Search Results for A voice for men
>New and Improved Cheap And Easy Ways To Raise Your Value To A Girl.
>
Recently, “game” guru Roissy offered his readers a list of “Cheap And Easy Ways To Raise Your Value To A Girl.” Most were fairly standard pick up artist tricks of the “act like an aloof jerk and she’ll worship you” variety. According to Roissy, though, these little tricks will miraculously enable guys
to date women one to three points higher than you could be expected to get by societal standards. Do these to a girlfriend and you will be a god to her. A god among penii.
A few examples:
Don’t call back right away. Done properly, you will start to hear girls say things like “I didn’t hear back from you. You were making me nervous!”
Don’t live together. It’s much harder to project mystery living under the same roof, watching each other fold laundry every week. (Not to mention side action will be more difficult to coordinate.)
Cancel dates. (Make the reason seem apparently legitimate, but suspicious.)
Muse wistfully about past lovers.Never do her a favor before you’ve had sex with her.
Never laugh at her jokes, even when they’re funny. If you must, chuckle under your breath.
When at her place, eat all her food, leave the seat up, change her TV channels, and torture her cat. Act like it’s your second home.
Bo-ring. These tricks may have worked on women once upon a time, but today’s women are far too sophisticated to fall for these tired old ruses . If you really want to score with the hot babes of today, you’ve got to kick your game up a notch — or three. To help, I have come up with some “New and Improved Cheap And Easy Ways To Raise Your Value To A Girl.”
Wear a banana peel on your head like a hat. This will help to create an aura of “mystery” around yourself, as well as a lovely banana-y scent that will follow you everywhere.
Poke her nose playfully after sex and say, in a cheerful voice, “Hitler was right about you!” She will ponder this one for days.
Never laugh at her jokes. Instead, fall to the floor and begin singing “Rock Me Amadeus.”
Go out on “dates” with imaginary people. Introduce her to these people, and slyly suggest a “threesome.” (Or a “foursome,” if you are dating two imaginary people at the same time.)
Muse wistfully about butter.
Don’t buy her gifts. Instead, sneak clumps of dirt into her lingerie drawer.
Never call her back right away. Instead, hide under her bed and make low moaning sounds.
If you end up in an argument with her, shout out “mom always loved you better!” Then set her couch on fire.
Don’t move in with her. Instead, move into the apartment above hers, and watch her through tiny holes drilled in the floor.
When at her place, eat her cat, torture her TV, and replace her toilet with a sack of potatoes. Act like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, including the accent.
Go forth, my young apprentices, and score like never before!
–
If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.
>Disorganized atheistic rectal sodomizing feminists of the world unite!
>
More from The Ghost Nation, a sort of MGTOW-ish site that hates MGTOW. And “rectal sodomites” and, well, a long list of others.
When novelist-turned-film-critic James Agee saw Bill and Coo, a feature-length 1948 film starring nothing but trained birds, he described it as “by conservative estimate, the God-damndest thing ever seen.” I believe that title may now belong to The Ghost Nation. Here’s a useful list from the site detailing The Personality Traits of Feminists:
If you are a feminist, you do not sincerely believe in God, you endorse Zionism, rectal sodomites, violence, police brutality, are two-faced, a liar, treacherous, a prospective adulterer, swear a lot, disorganized, vulgar, angry, a hacker and cybercriminal, untrustworthy, unfair, unjust, you share private information, are a misandrist, you commit blackmail and extortion, you are unpatriotic, you do not support the Constitution, are not humble, you hate straight whitey, have an erratic temperament, raise your voice to get a point across, are a sexual deviant, sadistic, violent, manipulative, fake friendships, enthusiastically associate with criminals, Zionists, sociopaths and psychopaths, cheat, are worthless and nonconstructive, are anti-heterosexual, heterophobic, atheist, agnostic, engage in gang-stalking, promote ugliness and scatology, do not respect other’s privacy, and do not believe that all rectal sodomites are homosexuals.
Hmm. I’ll just go through the list item by item: Yes, not exactly, yes, depends, no, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes, sometimes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, erratic or … erotic?, sometimes, yes, maybe a little, sometimes, not really, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, no, ugliness not really but scatology sometimes, no, yes.
