Search Results for elam
>Valentine’s Day, Massacred
>
Don’t let it be said that the dudes of the manosphere aren’t ready for Valentine’s Day. Oh, they haven’t been ordering little teddy bears and giant bouquets of flowers for their sweeties. They’ve been getting ready to throw a fit at the very notion of the ersatz holiday.
Marc Rudov, a self-described MRA, “relationship expert” and all-around asshole, has been trying to organize a boycott of VD for several years now. “There’s nothing romantic about coercing men to oblige female entitlement,” Rudov recently told AOL News. “Valentine’s Day artificially and unilaterally caters to women. It’s the media’s annual male-bashing fest.”
Over on The Spearhead, grizzled MRA veteran Zed has written not one but two articles attacking VD, which he describes as “Extortion of Insincere Materialistic Tokens of Affection Under Threat of Emotional Violence Day.” Meanwhile, Paul Elam — never one for subtlety — has one-upped old Zed, denouncing the holiday as “a socially coerced day of hyper-entitlement for a generation of princess leeches.” Endorsing Rudov’s boycott, Elam seems especially incensed by the omnipresent “Every Kiss Begins With Kay” ads that clutter the airwaves every year as VD approaches.
One commenter at The Spearhead summons up his inner comedian:
There’ two types of VD. One is a potentially serious affliction that can be caught from sexual relations with a woman. Symptoms include tiredness, lack of sex drive, acute pain in the groin region and loss of work productivity. It’s difficult to treat as the parasite responsible is very demanding and difficult to get rid of.
The other is a bacterial infection treatable with antibiotics and rest.
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| Marc Rudov: Trying to hypnotize you with his teeth. |
It’s almost cute, all this energy and anger. These guys seem to really think that they’re the first people to ever have an issue with Valentine’s day, the first people to ever get irritated by “every kiss begins with Kay.”
But, guess what? Lots of people hate Valentine’s day. I generally find it pretty annoying myself, and the Kay commercials, which basically suggest that the women of America are jewel-hungry prostitutes and the men their johns, set my teeth a-grinding. Granted, I’m generally been most hostile to VD when I’ve been single, but when a couple of years ago I discovered that my then-girlfriend was a really really really big fan of the holiday (and not a fan of my more laid-back approach to it) it was actually one of the things that led me to break up with her a few weeks later.
You know who else hates Valentine’s day and the blizzard of retrograde sexist advertising that accompanies it? Lots and lots of women, especially those of the feminist persuasion, who generally don’t take kindly to the insinuation that women are diamond whores. Indeed, a couple of weeks back, hundreds of the mostly women of Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes subreddit happily upvoted a topic with the title “If I see one more freakin’ “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” commercial I am going to find whoever is responsible for that nonsense and take a big fat poop on his face. “
Hell, Valentine’s Day hatred is everywhere. In the London Times, Helen McNutt — a woman, if her first name is any indication — spelled out “20 reasons it’s okay to hate Valentine’s Day.” Meanwhile, the Onion News Network ran a hilarious piece on the “Annual Valentine’s Day Stoning Of a Happy Couple .”
And if you want your VD hatred live and direct, you can always monitor Twitter for bitter anti-VD tweets.
Indeed, VD hatred has become so omnipresent that the folks at Slate, hoping to gin up some pageviews with some well-timed contrarianism, ran a piece — get this — actually defending the holiday. “I’m almost afraid to say it,” the piece began, “I have plans for Valentine’s Day. … If I’m lucky, there may even be chocolate and flowers involved.”
Like a lot of VD haters, I have plans for February 15th. They definitely involve chocolate, bought at a steep discount.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Rapist babies and internet threats
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| How the hell did I get mixed up in all this? |
The manosphere is in an uproar about a public service TV ad from an anti-violence group that portrays a baby boy as a future rapist. Some MRAs are attempting to refute the ad’s implication that improperly socialized men are prone to violence by posting and upvoting … violent comments and veiled threats online. And apparently some non-veiled death threats as well.
A few days ago, you see, W.F. Price, head honcho at The Spearhead, wrote a critical piece about the endeavors of one Josh Jasper to draw attention to sexism in Super Bowl commercials; Price also pointed out that Jasper, CEO of the Riverview Center, a nonprofit serving domestic violence and sexual assault victims in Illinois and Iowa, had put out an earlier commercial that, in Price’s words, “impl[ied] that baby boys are all potential rapists.”
