Program note: I’ll be on NPR at 11 AM (Eastern) today, talking about Elliot Rodger and the new misogyny [UPDATE: Archived audio is up!]
Just wanted to let you all know that I will be on NPR today, as part of a special segment on Misogyny And Murder: Unpacking A Killing In California on the show On Point With Tom Ashbrook. For more details and a link to listen to the show online, see here.
I will probably be on in the middle of the show, from about 11:20-11:40.
I’ll put up a link to the archived show when it’s over.
UPDATE: The archived audio is now up, at the same link. And yeah, I was on in the middle. But you should listen to the whole show; Soraya Chemaly in particular is great.
Heartiste takes on an “egotistic, attention starved, solipsistic, passive aggressive, perpetually aggrieved … manlet” who somehow isn’t him.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.)
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
Pledge Drive: Begging Cat Gif Edition!
Please, kind human, can you spare a ha’penny?
Welcome to the Somewhat Belated Second Quarter Man Boobz Pledge Drive 2014: Begging Cat Gif Edition!
To repeat my simple pitch from my previous pledge drives: If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below and send a few bucks my way. Or, if you’d prefer, a lot of bucks. You don’t need a PayPal account to donate; you can use a credit card, and there are other options as well. If you’re outside the US, PayPal should be able to handle your weird foreign money.
Oh, and the PayPal page will say you’re donating to Man Boobz; don’t panic! That’s just the old name of the blog.
Your donations, big and small, are all greatly appreciated; they keep this blog going, quite literally. My cats thank you too, as they also get a cut, mostly in the form of cat food.
Big thanks to everyone who donated during the last pledge drive. (If I didn’t get back to you personally, I apologize; I know I missed some of you.) Thanks as well to those who’ve donated since the last pledge drive, and to those especially generous souls who donate on a regular basis.
And if for whatever reason you can’t donate, that’s fine. I understand being broke.
I always use these pledge drives as an excuse to brag about page views, and I’m not going to stop: We Hunted the Mammoth has now received more than 15 million page views since its inception as Man Boobz on Blogger in 2010. And you all have posted more than 400,000 comments. Which is kind of staggering, really.
To all the MRAs out there who think I write all the comments here, really? THERE ARE 400,000 OF THEM. Lots of them talking about stuff I don’t even know about! Because the commenters here rock!
Dr. Helen of PJ Media tries to blame feminists for Elliot Rodger’s rampage. So why did she once glorify an MRA much like Rodger?
Memorial in Santa Barbara
Leave it to Dr. Helen – psychologist, right-wing blogger, friend of A Voice for Men – to come up with what has got to be the most transparent attempt to distract public attention from the obvious parallels between the misogyny of spree killer Elliot Rodgers and the misogyny of the Men’s Rights movement she supports.
In a blog post on PJ Media, she suggests half-seriously that “If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty,[of inspiring Elliot Rodger] Then So Are the Feminists.”
The good Doctor starts by accusing Slate’s Amanda Hess of blaming pickup artists for Elliot’s rampage. Her proof? Several passages from Hess in which Hess makes very clear that she is not blaming PUAs – or the anti-PUAs at PUAhate — for the deaths in Santa Barbara, or even for Rodger’s misogyny.
Semi-Open Thread for Happy Things. No Trolls.
Well, the box is correctly labeled, at least.
An open thread — well, a semi-open thread — for all of those needing a respite from the news. No trolls, no arguments, no discussion of depressing stuff. Adorable animal pics encouraged.
If you have personal stuff to discuss that is more serious, there’s a separate thread for that here.
Email me if someone misbehaves here.
For New Readers: An Intro to the Men’s Rights Movement and the New Misogyny
MRAs, always complaining about something.
If you’re one of the new readers who’ve come to this blog in recent days, and you’d like to get up to speed in a hurry on the Men’s Rights movement and all the other sorts of misogynists we discuss on this blog, here are some posts that you may find interesting and useful.
The Mammoth FAQ What I’m trying to do with the blog, as well as an explanation of the name.
White Hot Rage: A piece I did for The American Prospect reviewing Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men and offering a critical overview of the Men’s Rights Movement.
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words: Some truly reprehensible quotes from the most influential MRA online
Warren Farrell’s notorious comments on date rape: Not any more defensible in context than out of it A closer look at some infamous comments by Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power and the ideological grandfather of the Men’s Rights Movement
What Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell actually said about the allegedly positive aspects of incest. A look at an exceedingly disturbing interview Farrell gave about his incest research in the 1970s.
Warren Farrell: Men Are Oppressed by Women’s Butts He actually seems to believe this.
Tell Her That Her Soul Is Dog-Sh*t: Dating advice from A Voice for Men
The Spearhead on the Slutwalks, Again Highlights — that is, lowlights — from a discussion of Slutwalks on the popular reactionary MRA site The Spearhead.
Women! Why must you assault men with your evil sexy outfits?
Attention-seeking manosphere douchebag offers how-to guide for abusive boyfriends
Reno calls a domestic violence hotline: The MRA Reality Distortion Field in action A very revealing example of MRA “activism.”
These are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. There are roughly 1800 more posts. Try clicking on the categories at the end of each post! Type random anti-woman slurs into the search box to see what comes up! Examples of misogyny amongst MRAs, PUAs, and the various other denizens of the manosphere are so common I could probably put up 20 posts a day without running out of material.
Why Elliot Rodger’s misogyny matters
A chart posted by Elliot Rodger, giving his chilling spin on a manosphere meme depicting supposed female “hypergamy”
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
Pickup artists argue that “Game” is the solution to Elliot Rodger-style rampages. Here’s why they’re wrong.
From Elliot Rodger’s Google+ Profile
Pickup artists, classy fellows that they are, are using Elliot Rodger’s killing rampage as a marketing ploy. In the comments to one of Rodger’s videos on YouTube, a company called Strategic Dating Coach offered their solution to prevent similar shootings in the future: send disturbed young men who can’t get dates to one of their coaching sessions!
While this response to Rodger’s mass killing is uniquely crass, the argument that “Game saves lives” is hardly new. To PUAs like Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh it’s practically an article of faith.
Free Northerner: “The concept of marital rape creates the trauma of marital rape.” And spouses who say “no” to sex are sinners.
Just because she says “I do,” it doesn’t preclude her from saying “no” ever again.
Free Northerner is a “Dark Enlightenment” blogger who describes himself as “a Christian and a reactionary monarchist from British North America” who,
after a period of red pill exploration … decided to embrace Christian masculinity. I am working to improve myself for God’s glory. My plan is to find a wife and raise a large family with traditional values.
If any woman ever decides to marry him – and I sincerely hope no one ever does — she should be aware that her Darkly Enlightened husband does not believe there is such a thing as marital rape.
In a recent post, Free Northerner set forth the essentially the same argument as his fellow reactionary Vox Day: that the marriage contract provides “sexual consent … for life,” and that those who argue for the existence of marital rape are thereby undermining the legitimacy of marriage itself. And then he adds some tweaks that make his terrible argument even more terrible than that of Mr. Day. But we’ll get to those in a moment.
First, his basic claim:
