on planet earth.
Back to Matlack, whose generalizations get more surreal by the sentence:
In the locker room, in the bathroom, on the walk out of the board room, in my conversations with men of all kinds, that’s what I hear more than anything. The resignation that to be a man is to be unacceptable at some level to the woman in your life.
Really? Who on earth are you hanging out with? And what women are they hanging out with? Are men other than Tom Matlack and his possibly apocryphal conversational partners actually having conversations like this on a regular basis? If the “woman in your life” basically hates men, what is she doing with you, and what are you doing with her?
One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.”
Um, what?
I’ve watched him. He loves his wife.
He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.
You see what I meant before about the hallucinations, right?
But Matlack suggests there is hope for the poor demure, never-before-heard-from men of the world. Apparently they are starting to open their mouths at last.
It seems that the blame game in the mainstream, whether through the minimization of male life in pop culture or on television or through the continued obsession with men behaving badly, has finally struck a chord with the average guy.
Let’s just pause a moment to reflect on this whole “minimization of male life in pop culture or on television.” Mr. Matlack, do you actually watch movies or television, or visit libraries or anything like that? Most movies revolve around men as the main characters, with women in many cases serving as little more than a love interest or simply as scenery. Have you ever heard of the Bechdel test? Read up on it, run the test on some of your favorite films, and then get back to us on the “minimization of male life in pop culture.”
Now back to Matlack’s manifesto:
We are no longer willing to be blamed for being men. We are no longer willing to avert our gazes and stay silent about our feelings. We are raising our voices and telling our stories in our own male vocabulary.
Yeah, because men have been so utterly silent about their feelings, their opinons, and pretty much everything, up until now.
To women, I assume the response is, “well, it’s about time.” But just remember when we talk it’s not going to sound like a women in a man’s body. It’s gonna be all dude. And you are just going to have to deal with that.
Ladies, prepare yourselves for a lot more Dudesplaining in the near future. Dudes will be ignored no longer! Dudes!!! DUUUUUDESSS!!!!!!
EDITED TO ADD: Matlack’s gotten some responses on Twitter to his dudely roar; he’s posted a bunch of them here. Guest appearances by Amanda Marcotte and (seriously) Roseanne Barr.
The False Rape Society is shocked — shocked! — by a fraternity’s “who would you rape?” survey.
The False Rape Society is shocked and stunned that frat boys would joke about rape.
So you may have seen the story yesterday about the University of Vermont fraternity that was suspended for sending out a charming little survey that allegedly asked, among other things, “If you could rape someone, who would it be?” (FWIW, the frat now says it was the work of an individual frat member, not the chapter.)
Reading about this incident, I’m guessing that you probably didn’t ask yourself: “I wonder how the guys at the False Rape Society will use this news to push their own agenda?” Heck, I didn’t even think to ask myself that question. But while doing the rounds of the MRA blogs I’ve discovered the answer to that question, and here it is: FRS head honcho Pierce Harlan described the survey as “perhaps a poke at feminism’s fascination with rape,” then denounced it as “indefensible,” then ranted about the evils of false rape accusations. I guess that isn’t really shocking at all.
First, Harlan offered this take on the “who would you rape” question:
I assume the survey was sick humor, a crude satire of the fratboy culture, and perhaps a poke at feminism’s fascination with rape.
Yes, because any time men make rape jokes it’s probably because, you know, feminism, and its wacky obsession with rape.
Then Harlan went on to suggest that rape was no laughing matter – especially when it comes to rape that doesn’t happen:
Whatever it was intended to be, ultimately it is indefensible, because trivializing the word “rape” is no laughing matter, whether it’s a joke about the rape of male prisoners, or the fantasy “rape” of women, or a false rape claim intended to get a guy in, or a woman out of, trouble.
Well, that was quick. Let’s not talk about the trivialization of real rape. Let’s talk about the epidemic of “false rape accusations” that Harlan has convinced himself is the real problem here.
With nary a pause, Harlan moved on to complain about hypothetical feminists making a big deal out of this survey instead of joining him on his crusade:
There most certainly will be an outcry in the feminist blogosphere over this isolated incident
This what incident?
and it will be cited as proof positive to support the myth that ours is a “rape culture.”
Yeah, I wonder why casual jokes about rape would possibly be considered as part of “rape culture.”
A “rape culture,” of course, not only would tolerate but would condone such a puerile survey. Our society does neither. The only “rape” jokes our society condones concerns prison rape — and that’s because society actually encourages prison rape as a sort of “added bonus” punishment for any hapless male who lands in prison. It is ironic that actual prison rape does not garner the outrage that this this sick fratboy humor is generating. Go figure.
This from a guy who doesn’t seem to have ever even bothered to mention the leading anti-prison rape organization, Just Detention, on his web site. (See here for more on the issue on Man Boobz.) Though he does offer three links on his main page to information about the statute of limitation for rape charges, in case anyone reading is worried about getting caught being falsely accused for something they did didn’t do a long time ago.
Meanwhile,rape jokes — and not just prison rape jokes — are everywhere. Harlan, I assume you are at least somewhat familiar with a little site called Reddit, where people not only laugh at rape jokes – they laugh at actual rape!
Meanwhile, in the comments on Harlan’s article, some False Rape Society readers don’t even bother to pretend that the “rape survey” bothers them. According to the commenter called “bad,”
We should be celebrating young men who stand up against misandry. We should be celebrating the frat that said “no means yes” and we should be celebrating the frat that created this survey, if it’s a real story.
An anonymous commenter takes it a step further:
I do not condemn this action,
in fact, I wish I’d thought of it.
It is a brilliant and very appropriate response to the way young men are being treated by college campuses.
When the answer to “who would you like to treat like a rapist” is “all college men”, I think that asking them who they’d like to rape is more than fair.
But it is Harlan’s response to these comments that is the most revealing:
By the way, I read the reaction of Bad and others as a natural backlash … against the unconscionable PC culture of misandry on campus. I happen to disagree with those who suggest this was acceptable, but their remarks should not be construed as evidence that we live in a “rape culture.” Like Steve, I read their comments more as an affirmation that we live in a false rape culture–a culture that more and more men are finding intolerable.
I, on the other hand, doubt that these young men have the first clue about misandry, feminism, or how colleges run roughshod over the rights of young men. I am always amazed when we hear from falsely accused people who “had not idea this goes on.” My guess is they were just being being “funny.” I would, frankly, love to find out I am wrong, and that not only would they never call for a woman to be actually raped, but that this was a protest against the pendulum swinging too far. In that case, I am still not sure I could find it acceptable but it would initiate an entirely different dialogue.
So the survey is “indefensible,” yet a totally understandable reaction to, and protest against, an “unconscionable PC culture of misandry.”
Got it.
EDITED TO ADD: Harlan has written a response, of sorts, to this post. It is a bit — what’s the word I’m looking for here? – zany.