Despite the source, that’s actually a more or less accurate description of the ad, which depicts a happy little baby boy as a future rapist. I’m just not quite sure why that’s so objectionable; after all, every baby, male or female, is a bundle of possibilities, some good, some bad. (Hitler was once a happy, gurgling baby.) The point of the ad is that parents can have an effect on how their kids turn out; if you raise your son to be a violent, misogynist asshole, he may well end up a rapist.
As much as I agree with this basic sentiment, I’m not going to defend the ad. It’s terrible. Generally, I’m not a fan of using babies to make political points — it’s trite and manipulative, to begin with. And in this case, it’s worse than that: portraying a baby as a future rapist seems rather hamfisted, given that babies are often victims of abuse themselves.
Judge for yourself; here’s the ad.
All this said, the flaws of the “rapist baby” ad in no way excuse the response it’s gotten from some of the more hotheaded in the Men’s Rights Movement and the manosphere in general. On his website, Peter Nolan declares that the ad “promote[s] hatred of male babies”; on The Spearhead, Poester99 goes even further, accusing Riverview Center of “promoting violence against baby boys.” Which is, of course, completely absurd. (Even besides that, as Jasper has pointed out on his blog, the Riverview Center serves male victims as well as female ones.) It’s hard to know if the people spouting this nonsense honestly believe it, or if they are using the baby in the ad even more cynically and opportunistically than Jasper is.
Unfortunately, the MRA reaction has gone well beyond simple rhetorical overkill. A number of comments on The Spearhead, many of them with dozens of upvotes, are essentially threats — some vague, some not-so-vague — against Jasper himself. duke writes that:
Mangina creeps like Josh Jasper should suffer the same fate as Nazi sympathizers after WWII-taken out and shot after a five minute trial.
Avenger adds:
If men really were as violent as he claims they would have shut him up long ago. One good beating and this mangina would never open his mouth again.
Firepower, meanwhile, goes after Jasper’s … first name:
So long as males tolerate sissified males named “Josh” – pissing even on our SuperBowl – these gender traitors will only feel encouraged to increase their anti-male slurs.
Over on A Voice For Men, meanwhile, MRA elder Paul Elam insinuates that Jasper, far from being a sissy, is a violent “alpha puke” — and calls on his fans to dig up dirt on him:
This man deserves consequences for his actions.
Some history on Josh is known. We know he was a marine and we also know that he was a Los Angeles police officer. Two areas for sure where the capacity for violence is a plus. Add to that the fact that he was on a Domestic Violence task force and this bad apple starts to stink a little more. …
Anyone want to take any bets on whether this alpha puke ever busted heads as a cop, simply because he could? It leaves one to wonder – especially given the intellectual violence he is so obviously willing to inflict on male children – just what sort of skeletons are in this douche bag’s closet.
If they are there, I would love to get my hands on them and rattle them together for the world to hear.
And on Men-Factor, antifeminist blogger ScareCrow (who used to regularly post comments here) posts the email addresses of The Riverview Center’s mostly female board of directors, urging readers to “vent your anger” on this “bitch-hive,” adding “I aim to destroy it.”
I don’t have the patience or the stomach to sort through the comments on the YouTube page for the ad to see what other vile shit has been posted there.
I can only hope that most of this violent language is just standard internet tough guy talk, and won’t result in real violence in the real world. Even if you believe that Jasper’s ad commits a sort of rhetorical violence against male babies — which I think is a ridiculous reading of the admittedly idiotic ad — it does not justify actual violence against anybody.
EDIT: I should have let this one sit a little before putting it up. I’ve made various changes to strengthen and clarify my argument.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
Women Are … Part 3: A Voice For Men edition
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| Britney, don’t you know YOU’RE toxic? |
More, uh, questionable wisdom from angry dudes on the nature of women. Today: comments from A Voice For Men. I’ve highlighted some of the nastiest stuff for easy reference.
Women: Deserve to be shot in the face.
Women are the natural enemies of men. No matter what anyone says and how good women claim to be, that is just the truth. This will never stop and men will continue under the tyranny of women. … We are called rapists, abusers, bullies, and even homophobes because we don’t embrace the faggots biologically backward, queer-ass culture. … I am so fucking tired of this shit, that I really wouldn’t mind shooting a bitch dead in the face. … They are evil. ALL OF THEM!!! … This is a gender war, and women, ALL WOMEN! are the enemies, there is no compromising.
