Category Archives: Uncategorized
>Debate Drama: Dalrock is a Lying Liar
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Debating Men’s Rights Activists can be a lot like arguing with a kid who puts his hands over his ears and shouts “la la la I can’t hear you!”
During my abortive debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence, I had a hard time getting him to respond to my arguments; instead, he devoted much of his energy to arguing against experts I never cited and arguments I never made.(EDIT: See all my debate posts and some commentary here.)
Now the blogger “Dalrock” has decided to weigh in on the debate — despite the fact that by his own admission he didn’t actually read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, he completely misrepresents my argument:
His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right.
Either he didn’t read more than a paragraph or two of what I wrote, or he’s incapable of understanding logic, or, well, he’s a lying liar.
At the moment I’m leaning towards the first explanation; I’m being generous here.
But it’s hard to see the next bit as anything but, well, that lying liar thing.
Mentioning my post responding to Elam’s disgraceful “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post, which was not even part of the debate proper, Dalrock ignores Elam’s obnoxious provocation and brings up a similarly obnoxious, similarly disgraceful Jezebel post from several years back, in which several Jezebel staffers and a host of commenters there gleefully admitted to beating up boyfriends. (Elam and I both mentioned it in our posts; it was Elam’s excuse for writing his post in the first place.)
According to Dalrock, my response to the Jezebel post went roughly as follows:
The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count. He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves. And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
Even aside from the dopey boxing metaphor, this is simply fiction. Let’s break it down.
He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.
I didn’t say that.
Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.
I didn’t say that.
And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
I didn’t say that. He’s simply making shit up. Or, as some might put it, lying.
If you want to know what I did say, you can see it here.
When I pointed all this out in Dalrock’s comments, he responded with:
You mean you weren’t really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?
Yeah, the fact that you made a dumb boxing joke means it’s totally ok to lie about what I said.
To my regular readers: Sorry about all the drama here. To paraphrase Bob Dole, I’m just trying to get these guys to “stop lying about my record.”
Also: Elam himself poked his head up in the comments to Dalrock’s post to offer a response of sorts to my final debate post; needless to say, it’s pretty feeble. You can read it here, and if you skip down a few posts you should be able to read my response to it; I will also be appending it to my original post.
>QuoteOTD: Wisdom from the superior sex
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Wisdom from misterb, aka misterbastard, taken from a discussion on The Spearhead on “Academia and the Politics of Peer Review,” which quickly degenerated from an idiotic discussion about the evils of academia into an idiotic discussion about how women are stupid, selfish and evil. (Isn’t that how discussions on The Spearhead always go?)
Anyway, the wisdom:
I hate to say this. Feminism dumb down society.
Misterb make feminism mad! Feminism stomp misterb!
More wisdom:
In my opinion. Women should never be allowed to hold degrees in soft sciences. And there should be no degrees in regards to soft sciences.
Just because a woman holds a degree to some cheap laden science or bad science. It doesn’t make her smart, but in fact it has an opposite effect. it makes her downright stupid.
There’s different between knowledge and wisdom. And today’s lacks both of them. Only thing she’s good at is being worthless
In another comment he corrected what he evidently saw as his one and only mistake in this final paragraph: “today’s” should have been “today’s woman.”
Yep, that oughtta fix it.
I’m sorry, but idiots going on about their intellectual superiority: always funny. Always.
>Paul Elam’s continuing childish and unethical behavior
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When I agreed to debate Paul Elam on domestic violence on his web site, I clearly underestimated how childish, and unethical, he really is.
After I bowed out of the debate — see the details here – he decided to run the whole thing under a childish, gloating headline, and with an introduction labeling me a “fucking moron.” (EDIT: See here for my posts without Elam’s editorializing.)
Because of this behavior, I requested he either remove the headline and the obnoxious introduction, or remove my contributions to the debate from his web site entirely. After getting no response from him to this, I sent another email telling him to simply take down my writings from his web site.
Legally, he does not own any rights to my writings, and because of his behavior he no longer has my permission to run them. I may pursue legal action.
Paul, unfortunately, has chosen to escalate the situation, by running an even more childish post titled “David Futrelle- Covered in Pin Feathers and Clucking,” in which he writes:
let it be known now that any blogger in the sphere, MRA or otherwise, has my permission to repost this debate in full on their blog or website.
Obviously he has no more right to do this than I have the right to take his car on a joy ride.
He’s also apparently pitched the idea of reposting the whole debate on The Spearhead. While he doesn’t have the right to do this, and I’ve told The Spearhead that they do not have the right to reprint my writings, I might agree to the proposition provided that I’d be guaranteed in writing by The Spearhead that it would run with a neutral headline, that my latest response to Paul’s “final” post would be included, and a few other conditions.
And I would have no problem continuing the debate with Paul on The Spearhead until we each post 5 posts, as per our original agreement, were I to work out the necessary details with The Spearhead and get an agreement in writing. Or we could finish the debate right here.
I stand by everything I wrote in the debate, and have no problem continuing it, provided it be on a venue not controlled by Paul Elam and with some basic rules to guarantee fairness set forth in writing. (Paul would have to agree in writing to run the debate under a neutral headline on his site as well.)
