Blog Archives
Women who get catcalled are the real sexual harassers, explains Men’s Rights Redditor
Woman sexually harassing a group of men with her slutty attire.
A month or so ago, after an antiques dealer responded to her comment about a piece of furniture by asking her if she and her female friend “ever made out with each other,” Leah Green of The Guardian decided it was time to try a little gender-reversal experiment: she would use hidden cameras to film her to treat unsuspecting men to the same sort of inappropriate sexual remarks that women get treated to every day, using real life examples collected by the @everydaysexism project.
You can see their reactions in the short video she posted on the Guardian’s website; she discusses her motivations more here.
Many of the men, unaccustomed to this sort of harassment, weren’t exactly sure how to react to her comments. When she asked a bartender for a drink and a lap dance, she had to repeat herself several times before he got her point. When she tried the “have you guys ever made out with each other” line on two older men, they couldn’t quite even process the question at first.
Others got angry. When she yelled “oi, get your asses out” at some construction workers – a gender-swapped version of the classic “show us your tits” — one of the affronted men responded with “you can’t talk to us like that.” And that was essentially the point of the video: no one should be talking to anyone like that.
That point seems to have escaped one angry commenter on the Men’s Rights subreddit going by the name of frankie_q, who spewed forth a well-received virtual manifesto arguing that it’s complaints about cat-calling, not the cat-calling itself, that is the bigger problem. And that the biggest problem of all is that women wear clothes that men consider sexy.
Phyllis Schlafly channels the manosphere with a column about female “hypergamy.”
The world’s most eligible bachelor?
Professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly – perhaps best known for her fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – seems to have been channeling the manosphere in a column she published yesterday on the issue of “paycheck fairness.” Turns out she thinks such fairness is actually a bad idea, because ladies love marrying rich guys more than they love earning money.
According to Schlafly, equal pay messes with the fundamental female desire for “hypergamy” – that favorite manosphere buzzword – and undermines marriage:
[H]ypergamy … means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Indeed, Schlafly argues, women love marrying men who earn more than them so much that when the pay gap is eliminated some of them just won’t marry at all. Which is apparently the end of the world, or something.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. …
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
So it’s not enough that most people end up getting married; civilization will crumble if more than half of them don’t marry before the age of 30!
And so, she suggests, if American women knew what was good for them they would be begging for employers pay them even less, relative to men.
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Schlafly – a best-selling author and popular speaker on the right – didn’t send back any of her royalties or speaking fees so that she would feel more like a woman and her late husband would feel like more of a man, and I doubt she’s doing so now, as a widow. She’s also been unmarried for more than twenty years. Coincidence?
NOTE TO MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: When you find yourself agreeing with Phyllis Schlafly on pretty much anything (beyond, say, the existence of gravity, the need for human beings to breathe air, and other widely accepted beliefs of this sort), this is an indication that perhaps your movement isn’t the progressive, egalitarian movement that you like to pretend that it is, and that in fact it is sort of the opposite.
That said, I should also note that Schlafly’s notion of “hypergamy,” while sexist and silly, is decidedly less obnoxious than the version peddled by PUAs and websites like A Voice for Men — congrats, Men’s Human Rights Activists, you’re actually worse than Phyllis Schlafly!
She just uses the term to indicate a desire to marry up. For many manospherians, by contrast, “hypergamy” doesn’t just mean marrying up; it means that women are fickle, unfaithful monsters who love nothing better than cuckolding beta males in order to jump into bed with whatever alpha male wanders into their field of vision. (I’m guessing Schlafly hasn’t actually been going through the archives at AVFM or Chateau Heartiste looking for column ideas.) While many MRAs love to complain about hypergamy, many of them also seem to think that it’s unfair that “beta” males with good jobs aren’t automatically entitled to hot wives.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual definition of the word “hypergamy” involves none of that. According to Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, the word means “marriage to a person of a social status higher than one’s own; orig., esp. in India, the custom of allowing a woman to marry only into her own or a higher social group.”
That’s it. It refers to the fact of marrying up, not to the desire to marry up, much less to the alleged desire of all twentysomething women to ride the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel. The manosphere’s new and not-so-improved definition came from a white nationalist named F. Roger Devlin.
ANOTHER NOTE: Big thanks to the people who emailed me about this story. If you ever see something you think would make for a good Man Boobz post, send me an email at futrelle [at] manboobz.com. I get a lot of ideas from tips!
Harassment as Activism: Men’s Rights Redditors Gleefully Dox a College Student, Face No Repercussions
No long post today. Instead, I urge you to go over to the AgainstMensRights subreddit to read about how several long time Men’s Rights Redditors have doxxed and harassed a college student, with one of the regulars gleefully setting forth a plan to stalk her and ruin her life and another seeming to suggest he might want to pay her a visit to “debate” her.
Some screenshots from the original Men’s Rights subreddit discussion:
The thread (which remained up for many hours) has now been scrubbed by the Men’s Rights mods — I got these screenshots from u/Aceyjuan and u/TraceyMorganFreeman’s respective timelines — but as of right now none of the doxxers have been banned from the subreddit, or from Reddit itself.