(Note: This comment, even with the whole shooting-women-in-the-face bit, got more upvotes than downvotes from A Voice For Men’s peanut gallery, and “redpill” was not taken to task for actually suggesting murder by the site’s owner, Paul Elam. Lots of other crazy stuff in that comment thread.)
EDITED TO ADD: Elam has now removed this comment, which he says he hadn’t seen before, saying “I am vehemently against violence.” Given that he has posted similarly violent fantasies several times in his own pieces, this is a little difficult to take altogether seriously. (My link is to the version of the page saved on the Internet Archive, which still contains the comment intact.) He claims those other pieces were “satire” and that the violent parts were “taken out of context.” Of course, none of this changes the fact that a comment about “shooting a bitch dead in the face” got more upvotes than downvotes on his site. (Here, by contrast, is a comment that got massive downvotes on his site; you’ll have to click a link there to even make the comment visible.) EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: In this post, I take apart Paul’s claim that he’s being satirical when he talks about violence.
Women are: Toxic, but their vaginas are useful.
Women are toxic – stay away from them, dont be around them for too long and most importantly when pumping them with man juice wear protection so you dont get infected with child support.
Until women regress back into their maternal/house keeping roles use them for the only thing they have to offer to a straight man – their vaginas.
Women are: Malleable, gullible, stupid, bad, irrational, and ridiculous.
In my opinion women are malleable,gullible and lack vision.The statements they make are ludicrous,they are therefore stupid, driven on by one thing and one thing only-their sexual power. The day someone creates a pill that desexualizes them in our eyes, then that is it. It is over. I don’t for a single second believe that the nature of women has transformed over the ages. Go back in time and the same nonsense will be as visible then as it is now. … women are this way by nature. The good thing is,they have demonstrated, to their everlasting detriment, just how bad, irrational, and ridiculous they really are. Time to stop pandering.
Women are: Crazy, undisciplined, irresponsible, toxic, entitled, and they’ll probably get your penis infected.
[W]omen in this country my age and younger are out of their minds! They have no concept of discipline or responsibility. They can talk with the best of them but their actions paint an entirely different picture. It’s not going to an extreme to want to get away from Western women entirely. They are toxic human beings. It is dangerous physically (many of them have STD’s), economically (look at hulk hogan’s ex and her new yacht the alimoney), religiously (these girls are some of the MOST entitled I have seen), etc.. Even the best of them slip into the entitled mentality far too frequently.
>Further Reading: The Worst of the Men’s Rights Movement
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| From Paul Elam’s site. |
Here are links to, and brief excerpts of, some of the worst posts by Men’s Rights activists and/or antifeminists I’ve run across in doing this blog. These are not random comments by random MRAs; they are all by people who have a history in the MRM. In most cases, they are fairly prominent names, at least within the online MRA community. A few of these posts will be familiar to readers of this blog.
Lest anyone accuse me of taking quotes out of context, I urge you to read the originals. As you’ll see, none of these quotes are any more justifiable “in context” than they are here on their own.
If anyone out there has seen worse, please post a URL below. Conversely, if any of these posts have been publicly challenged by others in the MRM, I will happily post links alongside the original.
I am also taking nominations for a follow-up post, The Best of the MRM. Post URLs below.
Let’s start with Paul Elam’s charming “Bash A Violent Bitch Month” Post
The money quote:
In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.
I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to 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 till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.
And then make them clean up the mess.
Immediately after this quote, he claims he’s not “serious” about this, though apparently only because “it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.” My post on the subject is here. Here’s another piece by Elam full of fantasies of violence against women.
Another by Elam: Jury Duty at a Rape Trial? Acquit!
Key quote:
Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.
This post from Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and Men’s Rights activist best known for suing clubs that have “ladies nights,” suggests that men may have to take up arms to win their, er, struggle:
The future prospect of the Men’s Movement raising enough money to exercise some influence in America is unlikely. But there is one remaining source of power in which men still have a near monopoly—firearms.
I wrote about Hollander’s call to arms in If at first you don’t succeed, shoot people.