Oh, and one final note: Paul has also removed the links back to here from the original debate, thus breaking still another condition I insisted on in order to participate in the debate in the first place. And he’s banned me from commenting in the comments section under the debate posts.
This is all very stupid and very petty.
Let me offer a challenge to anyone in the MRM whose ethics are more developed than Paul’s: Stand up and object to his illegal and unethical behavior. Were a feminist to pull this sort of thing on an MRA, I would certainly stand up and object to it.
>QuoteOTD: The Nerd Rage Virus
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The last time we checked in with the Pro-Male/Ant-Feminist Technology blog — a blog which, you may recall, is ostensibly devoted to the notion that technology is going to kick feminism’s ass, and how this is a good thing — the resident anonymous blogger was complaining about feminists (including me) who engage in “shaming tactics” that are, like, totally unfair to MRAs, because all MRAs want to do is have an honest debate on the merits of their ideas. Today, however, he talks a bit about a new computer virus, Stuxnet, and fantasizes about a virus designed to take down feminist websites:
Imagine what an anti-feminist Stuxnet would do. It would specifically target computers belonging to NOW (the National Organization of Women) and other women’s groups, child support agencies, family/divorce courts, women’s studies departments at universities, etc. Perhaps it could target something as specific as feminist websites and blogs … An anti-feminist Stuxnet would be [easy] to create. Unless it seriously wants to attack databases, an anti-feminist Stuxnet does not require even a minimum of specialized knowledge besides being able to identify its target systems. Creating an anti-feminist Stuxnet will be within the skills of at least a significant fraction of malware programmers (if not most or all). This means that in the near future there probably will be an anti-feminist Stuxnet.
Well, that’s one way to win the war of ideas.
>Famous all over town
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Apparently, they can’t look away. A couple of days after Paul Elam — the MRA elder I am scheduled to debate on the topic of domestic violence later this week — launched a weird tirade against me on his blog, I’m now getting attention (and some traffic) from Ferdinand Bardamu at In Mala Fide, in a post urging MRAs to, er, stop paying attention to me.
As is generally the case with my MRA critics, it’s basically a bunch of empty insults. But as empty insults go, they’re not half bad. He calls me, among other things, a “twerp,” a “feminist quisling,” and “a miserable mediocrity who’s trying to get famous, an ant in our blog ecosphere.” He somehow manages to avoid the term “mangina” altogether.
There is one bit that’s actually obnoxious. In an attempt to explain something he said in a homophobic post of his I quoted last week, he says this:
radical gay activists, in their obnoxious way of shoving their lifestyles in the faces of the heterosexual majority and demonizing them, are poking and prodding an elephant. Elephants are big, heavy and have sharp tusks, and can gore or stomp you to death without breaking a sweat. If gays don’t clean up their act and stop treating straight people with contempt … they could inspire a violent homophobic backlash. Capisce?
Is it just me, or does anyone else suspect that the people given to “warning” gays about a “possible violent homophobic backlash” would be the first to get in line to stomp gays like an elephant in such a backlash?
EDIT: Oops! Speaking of attention, I forgot to add this actual screen capture. Hey, try it yourself.
QuoteOTD: Hark! A Huntress Approaches!
Watch out boys, she’ll chew you up!
Oh, lordy. I don’t think I’ve read anything this awfully, painfully, suckily overwritten since, well, ever. I present to you an excerpt from a book called Real Men Can Read Women Like a Book, by Corey Donaldson, some dude who fancies himself an expert on the whole lady-figuring-out thing:
For the beauty of the wrong woman, many men have let the song within them fade away as they meander among the living dead, having charred their soul and scorched the playful lyrics that once echoed through a vibrant smile.
I can only hope the book this guy is reading women like isn’t his own. Here’s more:
For these men, the memory that once energized them with the promise and childlike hope for a future filled with romantic glee now flickers weakly in the distance, in a time when innocence had not yet been corrected.
And more:
There are women who pride themselves on their ability go out and hunt for sex from any man they want regardless of who she or he is already committed to … These hunters are the shame of men, they are easy to identify and their future is predictably lonely as their faces literally crack like the bloody worn sole of a wrinkled old foot. They end up as old hags with sharply wounded faces of treachery spread out in the bitterness of their discontent.
Oh, ok, just one more:
These female hunters judge the short term results of their behavior as most desirable and delicious to the hell-bent bloodlust of their unquenchable taste for the chase of a man’s power.
Or for the taste of some ice cream. Everybody likes ice cream.
More excerpts here, on MarkyMark’s Mens Rightsy blog. The web page for the book, here. Please do not buy it, as that will only encourage him.
>QuoteOTD: Un-macho, Un-macho Men
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| Enemy of all things manly? |
Sometimes women actually live up to Men’s Rights stereotypes. Consider Katherine Miller, a beta-male-taunting, Alpha-male idolizing, Vanderbilt-going, essay-writing gal who looks down her nose at all things wussy, from man-scarves to Joseph Gordon-Levitt:
America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.
