Creepy expat: “Properly owned” women appreciate a man’s “pimp hand.”
Western “tourists” in Cambodia
Today, a look at an appalling apologia for domestic violence and abuse from everyone’s least favorite creepy expat, the anonymous “game” blogger behind Random Xpat Rantings. Oh, and he also offers a handy rationalization for child abuse as well.
Xsplat, is, by his own description, an expat in his late 40s living in Indonesia and “dating” a teenager considerably less than half his age. Well, not just dating: apparently he feels that he “owns” her.
He starts off his post by arguing that parents have the right to spank their children because the children are, in essence, their property:
The #FeministsAreUgly hashtag on Twitter confuses and frustrates some of the internet’s most dedicated feminist-haters
Not actual feminist
#FeministsAreUgly is confusing a lot of people, misogynists included. The Twitter hashtag – which took off yesterday and is still going strong, if not quite so strong, today – was originally started not by misogynistic trolls but by two feminists, @LilyBolorian and @Cheuya, who intended the hashtag to be a way for feminist women to celebrate their own beauty, whether it conformed to conventional (and generally white-centric) standards or not. As Bolorian put it,
Women responded at once by doing just that, and the hashtag was quickly flooded by feminist selfies. This being the internet, it was also flooded with comments from misogynists and trolls. Given how many of the latter were posted, many feminists on Twitter initially assumed it was just another outburst of internet misogyny; it took a little while before the feminist origins of the hashtag became widely known.
So how did the devoted antifeminists of the manosphere and the Men’s Rights movement react to the hashtag? Some responded with unabashed glee. The regulars on Roosh V’s forum reposted the selfies of some in women posting in the #FeministsAreUgly hashtage, mocking them as fat, lazy “cunts.”
One commenter offered this helpful observation:
Paul Elam: “If a woman five feet tall and 110 pounds soaking wet hits me, I am going to hit her back.”
Should these books be required reading for MRAs?
Attention tiny ladies! Paul Elam wants you to know that if you attack him, he will totally punch you right back. And not in a satirical way, either. With his actual, non-satirical fists.
A Voice for Men’s maximum leader has long insisted that his notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was nothing more than misunderstood “satire.” That is, when he argued that men who are abused by women would be totally justified if they “beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall,” this was somehow a “Juvenalian” satire of some sort. There’s a famous quote from The Princess Bride that might be appropriate here.
Well, now Mr. Elam has announced to the world that every month is a potential “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” for him. Even if the “Violent Bitch” in question is less than half his size. In a post that he insists is super serious, he writes:
Are Street Harassers the REAL Victims of Street Harassment? One Men’s Rights Redditor says “yes.”
Not so fantastic, dude.
A new video from Vocativ features a number of young women describing the sexual harassment – from creepy catcalls to actual physical assaults – they and countless other women face on the streets every day; the unsettling video, in which one woman, a former beauty queen, recounts her own sexual assault on the Washington DC metro last year, has been seen more than 2 million times on YouTube in the eight days it’s been up. (I’ve pasted it in at the end of the post.)
Some of these viewers have been Men’s Rights activists, and a lot of them aren’t too happy about it. Not about the street harassment. About the women speaking up against it. Indeed, one new Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of liuetenantwaffleiron was so angered by the video that he sat down and wrote a 700 word rebuttal of sorts – which quickly won him dozens of upvotes from others on the subreddit.
He started off with a story of his heroic efforts to stand up against one of the evil sexy women in the video, and the terrible price he paid for expressing his so brave opinions on the subject on Facebook:
A Men’s Human Rights Movement Graphix Xtravaganza of Joy!!1!
Actual “meme” from AVFM. I did not make it up or choose the font.
That last post was a bit, well, grim. So I thought I’d lighten the mood with some terrible, terrible memes from A Voice for Men’s Facebook page. They’re so Men’s Human Rightsy that you can practically smell the human rights wafting off of them!
Or could that be the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity?
Either way, enjoy! For a fun game, see how many different examples of ideas that do not actually enhance human rights you can find in the memes below! For example, I found both misogyny and transphobia! See what else you can find!
Lies, Damn Lies, and Janet Bloomfield: The world’s least convincing liar is now trying to smear me
So much bullshit.
Janet Bloomfield’s antifeminist smear campaign continues apace. Yesterday I wrote about her disgraceful attack on feminist writer Jessica Valenti, in which Bloomfield made up offensive statements and attributed them to Valenti in a malicious attempt to malign her reputation. Bloomfield, the “social media director” for A Voice for Men, then went on to boast about this on her blog.
Now she has decided to libel me as well, declaring on Twitter
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/496088519941816321
She followed this up with a post on her blog full of outright lies and weird insinuations. Her allies at A Voice for Men jumped on board the defamation train, with Paul Elam devoting at least part of one of his “radio” shows to the topic “Is David Futrelle a Perv Apologist?”
This morning, the AVFM Twitter crew was out in force peddling this bullshit, with “operations manager” Dean Esmay leading the charge in his typically addled way.
Ironically, the AVFM crowd is cribbing their attacks on me from a REAL pedophile apologist who blogs under the name theantifeminist. Indeed, Elam, Bloomfield and AVFM ally Angry Harry all linked to theantifeminist on Twitter this morning to back up their assorted smears.
The supposed case against me is based on two articles I wrote nearly twenty years ago for the magazine In These Times.
The attack on me is absurd on its face, but I think it’s worth addressing if only to show the depths of their dishonesty, and just how desperate they are to smear me.
Lying as PR: AVFM’s Janet Bloomfield libels Jessica Valenti — then brags about it
Janet Bloomfield, self-acknowledged liar
A Voice for Men’s “social media director” Janet Bloomfield is proving to be quite the innovator in the world of public relations. You may recall her cheeky approach to publicizing the recent AVFM conference, which involved awarding herself “whore points” for calling critics of AVFM “whores.”
Now she’s moved on to straight-up libel, making up fake quotes in order to make feminist writer Jessica Valenti look bad, and then bragging about it on her blog.
This whole sordid episode began several days ago when Valenti, on vacation, decided to send a message to “all the misogynist whiners in my feed today” in the form of a photo of her on a beach wearing a t-shirt saying “I bathe in male tears.”
The AVFM social media attack squad seized on this at once, with Bloomfield telling her followers, wrongly, that the picture had been posted in response to a question about male suicide. When Valenti corrected her on this point, Bloomfield offered a half-assed apology (“My bad”).
Then Bloomfield, demonstrating just how insincere her apology had been, decided to up the ante, concocting four “quotes” from thin air and attributing them to Valenti.
[EDIT: JB's Twitter account was suspended, so here's a screenshot of the tweets; I'll keep the original links up in case she's ever unsuspended, though that seems unlikely.]
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495366752168329216
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367262187302913
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367996337295360
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495374177013346304
Naturally, as you’ll see if you follow any of these Tweets back to their original context on Twitter, many of Bloomfield’s fans assumed that these quotes were real.
Needless to say, some responded to Bloomfield’s dirty tricks with all-too predictable harassment of her target:
After brazenly libeling Valenti, Bloomfield went on to boast about it on her blog. In a post with the smug title “Jessica Valenti is not having a good day,” she wrote:
Now, these fake quotes may have been “utterly plausible” only to those who are ignorant of Valenti’s work, but in the hothouse world of the Men’s Rights movement there are people who would probably believe that Valenti eats babies. As I noted, JB’s followers had no trouble believing them.
Later in the post Bloomfield added, with more than a hint of maliciousness:
It’s not clear how having made-up quotes attributed to you counts as “owning your shit,” but I guess I just don’t understand Bloomfield’s higher morality.
Needless to say, in the real world, deliberately publishing false information about someone in order to harm their reputation is libel.