And speaking of angry men and their guns, here’s a post from Citizen Renegade, a Pick-Up Artist (PUA) site popular with MRAs: Game Can Save Lives It’s about George Sodini, the misogynist killer who gunned down women at a health club a year ago. “Chateau” suggests that all would have been well if Sodini had learned how to be a Pick-Up Artist:
If Sodini had learned game he would have been able to find another woman and gotten laid after his ex dumped him. He wouldn’t have spent the next 20 years steeped in bile and weighed down by his Sisyphian blue balls, dreaming of vengeance. Game could have saved the lives of the women Sodini killed.
Actually, Sodini had taken at least one class from Don Steele, author of “How to Date Young Women for Men Over 35.” The comments to Chateau’s article are scarier than the article itself. For selected examples and commentary, see here.
Another from Citizen Renegade: Owning a Dog is Training for Owning a Woman
[P]roperly owning a dog is excellent training for properly owning a woman. The behavior of dogs and women is eerily similar, and their relation to man testifies to that.Like dogs, women need to be led. They *want* to be led. In fact, though they will never admit it, women want to be owned by their men.
Other MRAs don’t seem to be much interested in adult women at all. MRA Jay Hammers, a regular contributor to The Spearhead, has taken down his blog, but its worst moments live on in Google’s cache. Perhaps the worst of the worst: Age of Consent is Misandry. Key quotes:
Age of consent laws are designed to punish beta males. A beta male in his 20s, unsuccessful with women his own age who are infused with a sense of feminist entitlement and deride all but the top alpha males who take interest in them, who seeks companionship with a younger, sexually mature female who desires him, should not go to prison for acting on that which is normal male sexuality.Females generally do not significantly mature mentally past puberty so it should always be illegal for any woman to have sex or it should never be illegal for any woman to have sex. There is no arbitrary age where females suddenly become self-aware, realizing the consequences of their actions, and stop seeking out alpha males. Thus there must not be an arbitrary age of consent for sex.
This post did get some criticism in the MRM. Here’s one discussion.
And here’s Hammers again, accusing other MRAs of being “pansies.”
One of Hammers’ biggest defenders has been an antifeminist blogger by the nom-de-net of Schopenbecq, who is equally obsessed with the age of consent and what he sees as the superior attractiveness of teen girls. Here’s one of his posts on the subject, which argues:
The age of consent has always been central to feminism. In fact, it has been its primary driving force right from the beginning. The purpose of this website is not to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from the present feminist age of 16. For one thing, there is little or no chance of that happening in this author’s lifetime. However, I have no shame whatsoever in stating my clear belief that the age of consent ought to be what it still technically is in the majority of major civilised nations – namely, 14.
In this post, he mocks any man who doesn’t think Heather Locklear’s 13-year-old daughter is hotter than Locklear herself:
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| Results of a poll on Schopenbecq’s site. |
Here, he argues that feminism is a “Sexual Trade Union,” and seems to suggest that increasing the age of consent from 12 was bad thing :
Feminism exists as a defender of the selfish sexual and reproductive interests of aging and/or unattractive women. This is its entire raison d’etre, the reason it first came into existence with the social purity movement reformers of the 19th century, led by their harridan battle cry – ‘armed with the ballot the mothers of America will legislate morality’.And legislate morality these pioneering feminists quickly did, even before they had won the vote. That is, they successfully lobbied for restrictions on prostitution, a rise in the age of consent from 12 to 16, or even 18, and the closing down of saloons where their husbands might mix freely with unattached young women.
More misogyny:
Anglobitch: Women, Self Awareness and the Guillotine of Bitterness
Post-feminist women have been so indoctrinated by specious polemics extolling their (largely imaginary) talents, that they truly believe their ‘achievements’ are somehow self-determined. This is why the loss of their physical charms wreaks such havok on them. Having been nurtured on feminist pipe dreams, the cutting realization that their youthful ‘success’ was entirely due to sexual allure must be galling indeed. … Indeed, the staunch bitterness of middle-aged Anglo-American women can be entirely attributed to this realization:It wasn’t your ‘talent’ and ‘intelligence’ that men admired: it was your sweet young pussy. That pussy-pass departed with your first wrinkle: live with it, bitch.
Heretical Sex: Never Date Western Women
Big cities like London, New York and Sydney are jam-packed with beautiful foreign girls from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. They are sexy, fun, good company and they treat men like human beings. They have not had their minds poisoned by feminist hate-speech. … I urge all Western men to boycott Western Women if they can. Don’t date them, don’t marry them, don’t have children with them. Find yourself a nice foreign girl, and find out what women should be like. If anyone asks you why, tell them it is a protest against feminist ideology. Once enough men start boycotting them, women will turn away from feminism.