I hope I didn’t leave out any answers and inadvertently make myself out to be a blackmailing gang-stalking adulterous cybercriminal rather than a humble disorganized agnostic who is friendly towards rectal sodomites and, really, sodomites generally.
So how many of the personality traits apply to you, dear readers?
Oh, and by the way, if you didn’t believe me about Bill and Coo, here is a clip of this exceedingly WTF film masterpiece:
–
If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it. *Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>Paul Elam’s Vanishing Post: Blaming and Mocking Rape Victims
>
Well, this is interesting. Last night, idly perusing the latest posts by blogs on my Enemies List I noticed a new post by Paul Elam. It was a doozy, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Under the seemingly innocuous title “Challenging the Etiology of Rape,” the post mocked and blamed rape victims for the crime of getting raped. I copied the most obnoxious bits onto my computer, planning to write a post about it.
Now it appears Elam has deleted the post, and the comments associated with it. [NOTE: Apparently the vanishing post was actually the result of an issue with the web host. It's now up again. On to the content of his post.]
Here, minus a little of his rhetorical huffing and puffing, is the basic thesis of his post:
I have ideas about women who spend evenings in bars hustling men for drinks, playing on their sexual desires so they can get shit faced on the beta dole; paying their bar tab with the pussy pass. And the women who drink and make out, doing everything short of sex with men all evening, and then go to his apartment at 2:00 a.m.. Sometimes … these women end up being the “victims” of rape.
But are these women asking to get raped?…
They are freaking begging for it.
Damn near demanding it. …
[T]here are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
What’s there to say to that? It’s odious, simply odious. Anyone who makes such an argument thereby destroys whatever tiny bit of credibility, whatever moral authority, they once might have had to speak about rape, domestic violence, or, really any violence at all against women or men. Anyone who makes such an argument forfeits the right to be taken seriously on the issue of rape, or, really, on any issue at all.
By Elam’s logic, any man who gets drunk and hooks up with a woman he’s only recently met is “damn near demanding” to be falsely accused of rape, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE [ACCUSE] ME neon sign glowing above [his] empty little narcissistic head.”
Hey, he should have known better, right?
By Elam’s logic, any man who gets himself sent to prison through an act of his own is “damn near demanding” to be raped, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above [his] empty little narcissistic head.”
Hey, he should have known better, right?
By Elam’s logic, any man who works in a profession where occupational injuries are relatively more common is “damn near demanding” to be injured or killed, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH … neon sign glowing above [his] empty little narcissistic head.”
Hey, he should have known better, right?
By Elam’s logic, any man who joins the Armed Forces is “damn near demanding” to be killed, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE [KILL ME] neon sign glowing above [his] empty little narcissistic head.”
Hey, he should have known better, right?
By Elam’s logic, any man who crosses a busy street without waiting for the “walk” sign is “damn near demanding” to be hit by a car, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE [RUN ME OVER] neon sign glowing above [his] empty little narcissistic head.”
Hey, he should have known better, right?
By Elam’s logic, any man who does anything at all that might possibly increase the odds of anything bad happening to him is “damn near demanding” to face horrific consequences, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE [HARM] ME neon sign glowing above [his] empty little narcissistic head.”
By Elam’s logic, neither men nor women should ever leave the house.
Oh, but wait, most accidents happen at home (just as most rapes involve people already known to the victim, not random strangers at bars). So anyone staying at home is “damn near demanding” to trip and fall down the stairs, is “walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE [INJURE] ME neon sign glowing above [his or her] empty little narcissistic head.”
I guess we’re all empty-headed conniving bitches. Each and every one of us on planet earth. But the only people Elam thinks to apply his logic to are female rape victims. That says a lot, and none of it good.
NOTE: Elam has (among other things) banned me from commenting on his site, and relagates all critical comments on his website to a special board for “feminists and manginas,” so any comments he makes here will be deleted.
NOTE #2: Just to forestall what could become an endless and pointless debate in the comments: Elam is not saying, as he puts it, that women “are literally asking men to rape them” — that is, walking up and saying “rape me please.” That would be absurd. He is speaking more colloquially, as am I.
>Debate Drama: Dalrock is a Lying Liar
>
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.
