Blog Archives
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.
Red Pill Dude: I don’t hate women. I just think they’re vindictive, hurtful, hateful, solipsitic child-stealing sociopaths who deserve no respect.
You know, maybe I’ve been unfair to these manosphere fellows. I’m always saying that they hate women. But what if they don’t really hate women? Like hate hate. What if they just don’t respect women, you know, for totally understandable non-hatey reasons that aren’t misogynistic at all?
I mean, there’s nothing misogynistic about refusing to show an entire gender any respect because of some reasons you came up with, right?
Anyway, what’s got me wondering all this is a recent stickied post on the Red Pill Subreddit, home to ALPHA DUDES who totally score with the hot women like all the time. The post, by a dude with the totally non-lady-hating name of bitchdantkillmyvibe is titled “I don’t hate women, I just don’t respect them, and unless many changes within their gender come about, I never will,” and really, I don’t think I’ve ever read a less lady-hating title than that.
So let’s hear this dude out, huh?
“The battle against feminism is most definitely a white rights issue,” Reddit douchebag explains.
White men: Hot local girls are waiting for you now!
Here’s a horrible comment from Reddit’s always horrible White Rights subreddit that reveals some of the ways that the central ideas and obsessions of the manosphere are oozing their way into the thinking, such as it is, of the racist right. Birds of a feather flock together, and I guess the same is true of hateful shitheads.
What’s interesting to me is how easily Mr. Saturnine83 here is able to take the traditional racist paranoia about white women not popping out enough white babies to keep the white race going and make the whole “problem” about stuck-up ladies who won’t date him decent white men. For those filling out bingo cards, note the references to”disposible” men and “involuntary celibacy.”
Oh, we have no doubt you could go on and on endlessly. Guys like you always can.
If you’re interested in exploring further connections between “Men’s Rights” and “White Rights,” check out the MRMorWhiteRights subreddit, which tracks this stuff in an entertaining way, and which is where I found the link to Saturnine83’s little screed.
When anonymous threats are not-so anonymous
When feminists are besieged with threatening messages after being targeted by Men’s Rights Activists, MRAs sometimes ask how we know for sure that the messages (or at least a good portion of them) are being sent by MRAs. And the answer is that, in most cases, we don’t, at least not beyond a reasonable doubt, because most people sending threatening messages have the good sense to do so anonymously.
So it is possible, at least theoretically, that when, say, a feminist blogger gets threatening messages shortly after MRAs start posting nasty things about her on their blogs and in their various forums, it is not MRAs sending the messages but angry ornithologists who, for no reason whatsoever, collectively decided to pick on a feminist blogger that day. Seems unlikely, but it’s possible.
Other times, though, we do know who is sending the threats, because, conveniently enough, they do so under their own name or using their MRA identity online.
That was the case, you might recall, when Australian MRA and fanatical A Voice for Men supporter Frank James Spencer, also known as KARMA MRA MGTOW, left me a creepy, vaguely threatening voicemail message one night at 1:38 AM. That was the case with many of those posting threatening YouTube comments about a certain inadvertently famous Canadian feminist.
And that was the case last night when a longtime MRA known as Masculist Man tried to post a threatening message in the comments to a post of mine about a threatening comment directed at me on The Spearhead. The Spearhead comment, you may remember, involved a weird and elaborate anal rape fantasy. I noted in my post that the comment had gotten 10 upvotes, no downvotes.
Masculist Man added his two cents (click for larger version):
He’s probably right about the 500 upvotes. Apparently rape threats are a form of Human Rights activism.
I wrote about a ranty blog post of Mr. Man’s some time ago, and he’s written several posts about me, or at least about someone he calls Dave Fooltrelle. I let him comment here for a time as well. He was always obnoxious, though never quite this obnoxious.
Mr. Man’s blog is called, creatively, Men’s Rights Blog. In addition to the aforementioned ranty post, it features a cartoony avatar of himself wearing a fedora and brandishing a sword, with the caption “I’ll cut ya.” As part of his “activism,” he’s put up a page of anti-feminist “memes,” many based on photos of real feminists, including me. The blog has been around since 2007.
In his profile on Blogger, he declares
I’ve been a masculist for over 20 years and have been very activist,both on and offline. I’ve debated phonies and feminists and have prevailed over both.
He lists Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power as one of his favorite books, and Neil LaBute’s misogynistic fantasy In The Company of Men as one of his favorite films.
And if you follow the link to Mr. Man’s Facebook page, you can take a look at his small collection of Facebook friends, including AVFM’s Paul Elam and MRA lawyer Roy Den Hollander, as well as the groups he supports, including the National Coalition for Men, the Men’s Human Rights Movement Facebook group, and assorted anti-VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) groups.