When confronted with this on Twitter, Bloomfield offered some inventive excuses:
Later on she attempted to prove that her libelous fake Valenti quotes didn’t matter … by making up things about me:
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495684048237633536
As I noted,
Of course, I’m no lawyer. I can only hope that some people who are lawyers are taking a good hard look at Bloomfield’s lies.
I would encourage you all to screenshot or otherwise archive Bloomfield’s self-incriminatory blog post, as well as her tweets, just in case she decides to talk to a lawyer and take them all down.
At this point, I think it’s probably safe to assume that anything and everything anyone from AVFM says should be taken not with a grain but with an entire shaker of salt.
The Catster Debates: Or, I inadvertently bring MRAs to an innocent cat website
From that other blog of mine
So I did an interview about my Confused Cats Against Feminism blog with Catster.com, a site that devotes itself to collecting “helpful and hilarious information for the worldly but still infatuated Cat aficionado.” Alas, as a result of publishing this interview with me yesterday, they now seem to be collecting angry MRA commenters as well.
Here are some highlights of the, er, debate so far, which I’ve waded into myself, perhaps unwisely. (These are selections, with a bunch missing, though the comments that look obviously like they are responses to other comments, are.) Maeve Connor is the author of the post about me.
He was a Men’s Rightser before Men’s Rights was cool. (Note: Men’s Rights has never been cool.)
I don’t know, I think he could use another sign or two.
I found this amazing pic of “Husband Libber” Harry Britton posted to the Blue Pill subreddit; it was taken in 1972 by the father of Blue Piller smileybird.
According to Cape Girardeau History and Photos, which has another pic of him,
New York Magazine wrote that he was a fixture who had been supporting himself wearing placards, carrying signs and selling his leaflets for 25 cents each for several years. “Harry makes only $2,000 a year [roughly $12,000 today --DF]. He’s not in this for the money, though; he says his only goal is reconciliation with his wife, from whom he is, not surprisingly, separated.”
Another account said he was the “president (and probably sole member) of the National Association of Dissatisfied Husbands subsisting on sales of publications extolling ‘Husband Lib.(‘It’s not men’s lib,it’s Husband Lib. The Bachelors are not oppressed yet’).”
Here’s that pic, and a couple of others; thanks to SquashedBananas in the Blue Pill for tracking all this down. (And thanks to the reader who emailed me about all this.)
In which I get an email from Women Against Feminism [CORRECTION: THE EMAIL WAS FROM A COPYCAT SITE]
Type type type
CORRECTION: THIS NOTE WAS NOT FROM THE OFFICIAL “WOMEN AGAINST FEMINISM” PAGE; IT WAS FROM A COPYCAT SITE. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO IGNORE IT OR AT LEAST TO LAUGH AT IT FOR THE CORRECT REASON. SORRY!
Just posted this on Confused Cats Against Feminism, but it was too good not to post here as well:
So I just got this curiously impersonal email from the admin at Women Against Feminism. (Gosh! Could it be a form letter?)
Hi David Futrelle,
I wanted to say thanks for writing the article about Women Against Feminism.
Whilst it’s clear that we don’t agree on all points, hearing both sides of the argument will get more people thinking about what they believe in and which set of points they feel aligned with more closely.
This can only be a positive step forward, not only for women, but for society as a whole.
To help get more people thinking about what they really believe, I was wondering if you could make add a link to our new website in your article?
We’re trying to create a centrally located hub where the discussion about Women and Feminism can flourish, with everyone getting a chance to share their opinions, and we believe that a website is the best place to do it.
Would you be able to help facilitate that conversation by adding a link to the site?
The URL is http://womenagainstfeminism.com
Once again, thanks for furthering the discussion about women and feminism through your article. Even though we don’t agree on all the same points, we really appreciate getting these concepts heard and empowering people to make up their own mind.
Many thanks,
[name and email redacted]
So I wrote back:
There already is a central hub for this discussion: http://confusedcatsagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/
Could you redirect all of your traffic there? Thanks!