>Paul Elam’s big mistake on domestic violence: A case study in MRA self-deception
>
I didn’t think I was going to reply to Paul Elam’s latest post in our abortive “debate” on domestic violence — see here for the details on why it fell apart, and here for details on his childish and unethical behavior since and here for the rest of my debate posts — but he’s really outdone himself this time, with an utterly spectacular misreading of an important research report on violence against women. Indeed, I’ve read over the relevant portion of his post several times, because I can’t quite believe he’s saying what he seems to be saying. If he is, and I have no other explanation for his remarks, his post becomes something of a case study in the way in which antifeminist dogma can distort even the most basic analysis of empirical data.
In the context of my debate with Elam, it’s not an insignificant error. Indeed, Elam sees his erroneous conclusion on this research as a sort of trump card in our debate, the grand finale to his final post in the debate. The only problem is that he’s completely wrong.
You don’t have to take my word for it. To make sure there was absolutely no doubt that Elam was misinterpreting the report, I contacted one of the report’s authors. She indeed confirmed that Elam’s interpretation was flat out wrong. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Let’s get into the details, shall we?
The report in question is one I cited in my initial post, titled Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey. (EDIT: You can find a pdf of it here.) The paper, co-written by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, summarizes the findings of a massive survey on violence jointly undertaken by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, despite the title, also dealt with violence against men. The researchers surveyed 16,000 people, divided equally between men and women, about the violence they had experienced over their lifetimes — specifically, whether or not they had been raped, physically assaulted, or stalked.
Elam’s ideologically driven misreading of the report starts with a misreading of the opening paragraph of the report, a brief historical summary of how the rise of feminism led researchers to start to seriously pay attention to violence against women:
Violence against women first came to be viewed as a serious social problem in the early 1970s, in part because of the reemergence of the Women’s Movement. In unprecedented numbers, scholars trained in such diverse disciplines as philosophy, literature, law, and sociology began to examine violence against women in the context of a feminist ideology.
All of this is a pretty straightforward accounting of what actually happened. But, the researchers continue:
Despite the resulting outpouring of research on violence against women, particularly in the areas of rape and intimate partner violence, many gaps remain in our understanding of violence against women. Until now, empirical data on the relationship between certain types of violence against women, such as childhood victimization and subsequent adult victimization, have been limited. Reliable information on minority women’s experiences with violence and on the consequences of violence against women, including rates of injury and use of medical services, is also limited.
So far, the meaning of these remarks is crystal clear: Though feminism inspired a great outpouring of research on violence against women, there was still insufficient reliable empirical data to measure the true extent of the problem.
The researchers then go on to present the details of the National Violence Against Women Survey, a study designed to provide precisely what they said was lacking: reliable empirical data on the various forms of violence against women. (In order to provide more context for this data, and to provide a basis for comparison, the study also asked the same questions to an equal number of men.)
Elam, though, reads this relatively straightforward introduction to the report as a sinister statement of purpose. Highlighting the phrases “Women’s Movement” and “in the context of a feminist ideology,” he declares:
Yes, in this the very first paragraph of the study, they identify not as academicians, but feminist ideologues. With a profound lack of erudition that can only be rooted in hubristic hegemony, they inform readers from the beginning that this is a political action. Straight from jump.
Not a promising start for Elam. But we haven’t gotten to Elam’s biggest error.
Elam’s Great Misunderstanding starts off innocently enough: he cites data from the report on rape and physical assault that shows that, with the exception of the category of rape, men report suffering more violence than women. This is a fairly unsurprising result; numerous studies have found the same thing.
Note that this data measures violence overall, NOT intimate partner violence by itself. Most of the violence against men is in fact perpetrated by other men.
Elam then shows a chart from the study that looks at the incidence of intimate partner violence, broken down into various categories of violence; it shows women more than three times as likely to report being victimized by IPV than men.
It’s what Elam does next that truly boggles the mind. After noting that the data did indeed seem to suggest that women are the primary victims of IPV, he firmly declares this conclusion “wrong.” No, he says, what the dastardly feminist researchers did was to “factor weigh for under reporting [but] to their disgrace they did not figure it in to the graphs.”
As proof for this, Elam quotes a relatively straightforward passage in the text that discusses some of these results, and specifically refers back to the chart in question:
It is important to note that differences between women’s and men’s rates of physical assault by an intimate partner become greater as the seriousness of the assault increases. For example, women were two to three times more likely than men to report that an intimate partner threw something that could hurt or pushed, grabbed, or shoved them. However, they were 7 to 14 times more likely to report that an intimate partner beat them up, choked or tried to drown them, threatened them with a gun, or actually used a gun on them (see exhibit 8).