So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that this threatening comment came from an MRA.
In MRA-land, women have never been oppressed, but men have been “disenfranchised” by having power over them
Somehow, we doubt that MRAs would appreciate this kind of “protection” for themselves and their fellow men.
One classic bad argument against feminism is the disingenuous claim that “we don’t need it any more.” In the bad old days, proponents of this argument would concede, women may have faced some pesky little obstacles, but now that they can vote, and own property, and briefly work as the executive editor of The New York Times, there’s just no need for feminism any more. Problem solved!
But these days the great minds of the Men’s Rights movement have moved beyond this bad argument to a worse one: feminism was never really necessary in the first place, because women have never been oppressed.
The other day a Redditor by the name of cefarix earned himself a couple of dozen upvotes by posting a version of this argument to the Men’s Rights Subreddit.
Vox Day: “The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.”
Anti-rape protest in India
Apparently worried that the world might forget what a thoroughly reprehensible human being he is, fantasy author and freelance bigot Vox Day (Theodore Beale) has decided to bring up the issue of marital rape again – in order to assert, as he has many times in the past, that marital rape doesn’t actually exist.
In a post yesterday on his blog Vox Populi, Beale notes with obvious pleasure that an Indian judge recently ruled that marital sex, “even if forcible, is not rape,” thus upholding a section of the Indian Penal Code that refuses to acknowledge marital rape as rape.
Beale crows:
Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law. …
The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so.
Unfortunately for Beale, simply declaring that the world is on his side on this one does not make it so. It not simply a handful of “ lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West” that see marital rape for what it is. The United Nations has recognized marital rape as a human rights violation for more than two decades. And the world is coming around to this point of view.
While (as of 2011) only 52 countries had laws specifically criminalizing marital rape, many others don’t have a “marital rape” exemption to their rape laws, meaning that in more than 100 countries marital rape can be prosecuted. And that number will inevitably grow.
Here’s a map from Wikipedia showing the countries (in red) in which marital rape is illegal. The countries in black allow marital rape. In the other countries, it’s a bit more complicated. (See here for the details.)
From Wikipedia.
But for now, at least, Beale is happy for another chance to explain the toxic “logic” behind his assertion that “marital rape” is impossible.
Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed.
Now, by Beale’s logic, a husband is entitled to force his wife to have sex over her screaming objections. Since “consent is ongoing,” in Beale’s version of marriage, a woman could say no or even fight back against her husband’s advances, but none of this would count as non-consent because once a woman is married there is no such thing.
But of course Beale doesn’t want to have to defend what is obviously – at least to anyone with any humanity – violent rape. So he tries instead to restrict the debate to the seemingly innocuous practice of “wake-up sex.” After all, what guy doesn’t want to be woken up with a blow job?
But even this example isn’t as persuasive as he thinks it is. Some people like to be woken up in an “intimate manner,” at least some of the time; some don’t, and you don’t get to override their desire not to be sexually manhandled in their sleep just because you’re married to them. And while drunk sex is not necessarily rape, marriage doesn’t give you the right to force sex on a partner who is intoxicated to the point of incapacity.
And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.
No, that word is “no.” There is no such thing as ongoing consent to sex. The fact that you are married to someone doesn’t give you the right to have sex with them whenever and wherever you want, whether they want to or not, any more than the fact that someone is a professional boxer gives you the right to punch them in the head any time you feel like it.
The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.
No, Mr. Beale, you having the right to do whatever you want to with your dick is not the basis of civilization itself. Civilization, in fact, is built in part on the repression of some of our darkest desires. Part of growing up is reconciling ourselves to the sad fact that we can’t just do whatever the hell we want to all the time; Freud described this as putting behind the “pleasure principle” of infancy and early childhood for the “reality principle” that governs the more mature mind.
Beale seems to be driven not only by a desire for instant sexual gratification, whenever and wherever he wants, but also by a certain degree of sexual insecurity. In a previous post on the subject, he wrote:
If a woman believes in the concept of marital rape, absolutely do not marry her! It would make no sense whatsoever to marry a woman who believes that being married to her grants her husband no more sexual privilege than the next unemployed musician who happens to catch her eye.
Beale seems to think that if married women are allowed to say no to their husbands, they’ll desert these poor beta schlubs en masse in favor of scruffy alphas with guitars. At the root of all his arguments against the idea of marital rape is an obvious terror of unrestricted female choice.
In a way Beale’s petulant, self-serving defenses of marital rape serve a positive function, in that they help to remind us how abhorrent the practice is and how nonsensical the “arguments” in favor of allowing it really are.
Every time he opens his mouth on the subject, he helps to strengthen the growing consensus against marital rape.
Vox Day: Honor mothers. Yes, they’re women, but without them the “Western sub-species” of Man would go extinct.
Mothers: Women, yes, but without them we’d have no babies.
Happy Mothers’ Day! In honor of this special day let me share the sweet sentiments of the mother-loving Vox Day, who took time out of his busy schedule of woman-hating to write a post urging his readers to “Honor the Mothers” of the world. Or at least the non-feminist mothers of the “Western sub-species” of the human race.
Vox starts out his paean to motherhood by noting that women are mostly shitty and need to be constantly reminded of their shittiness by right-thinking fellows like him:
We are, quite rightly, very often hard on women here at Alpha Game. We need to be, because they spend most of their lives having smoke blown up their pretty little asses by people of both sexes and all ages who want to curry favor with them.
Oh, but even though women are terrible, don’t give in to the temptation of misogyny!
But never be tempted into misogyny by the bad behavior of one, one hundred, one thousand, or even one million women. They are the fate of the human race. They are the fate of the Western sub-species. They matter.
Take the day to honor the mothers of our sub-species. Well, some of them.
So, honor those who reject the nihilistic hedonism of feminism despite being literally inundated with its dogma from their earliest years and fulfill their primary destiny, that of motherhood. Whether she fulfills it gracefully and well or grudgingly and incompetently, she has done her duty. Respect that she has played her part in the miracle of life, honor her for doing her part in turning back the dark void of universal entropy.
It’s not nothing. It’s not a minor thing. Without women, there is no Man.
So even if you hate women, you need to remember that they serve a useful role as incubators of future men!
Happy Mother’s Day.
And a happy mother’s day to you too, you racist, misogynistic piece of poop.
W.F. Price of The Spearhead accuses me of supporting violence against women … by opposing violence against women
W.F. Price (not pictured) believes the best way to prevent domestic violence is to put men in charge of households, and to keep police out
W. F. Price of The Spearhead isn’t very happy about my recent suggestion that the Men’s Rights movement encourages abusive ways of thinking towards women. It’s a strange claim for him to make, coming as it is from a guy who presides over one of the most notorious outposts of vicious, virulent misogyny in the Men’s Rights universe. Even stranger is his claim that by opposing violence against women and children I am therefore … supporting policies that lead to more violence against women and children.
It’s going to take a little while to work our way through his convoluted argument. So let’s start at the beginning. Here’s the quote of mine he objects to, from my post the other day about Lundy Bancroft:
No, Amy Schumer did not give a speech celebrating how she raped a guy
Amy Schumer, not celebrating rape.
Thought Catalog – which seems to be rapidly becoming the go-to site for terrible antifeminist posts – is making a bit of a stir on Reddit with a post bearing the deliberately provocative title “Wait A Second, Did Amy Schumer Rape a Guy?” Spoiler Alert: The anonymous author concludes that yes, she did. The anonymous author is full of shit.
In the Thought Catalog piece, Anonymous takes a look at a speech that Schumer – a comedian with some subversive feminist leanings — recently gave at the Gloria Awards and Gala, hosted by the Ms. Foundation for Women. The centerpiece of Schumer’s speech, a bittersweet celebration of confidence regained, was a long and cringeworthy story about a regrettable sexual encounter she had in her Freshman year of college, when her self-esteem was at an all-time low.
UK Political Donor Demetri Marchessini: Women In Trousers Are Destroying Western Civilization
Marlene Dietrich oppressing man with her trousers.
Demetri Marchessini is a retired Greek business tycoon, living in London, and has been a major donor to the right-wing, anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP). He also has some, let’s say, eccentric views about gay people, black people, women, and trousers, views so, er, eccentric that the folks in UKIP are a little embarrassed to be associated with him. Given that UKIP is filled with bigots in all varieties, that’s quite something.
In an interview last week with Britain’s Channel 4, Marchessini expounded at length on some of his more colorful views. He told interviewer Michael Crick that marital rape was impossible, because “you can’t have rape if you make love on Friday and make love on Sunday, you can’t say Saturday is rape. Once the woman accepts, she accepts.”
He argued that there is no such thing as homosexual love, only lust, because “they go out at nights and they pick up 5, 10, 15 different partners in one night.” Even gays in committed relationships are basically just roommates who still cruise for anonymous sex partners.
And he suggested that black slaves were better off as slaves in America than they would have been living in Africa, because if they survived the passage they lived longer.
But let’s just talk about the trouser thing. Marchessini thinks women should be banned from wearing trousers, because otherwise they just might bring about the end of western civilization.
