The Return of the ALL-WEEKEND OPEN THREAD DANCE PARTY, Part 2
Now here’s a bar – the one in the video clip above – that probably could benefit from having a ladies’ night once in a while. (I rather doubt the ladies would really benefit, though.) That’s why it’s Ladies Night here at the second weekly WEEKEND OPEN THREAD DANCE PARTY! It is also Men’s Night. Everyone comments for free! Post about whatever the hell you want to post about, link to stuff by people you like, link to your own stuff, go wild!
The dance sequence in the video is taken from the dark and wonderful Belgian horror film Calvaire. Which brings me to the questions I’m going to use to start off the thread: Do you like horror movies? Why or why not? If you do, what are some of your favorites?
Ozymandias asks: Who cares about Men’s Rights?
The Who does not care (about its equipment)
Great post by Ozymandias on her blog on the subject of “Who cares about men’s rights?” (Answer, Ozymandias, for one.) She offers a devastating critique of the Men’s Rights Movement and a critique of feminism I think I half-agree with as well. (She critiques feminists for not caring enough about men’s issues and responding to them with “but what about the menz” mockery; I think she’s got a point, but the fact is that lots of feminists do in fact work on behalf of men and men’s issues, from feminists involved in fighting for men and women falsely accused of sex crimes to feminist shelter workers who work on a regular basis to help male victims of abuse.)
Anyway, you should pop on over and read it.
It’s being discussed all over Reddit as well.
The post also inspired a debate on the old “chicks only want to date jerks” thing, which she’s broken out into a separate post.
EDITED TO ADD: And now The Spearhead has noticed the post.
New “Obedient Wives Club” in Malaysia: wives should be submissive helpmeets and first-class whores
Marry one, get one free: Two members of the Obedient Wives Club and their husband.
MRAs regularly accuse feminists of promoting the idea that all women are “perfect princesses” who can do no wrong. Which is a rather silly accusation, as every feminist I’ve ever met is well aware that women, like men, are capable of vast evil. Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, was one of the ringleaders behind China’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Madame Delphine Lalaurie was a 19th century New Orleans socialite who tortured her slaves and performed bizarre medical experiments on them. And then there were Ilse Koch, the “Witch of Buchenwald,” and her counterpart Irma Grese, the “Bitch of Belsen,” sadistic Nazis who tormented the prisoners under their charge and kept grisly “souveniers.” (For more on them and other truly evil women see here and here.)
But today I’m going to talk about some women who aren’t so much evil as retrograde and wrong: the 800 women who have reportedly joined the newly formed Obedient Wives Club in Malaysia, an offshoot of a fundamentalist Islamic organization called Global Ikhwan, previously known for its Polygamy Club.
If you set aside the whole fundamentalist Islam thing — MRAs by and large don’t seem terribly fond of Islam — these Obedient Wives would pretty much represent the ideal women for manosphere misogynists; much of what they profess sounds like it came straight from discussions on The Spearhead or one of the popular MGTOW forums.
According to the Obedient Wives, for example, “disobedient wives are the cause for upheaval in this world” — including social ills like domestic abuse. As one spokeswoman for the group sees it, “domestic abuse happens because wives don’t obey their husband.” Asked by the newspaper The Star if this meant that a wife was at fault if she was abused, the spokeswoman replied with a “yes,” because “most probably … she didn’t listen to her husband.”
But it’s the group’s pronouncements about sex that have caused the most controversy in Malaysia. Apparently Obedient Wives need to be sexual dynamos as well as submissive helpmeets, eager and willing to “obey, serve and entertain” their husbands “better than a first-class prostitute” can. As one of the group’s founders put it at the event heralding the formation of the Obedient Wives,
Sex is a taboo in Asian society. We have ignored it in our marriages but it’s all down to sex. A good wife is a good sex worker to her husband. What is wrong with being a whore … to your husband?
Several days later, another Obedient Wives Club spokeswoman attempted to “clarify” these remarks in an interview with the Malay Mail:
I believe we have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. When we said that husbands should treat their wives like first-class prostitutes, we were not putting wives on the same level with prostitutes. We are talking about first-class elite types, not street hooker types.
So that’s … good, I guess? Although we should point out that actual prostitutes in Malaysia – even those working at “high end” clubs — are treated like shit.
Before all the “American-Women-Suck” dudes reading this convert to Islam and buy one-way plane tickets to Malaysia, I would like to note that there are feminists in Malaysia who think these women (and the men Involved in starting the group) are full of it. Islamic feminists, even.
Meetups and Book Clubs all tied up with string. These are a few of my favorite things.
Note: Actual Man Boobz meetups may vary.