Henry Makow has gotten too loopy for most Men’s Rights activists to consider him as one of their own. But he remains one of the internet’s most influential antifeminists. Here are some quotes from his classic in craziness How the Rockefellers Re-Engineered Women.
Feminism is an excellent example of how the Rockefeller mega cartel uses the awesome power of the mass media (i.e. propaganda.) to control society. … Nicholas Rockefeller told [producer Aaron Russo] that his family foundation created women’s liberation using mass media control as part of a long-term plan to enslave humanity. ….The hidden goal of feminism is to destroy the family, which interferes with state brainwashing of the young. Side benefits include depopulation and widening the tax base. Displacing men in the role of providers also destabilizes the family.
Only satanists would trash motherhood.
The fellows at the Manhood Academy have also gotten a lot of criticism from MRAs. It’s not altogether clear why, since their ridiculously retrograde views of women are no more ridiculously retrograde than many of those I’ve quoted above. The key Manhood Academy text is a 135-page pdf called The Principles of Social Competence, which is full of stuff like this:
While women and children often lack the capacity to grasp the inner workings of authority, they still have an instinctual, positive response to it. Authority brings chaotic, aimless things, people, events and circumstances into a state of good order. … Masculinity is properly expressed in the form of authority.
You know what I said above about reading the originals? Don’t bother in this case.
Speaking of women as children, who could forget this classic, from “ramzpaul” on The Spearhead: How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization, which posited:
Single mothers, rampant divorce, abortion and falling birth rates are part of the cancer that is destroying what is left of Western Civilization. But very few people (even conservatives) fail to realize that the inception of this cancer can be found in the passage of the 19th amendment.
I wrote about the piece, and reactions to it, here.
More Worst Of links to come! The Men’s Rights movement produces fresh awfulness each and every day.
EDIT: Deansdale’s Blog has weighed in on this Worst-of list and is surprisingly positive about the whole thing. Oh, not my post — he hates my post, and me — but the original MRA-n-pals posts. Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch” post? “What’s the problem with this article? Nothing, really. … Elam has some insightful observations about the nature of women in our contemporary cultures.” Roissy’s post about misogynist killer George Sodini? “What’s wrong with this article? Nothing.”And RamZpaul’s How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization? “There are valid arguments supporting his claim. It’s not PC, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically wrong.”
He even sort-of defends good old Henry Makow and his bizarre conspiracy theoryies:
Actually this is not so crazy. You don’t believe it, that’s fine, but show me why this is soooo unacceptable. He states lots of things: some of them obvious, some of them researchable. But it’s not so radical.
The only people he doesn’t defend? The Manhood Academy guys. Apparently saying horrible, horrible shit about women is perfectly acceptable in Deansdale’s vision of the MRM, but saying horrible, horrible shit about women while also calling other MRAs “manginas,” as the Manhood Academy guys do, is totally BEYOND THE PALE!!!
>The Domestic Violence Debate has begun
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EDIT: My first response is up, here.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, MRA Paul Elam and I are debating Domestic Violence on his web site A Voice for Men. Elam’s first post has just gone up, a wrongheaded and rather underwhelming start to the debate; my response will appear in a day or two. (I will post a pointer here when it does.)
Instead of allowing open debate on his website, Elam generally segregates those he classifies as, er, “feminists and manginas” on a separate page. (I know, right?) But he says he’s suspended that rule for this debate, so I urge anyone here in that particular demographic to go over there and start picking apart his errors. (Paul and I have agreed to keep out of the comments section for the debate.)
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>QuoteOTD: Teh Menz at work
>
Another day, another muddled mess of misogynist generalizations completely unsupported by any actual evidence. Today, at A Voice For Men, Theodore Labadie reflects on the Roman Pantheon, and how teh menz made all the cool shit in the world lol, ladies are teh suckkssss! I’m paraphrasing, of course. In his words:
Men do not see the world like women do. The gaze of men projects outward into it; they see it, they take what they need from it, and they remake it anew. The gaze of women falls inward. The world becomes them, it exists for them. And thus, women do not build; they consume. It is not the vicissitudes of society or the education system that makes women like this. It is their nature. And, I hazard a guess … that because of the consumptive nature of women and of men’s desire to give them every comfort and convenience that we are eating ourselves alive.
I wonder, if the genius of men were fully recognized where would we be now?