John Wayne? Clint Eastwood? Really? Couldn’t you be a little less, well, cliche about your manly idols? Think outside the box. Think inside the ring. How about this guy? He’s a snappy dresser with a hot retro style, he’s a hit with the ladies, he’s built like a fucking piledriver, and he could kick John Wayne’s ass with one hand tied behind his back. (Or both, really, considering that John Wayne is, you know, dead.) Hell, the word Macho is even part of his name — and plastered on his sunglasses to boot!
Thank you, Mario! But my blog is in another castle!
Specifically, the one you’ll find at manboobz.blogspot.com.
See you there!
>Quote of the Day: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Easily Impressed Hot Chicks
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A ringing endorsement of immigration from “mean0dean0″ in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit:
Date immigrants–especially girls from countries with really repressive regimes or abject poverty. Just the fact that you have possessions like a car or a video game system is enough to secure you a happy girlfriend.
>Scary Man-sters and Super Creeps
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| Pablo Picasso had a way with the ladies. |
“Well some people try to pick up girls, and get called assholes,” the song goes. “This never happened to Pablo Picasso. He could walk down your street, and girls could not resist his stare. … Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.” This is more or less true, even though, by almost every account, Picasso was pretty much a complete douchebag.
Life is unfair. Famous men can behave like utter boors and predators towards the opposite sex and get away with it, even win reputations as charming ladykillers. The rest of us, well, we make awkward passes and often get rejected; sometimes we even get called creeps. This makes some men bitter; a few even become Men’s Rights Activists.
In a recent article on AlterNet, feminist sex blogger Clarisse Thorn offers a defense, of sorts, of men unfairly labelled “creeps.” “Why Do We Demonize Men Who Are Honest About Their Sexual Needs?” the article’s title asks, and it’s not a bad question. Women are naturally, and quite justifiably, wary of the attention of strange men, who could easily turn out to be predators. “So it’s completely understandable that we’re all on high alert for predatory expressions of male sexuality,” she writes. What this means is that perfectly decent guys are sometimes seen as creeps until proven innocent.
The pressure put on men to be initiators, yet avoid seeming creepy or aggressive leads to an unpleasant double bind. After all, the same gross cultural pressures that make women into objects force men into instigators. … So how can a man express his sexual needs without being tarred as a creep?
Her solution? We need to “accept male desire” as natural and legitimate — not something “toxic,” or some kind of macho accomplishment:
Like everyone, men deserve to feel as though their sexuality is hot, awesome, delicious, valuable, and can be pleasurable for all parties in a consensual situation. Just as women shouldn’t have to feel exploited when they have consensual sex, men shouldn’t have to feel like they’re exploiting someone when they have consensual sex.
It’s hard to disagree with that. I worry, though, that many of the guys in Thorn’s intended audience will only notice the bit about male sexuality being “hot, awesome, delicious and valuable,” and miss her careful caveats about consent — which she repeats three times in two sentences in an attempt to drive home the point. Unfortunately, as Amanda Marcotte puts it in a response to Thorn’s piece:
[O]ne thing creepy dudes all have in common is they only hear what they want to hear. So even though Clarisse actually writes, “It’s also incumbent upon us to honor each others’ boundaries,” creepy dudes are going to hear, “See, this lady agrees with me that it’s perfectly fine for me to use ‘pick-up artist’ techniques to put women that are 15 years younger than me and who don’t want to talk to me in situations where they have trouble finding a polite way to escape conversation with me. And I’m entitled to be such a miserable fuckhead, because men are so oppressed because they don’t get to have sex with whoever they want whenever they want.”
Looking through the comments Thorn’s article got on AlterNet, Marcotte finds ample evidence of this kind of creepiness — men with both a sense of entitlement and a massive amount of self-pity. That toxic attitude shows up as well in a comment from the perhaps aptly named “jackwripper” in a discussion of Thorn’s piece in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit:
[W]hen the vast majority of men have to ask hundreds or thousands of women on dates, for sex, for a dance, to talk, just to get one positive response, then, as a man, you either go through life alone, or you proposition thousands of women.
It’s a bizarre and insidious sort of argument: Women need to start having sex with men they don’t want to have sex with, because otherwise some men will have to go through life alone — or, I guess, with “2s” who aren’t too stuck up to go out with them. Why exactly is it women’s job to “fix this?” Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
Jackwripper’s argument eerily echoes the logic of George Sodini, the bitter, dateless antifeminist asshole who shot 12 women in a health club last year because he felt young women had unfairly rejected him. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that Sodini had his defenders in the MRA/pickup artist crowd. As one fan of Sodini put it in a comment at the time on a PUA blog popular with MRAs:
I think every man DOES deserve to get laid. … The problem is, our feminized society has given every woman the power to hold out for higher quality men than they deserve. This creates an imbalance that leads to tragedies like the one in PA. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (Newton’s 3rd Law) If empowered women keep applying pressure, they will create an explosion.
So, women, the message is clear: Date some losers, or someone is going to get shot.
No one “deserves” to get laid. If you’re a creepy asshole who doesn’t understand that any woman is allowed to turn you down for sex, for whatever reason she wants, however stupid it might seem to you, then you don’t deserve shit.