Last night, many hundreds of comments into what would become Man Boobz’ first 900-plus comment thread, an idea arose: a Man Boobz meetup! Specifically, a Boston-area MB meetup, since a lot of MB commenters seem to live around there. Holly – the awesome lady behind the excellent blog The Pervocracy – stepped up to organize the thing.
And thus was born the first of what quite possibly could be many Man Boobz/Pervocracy meetups, tentatively scheduled for 6pm on Friday, June 17th at the Prudential Center Food Court in Boston. If you’re in the area and want to attend, post a comment below and/or get in touch with Holly directly. (Email her at pervocracy@gmail.com.) I’ll post about it again before it happens, so if there are any changes in the details you all will know about it.
Also: for those Man Boobzers who live in and around Chicago, I’ll be organizing a meetup here too, probably within the next couple of weeks. If you’re in the area and want to attend, post below! I’ll do my best to accommodate everyone’s schedules, find places for people to crash, and so on.
There’s also talk about a Toronto meetup.
If anyone else reading this blog wants to get a meetup going in your area, post below! There are Man Boobzers all over the map. Let’s make this happen.
Meanwhile, some other Man Boobzers have set up a book club on Library Thing. Which is also amazing.
I am really happy to see this sort of thing happening, and honored, really, that so many of you all have found a little online home on this blog. And I want to do whatever I can to facilitate this. I’m still considering the possibility of a Man Boobz forum, though I’m not quite sure that the peculiar dynamics that propel so many of the discussions here into sprawling hundreds-of-posts-long threads would work as well on a forum. People here seem fairly evenly divided on the idea. So I’m holding off on that, at least for now, but if there’s enough demand for it I can set up a forum pretty much instantly. Post your thoughts below!
Also: I know a lot of you are broke (as am I), but if you have a few bucks to spare I’d like to once again plug the Man Boobz store., which has awesome “We Hunted the Mammoth” and other t-shirts and assorted products, designed by the awesome JohnnyKaje, who also designed the main Man Boobz banners. (Shaenon also contributed a lovely drawing of an evil cupcake.)
And finally: If you want to help Man Boobz take over the internets, promote the fuck out of the posts here with the little “share” buttons. Links bring traffic, and traffic brings more regular readers and commenters into the Man Boobz fold. Heh heh.
And finally finally, keep sending along suggestions for posts. Quite a few of my recent posts have been inspired by links people sent me. (If you send along a suggestion, and you’d like me to credit you in the posts, let me know; I’ve been assuming people would prefer anonymity.)
Thanks again, everyone!
Abortion, men’s rights, and that asshole in New Mexico
Here's where all the troubles begin
As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.
But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed. Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.
Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.
NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)
So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.
The Life Zone: If Saw and Human Centipede had a baby
The glow of pregnancy
Three young women wake up, confused and terrified, in a room that looks like a cross between a normal hospital room and the creepy underground lair of some mad scientist from a horror movie. A video screen flickers on and a creepy older man, looking a bit like Academy-award-nominee Robert Loggia, appears on it, telling the women that he’s their “jailer.” The women, you see, had all been getting abortions when their jailer’s shadowy accomplices kidnapped them and brought them to this strange prison, where they will be forced to live for the next seven months until they gave birth. “You were all on the operating table, all ready to commit murder,” announces a mysterious doctor. “Your babies will be given life just as God planned.”
This is the premise of a new horror film called The Life Zone, which recently had its world premiere at the prestigious, er, Hoboken International Film Festival, a festival that was, perhaps not coincidentally, founded and chaired by the film’s writer and producer, Kenneth del Vecchio. In case you think I’m making all this up, here’s the film’s trailer, which makes The Life Zone look a bit like an equal-parts mixture of Saw, Human Centipede, and The Handmaid’s Tale, with Robert Loggia in the role of Jigsaw/Dr. Heiter/The Commander:
Now, if you thought that something seemed really … off about that trailer, well, you’re not alone. For the film is not, as you might have assumed from my description, a warning against the fanatical misogyny of many in the anti-abortion movement.
No, the film – produced by a pro-life former judge, crime thriller author, and Republican New Jersey state senate candidate – is meant as pro-life propaganda. As the offical press release for the film’s premiere put it:
The film, which appears to cut right down the middle [of the abortion debate], examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist. Del Vecchio and the cast invite pro-lifers to come to this historic event.
During the months the three women are held in captivity, you see, they are exposed to a barrage of films and books intended to, er, educate them about abortion –what their attending obstetrician Dr. Wise describes as “an abortion think tank.” Two of the captive women do indeed convert to the pro-life side; apparently we in the audience are supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome along with them. The third, as we see in the trailer, tries to induce a miscarriage, which doesn’t go quite as planned.