Gosh, I don’t know. We’d probably all be flying around with jet packs while having sex with sexy sex robots. That’s just a guess, though. But I have a question for Mr. Labadie, and for every MRA who gets vicarious man thrills from stuff other dudes have made: how many Roman Pantheons have you personally built?
Also: it sort of undermines your case for inherent man genius when you use the word “bare” to mean “bear.” Real men proofread.
Program Note: I will be man-debating Paul Elam, the man behind A Voice For Men, on the topic of Domestic Violence, starting tonight on his man-site. I will post links when the posts start going up.
>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.
>Cartoon of the Day: Tied Down
>Remember all those outrageously sexist cartoons that used to fill the pages of our popular periodicals back in the good old days before evil feminism brought its blight upon the world? They’re having a sort of second life on the Internet, and apparently some people still find them hi-larious. I found this is on an Indian Men’s Rights site, which offered this little bit of commentary: “So so so true……………….”
EDIT: Apparently my not thinking that this cartoon is hi-larious makes me the “Cartoon Monitor for the Confederacy of Dunces,” or so says the often inadvertently hi-larious Paul Elam.
>The Surreal Housewife
>
One of the things that still surprises me as I traverse the weird online world of anti-feminism is the number of women I’ve run across who think that they have altogether too many rights. I’ve written in the past about women who don’t believe they should have the right to vote. Today, Laura Wood, a proudly retrograde woman who thinks the solution to contemporary “cultural ruin” is for employers to start paying women even less than they do now. According to “Why We Must Discriminate,” a manifesto of sorts on her blog The Thinking Housewife:
Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural ruin of its women. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. … First and foremost, we must restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions must be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.
It’s a strange manifesto and a strange blog. Unlike many of the reactionaries I regularly quote on this blog, Wood is not an idiot. Her tone is measured and cautious. If you accept her fairly ludicrous premises — the key ones here being that it would be desirable or even possible to undo decades of economic and cultural history to essentially return to an imaginary, idealized prefeminist world in which men could earn enough to comfortably support a family and women would work primarily for “pin money” — her manifesto almost makes sense. And yet what she is saying is, not to put too fine a point on it, vile.
She is utterly blithe, for example, about the effect her proposal would have on single and divorced women:
Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.
Who needs a man-sized wage when you can just beg dad for cash when the rent comes due?
Wood not only thinks women deserve to be paid less than men for the same work; she’s also wary of women taking on almost any authority at all outside the home. While she’s admits it’s technically possible for women to be, for example, effective drill sergeants, she finds the idea vaguely abhorrent:
When women start barking orders at grown men, the delicate balance of power between the sexes is disturbed. Women are mothers and wives, lovers and friends to men. These roles are damaged by domineering bossiness. Male psychology is radically different from female psychology. After all, mothers are women. There is no more significant fact than that.
There’s more, much more. Troll This Blog has assembled a lengthy list of Wood’s more backwards utterances, from which I drew the example above, including some thoughts on race that would not be out of place at a (very polite) Klan meeting: “Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today.”
Though I found her blog through links on a Men’s Rights blog or two, and her ideology is more or less consistent with some of the more reactionary MRAs out there, Wood is not exactly an MRA herself. Indeed, she has tangled with the Men’s Rights Movement on several occasions — lambasting commenters on The Spearhead for “juvenile” misogyny, and accusing MRA elder Paul Elam of “idiocy and hatred” for his, er, idiotic and hateful statement that if he were on a jury he wouldn’t vote to convict a clearly guilty rapist.
Wood’s enmity towards certain elements of the MRM has been reciprocated. Our good (not) friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog recently took on a “mangina” commenter at what he calls “The (Not) Thinking Housewife” for suggesting that the MRM had its roots in “radical homosexuality.”
This is one of those battles, to paraphrase Calvin Trillin, in which I can only hope that both sides suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.
NOTE: Before any of the anti-feminists who regularly post here accuse me of lacking “substance” because I do not “rebut” Wood’s “arguments” in detail, I request only one thing: find me something solid to rebut. Wood, like many of those I write about, offers a lot of opinions — see the quotes above, and on Troll This Blog, for numerous examples — but almost nothing to actually support those opinions. Find me an example of an argument she has made that is actually supported with actual empirical evidence, with specific citations and/or links to sources, and I’ll have a go at it.


