After quoting this text, Elam triumphantly declares victory:
And so there you have it. A rough sketch of the math will lead you to a very familiar situation.Domestic Violence- Women are half the problem.
Huh? The first time I read this I was simply baffled. Elam posts a chart showing that women report being the victim of IPV more often than men do, then a paragraph discussing the very same results, which says exactly the same thing, and which specifically refers back to that very same chart, and somehow concludes that … women are responsible for half the problem?
It took several rereadings for me to even grasp how he might have come to that utterly erroneous conclusion. Apparently, as best as I can figure it, he has interpreted the word “report” in the text to mean “overreport” instead of, you know, “report.” (Or that it indicated in some way that women overreported in comparison to men, who underreported, or something along these lines.) So that, as Elam figures it, the numbers in the text basically cancel out the numbers in the chart. In fact, the numbers in the text reflect the exact same data as the numbers in the chart.
Thus Elam transforms, in his mind at least, an empirical report of survey results that challenge his central claim — that women are half the problem in domestic violence — into one that proves his pet theory, and which reveals the perfidity of devious, cunning feminists.
Just so there would be absolutely no question that Elam is completely mistaken in his conclusion, I got in touch with Patricia Tjaden, one of the key researchers behind the survey, and the co-author of the summary Elam quoted from. She told me that, indeed, his interpretation of the figures in the paper is flat out wrong. As she put it in an email:
Yes, you are right in your interpretation of our results: Generally
speaking, in our study “reported” means respondents disclosed that they had
ever been a victim of a specific type of violent victimization. So, for
example, as presented in Exhibit 3 in our report on intimate partner
violence … 8.5 % of women compared to 0.6% of men
disclosed that they had been beaten up by an intimate partner at some time
in their lifetime. It should be noted that some were beaten up more than
once, but these estimates reflect only if they “ever had.” Thus, (surveyed)
women were 14 times more likely than (surveyed) men to report ever being
beaten up by an intimate partner [8.5/0.6 = 14.17.]
I have no idea what your [debate] opponent means when he said our
estimates reflect over-reporting. Perhaps he meant that women are more
likely than men to report victimization to an interviewer? There is little
research on what influences women and men to disclose victimization during
telephone surveys. We conducted a small study during the course of the
NVAWS to see if interviewer gender impacted male respondents’ responses to
survey questions. (We didn’t do it for women because all the women were
interviewed by female respondents.) We found that male respondents were
more likely to disclose sensitive information, such as age, income, fear and
accommodation behavior, and recent victimization, to male interviewers.
This contradicts findings from previous research that shows respondents -
male and female alike – feel more comfortable disclosing sensitive
information to female interviews in face-to-face surveys.
The paper she is citing here is this one, available online here (pdf format):
Tjaden, P & Thoennes, N. (2000). Extent, nature, and consequences of
intimate partner violence: Findings from the National Violence Against
Women Survey. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice NCJ 181867.
The only real question is whether Elam has distorted the results of the NVAWS deliberately. I don’t actually think so. He is enough of an ideologue to believe that a report based on a massive government study and which has been exposed to an enormous amount of scrutiny over the years in fact secretly proves his pet theory.
One final note: Elam also makes a big deal of the fact that the NVAW used the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) in its surveys, a research tool which I have criticized in my previous posts in the debate. As is often the case with Elam, this is a half-truth. The survey, as Tjadan noted in her email to me, “used questions similar to those in the CTS, but framed them differently,” and thus got very different results.
I will end with another comment from Tjaden, which helps to put this debate in a broader context:
I know this debate over whether men and women are equally likely to
perpetrate violence against their intimate partners is very confusing and I
have spent a good part of my career attempting to convince fellow
researchers and the federal government that we need to spend time and money
figuring out why different studies (i.e. different methodological approaches)
have yielded such disparate findings. This would be far more fruitful than
pointing fingers at each other and calling each other names.
This is a topic I will take up further in future posts.
>Paul Elam’s continuing childish and unethical behavior
>
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.
>Famous all over town
>
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.