And this sets us up for the final twist, which I’m just going to go ahead and reveal: once all three women have given birth, Dr. Wise tells them she’s going to sew them all, mouth-to-vagina, into a Human Abortion-pede!
Actually no: the twist is that the “life zone” the three women in has actually been … purgatory! All three “captives,” you see, had died on the operating table while getting their abortions. (Apparently they went to the world’s worst abortion clinic, as first-trimester abortions don’t involve anything more surgically invasive than the insertion of a suction tube; the risk of death from a legal surgical abortion is 0.0006%, one in 160,000 cases, making the procedure many times safer than childbirth itself.) Their time in the “life zone” was a test: the two women who changed their minds were whisked up to heaven, while their miscarriage-attempting, stubbornly pro-choice companion is sent straight to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. Dr. Wise, despite being on the right side of the abortion question, also goes to hell for committing suicide. And, oh yeah, their jailer – Loggia – was Satan. Why Satan and a hell-bound doctor were the ones trying to convert the abortion ladies to the pro-life side I can’t tell you; del Vecchio’s theology is evidently more sophisticated than I am.
The real twist here? As Jersey Journal writer Alan Robb notes:
The Life Zone went viral across the internet [last] Friday after blogs The Frisky and Talking Points Memo picked up on the film’s trailer. … But despite garnering more than 20,000 hits on YouTube in the last four days, only fifty people – including the film’s cast and producers – attended this weekend’s screening, and even those who starred in the movie didn’t know how to interpret its twist ending.
It’s impossible to tell from the trailer if the film is bad in a so-bad-it’s-good way, or if it’s just plain awful. I will try to get hold of it when it hits video, and will report back with my results.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a good horror film set in a creepy hospital, try renting Infection, a Japanese film from 2005. Or, if you’ve got a longer attention span, try Lars Von Trier’s supernatural soap opera The Kingdom, a darkly comic miniseries which takes place in what one might call, paraphrasing Bill Murray’s character in Tootsie, “one nutty hospital.” Both are conveniently available on Netflix instant watch, so you don’t even have to leave your pregnancy dungeon to see them.
EDITED: Added some info on the minimal dangers of abortion procedures.
The persistence of prejudice
The burning of the Jews in the Black Death pograms
Among those MRAs who are actually willing to acknowledge that women actually suffered oppression in the past, you sometimes find this argument: “Sure, things were bad for women back then – in the 1950s, or 1890, or whenever — but these days women don’t suffer from sexism. It’s men who are the real victims.”
This argument not only flies in the face of, you know, reality; it also reflects a naïve and simplistic understanding of how prejudice works, and why it persists. Misogyny, like other prejudices, is deeply rooted; it’s been around for literally thousands of years, and permeates culture and cultural/social/political institutions. The idea that a couple of decades of feminism have been enough to eradicate centuries-old attitudes and beliefs is, if you know anything at all about history or sociology or psychology, simply absurd.
How persistent is prejudice? A recent article in Slate looks at a historical study of anti-Semitism in Germany. As Ray Fisman notes in the Slate article, the study found that:
Communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later. A culture of intolerance can be very persistent indeed.
Let’s just let that sink in for a second: Six. Hundred. Years. The noxious ideas of anti-Semites in the 14th century deeply affected what their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren believed (and did) when the Nazis rolled into town six centuries later. (I’m assuming an average 4 generations per century here; if that’s an incorrect assumption you may need to add or subtract a handful of “greats.”)
Here are more details, from the study’s abstract:
This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.
As Fisman notes,
Changing any aspect of culture—the norms, attitudes, and “unwritten rules” of a group—isn’t easy. Beliefs are passed down from parent to child—positions on everything from childbearing to religious beliefs to risk-taking are transmitted across generations.
You can read more about the details of the study on Slate; the actual study is available here.
EDITED TO ADD: And, on a lighter note, here’s what happens when a “white-men-are-the-real-victims” dude (who clearly has been reading about pick-up artistry) goes a-courtin’ on OkCupid.
EDITED AGAIN: Added more details from the study’s abstract.
Life Before Feminism: Playing “Old Maid”
Damn her and her high IQ!
Sometimes it’s useful to remember just what the early second wave feminists were reacting against. Here, from a comic circa 1970 (judging from the clothing) is a sort of double-whammy of misogyny: hide your smarts, girls, or you’ll end up a wizened old maid at the ripe old age of … twenty?
The MRAs today who prattle on about how declining marriage rates mean that men are wising-up to the evils of feminism need to remind themselves that delaying marriage is a good thing for both men and women (the earlier the marriage, the greater the likelihood of divorce; the later the marriage, the more time for men and women to get decent education, start a career, mature a bit, etc etc). In the fifties, obviously, the pressure for women (and to a lesser degree, men) to marry very young was immense. This comic suggests that these pressures didn’t vanish with the coming of the sixties counterculture or even with the first stirrings of second wave feminism.
Comic from Comically Vintage.
The Spearhead on Lady Lit 3: Electric Boogaloo
This baby knows more about contemporary women's fiction than all Spearhead contributors combined. (As does the kitten.)
There are really few things quite so entertaining as watching people as ignorant as a box of pig shit offering their opinions on literature. Especially when the people in question are W.F. Price and his gang of misfit boys at The Spearhead, who are back for yet another take on the whole Women’s Lit question.
At this point I’ve run out of jokes on this particular subject, so I’m just going to let Mr. Price dig his own hole here. Here he is, trying to argue that feminism has made terrible lady writers even terribler.*
[I]t appears that since feminism’s triumph, female achievement in the higher arts has deteriorated substantially. When women no longer have to excel to be read and recognized, but simply have to advertise the fact that they are women to be celebrated for dubious achievements, they won’t put as much effort into producing anything of quality. So the sorry state of women today is a direct result of feminist privilege, which absolves them of all responsibility and deflects any criticism. …
Yes, feminism has wrecked Western womanhood, reducing the young women of today to spoiled brats who can’t take a hint of criticism, and immediately turn to authorities to bolster their self-esteem. No woman can be too fat to be beautiful, too dense to be intelligent, or too dull to be creative. They are all equally super-duper goddesses, before whom men must genuflect and heap up mounds of praise.
Price of course gives no examples to back up any of his, er, “arguments,” and somehow I suspect he hasn’t actually read any fiction written by women beyond an odd title or two he might have been assigned in high school. I wonder if Price could even name a half-dozen living woman novelists without having to resort to Google — excluding JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and Jackie Collins (who hasn’t heard of them?) and Harper Lee (who wasn’t assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in high school?).
*I am aware that “terribler” is not a real world.
The Spearhead on Lady Lit, Part 2: Poetry Slam!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, dude poet extraordinaire
The fellows at The Spearhead are still talking about lady literature — by which I mean, why ladies totally can’t write for shit. This time, they’re taking on the lady poets.
Contrasting a poem by former US poet laureate Kay Ryan with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, The Spearhead’s W.F. Price proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that men are the best poets. And then Price takes it one step further, contrasting a video of Kay Ryan’s reading of another of her poems with Dylan Thomas’ passionate (if slightly overripe) reading of his “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.”
While I can’t take issue with Price’s methodology here – comparing a couple of random poems by a female poet most people have never heard of (but who apparently represents all female poets ever) with legendary poems by two of the world’s most famous poets – I wonder about his choice of male poets here.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Dylan Thomas? Sure, they wrote some awesome dude poems, for their time. But they’re long dead, Daddy-O, and we men of today demand poetry that speaks to our lives. Who better speaks to men today than the tag-team of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J from the Insane Clown Posse? And which of their poems speaks to men today better than their most famous work, “Miracles?”
Here are some selections from this fine piece of work — and because, by Price’s rules, any poem by a person of a particular gender obviously represents all poetry from people of that gender, this wonderful little poem represents all male poetry. (Not to mention all poetry written by insane clowns.)
We don’t have to be high to look in the sky
And know that’s a miracle opened wide
Look at the mountains, trees, the seven seas
And everything chilling underwater, please …
Pure magic is the birth of my kids
I’ve seen shit that’ll shock your eyelids
The sun and the moon, and even Mars
The Milky Way and fucking shooting stars
UFOs, a river flows
Plant a little seed and nature grows
Niagara falls and the pyramids
Everything you believed in as kids
Fucking rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to blow your brains
I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco bay
It tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away
And then, in this poem’s most famous lines, Shaggy 2 Dope (or perhaps Violent J, I can’t remember which is which), takes on the miracle of magnetism:
I see miracles all around me
Stop and look around, it’s all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
But as wonderfully as these lines read on the printed page, it is Insane Clown Posse’s performance of this poem (which they have set to music) that really brings home how motherfuckingly miraculous these two poets, and by extension all men who have ever written poetry, really are. So here is that performance:
As yet another great male poet, MC Hammer, once put it: “You can’t touch this!”
But, just to be fair, here’s some chick reading her dumb poem:
Picture of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Jason Towers, from here.