The “crimes” of the woman in question? According to her main stalker — who has apparently been harassing her for months — she’s tweeted comments like “white men are like the gum on the bottom of my shoe” and “Jared Leto looks like the kind if guy that gives you herpes.”
Yep. Apparently the second-worst evil misandrist comment she made was … a joke about Jared Leto. For these comments, apparently she deserves to have her life ruined.
Here’s the thing: If you don’t like someone’s comments online, you are certainly well within your rights to quote them and point out why you don’t like what they said. That’s kind of the point of this blog. But it’s one thing to point out these comments, and another thing entirely to track down their identity and stalk them in real life. It’s another thing to whip up a virtual mob against them.
Doxxing by Men’s Rights Activists isn’t an accident; it’s the inevitable result of the peculiar style of Men’s Rights Activism.
MRAs, you see, seem utterly incapable of engaging in any kind of activism that might actually benefit men in the real world in any concrete manner. What they as a group specialize in is demonizing women, and in the case of too many MRAS, nothing gets their activist juices flowing faster than the opportunity to attack an individual woman.
That’s why A Voice for Men “activists” put up “wanted” style posters featuring their favorite feminist villains of the day; it’s why they started Register-Her.com. That’s why a certain red-haired Canadian activist who yelled at some MRAs once at a protest now finds her image splashed everywhere online as a visual representation of an evil feminist. That’s why MRAs show up at protests with cameras and threaten to expose the women they film — even if they’ve done nothing more than stand there with a sign.
And that’s why they doxx.
The Men’s Rights movement isn’t a civil rights movement. As it stands right now, it’s a union of abusers, and their enablers.
EDITED TO ADD: Lest anyone claim that the OP didn’t “really” dox the woman in question because he didn’t literally post all her personal details, he provided enough to allow anyone with even rudimentary Google skills to find out her real name and a great deal of other personal identifying information in less time than it would take to order a pizza online.
Men’s Rights Poetry Corner: “Feminists Killed Kurt Cobain.”
Kurt Cobain, RIP
Yesterday, several days after the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, A Voice for Men took a moment to honor the brilliant musician who tragically ended his life at the age of only 27.
Well, not exactly. What they actually did was run a terrible poem using the anniversary of Cobain’s death as an excuse to launch an extended attack on the supposed evils of feminism.
Here’s the opening:
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot change
It gets worse. The poem, written by a YouTube MRA calling himself Laudanum Byron, continues on for another 104 lines after this. Only 13 refer to Cobain, and five of these are simply repetitions of the opening accusation: “feminists killed Kurt Cobain.”
The rest of the poem consists of an assortment of Men’s Rights talking points sketched out in the most melodramatic manner possible.
Men chastised, demonized,
Healthy males pathologized
A man is just a dirty ape
Longing, lust, desire: all rape
Your body is a loaded gun
And all that it has done is wrong
Like all too many MRAs, Mr. Byron lets his anger at women get the better of his logic. In the following lines, for example, he lashes out at women both for living off of the earnings of men — and for earning money of their own.
Now the girls get told get what you can
After all, he’s just a man
You’re right to think it’s right to take
Yes you go girl, you make him pay
The girls get taught they must get on
Like work empowered anyone:
To sell your life for dollar bills
Taking calls & stacking shelves
In offices & factories
Fulfilment sought in drudgery
Mr. Byron – no relation, one presumes, to the actual Byron – seems to have only a rudimentary notion of what a poem actually is. While most, though not all, of his lines scan, he has persistent troubles with the concept of rhyme, with his aabb and aabbcc rhyme schemes dominated by half-rhymes and quarter-rhymes and, well, the words have some similar sounds in them.
“Bills” and “shelves” don’t rhyme, or half-rhyme, despite both ending in the letter “s.” “Take” and “pay” aren’t even remotely close.
Admittedly, “chivalry” is a tough one to rhyme. But surely one can do better than “steeds.”
White knights, on their hobbled steeds
Still cling to laws of chivalry
Passed over by the queens they save
A joke to all the other slaves
When he pulls off an actual rhyme, it comes a surprise:
All of us the sons of Cain
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain.
But while we’re on the topic, it’s worth pointing out that feminists and/or feminism did not actually kill Kurt Cobain. (Nor did anyone else; the conspiracy theories suggesting he was murdered don’t make a lot of sense.)
Byron’s only “evidence” linking feminism to the suicide?
He screamed onstage & pierced his flesh
Put on make-up, wore a dress
Look, nobody knows for sure the reason or reasons Cobain took his own life, but he was a troubled man with a history of suicide attempts. He suffered from depression and from a painful, persistent stomach ailment. He was addicted to heroin. And as his suicide note made clear, he found the fame he had achieved to be something of an intolerable burden; he felt like a fake. Like a lot of suicides, Cobain’s could be seen as psychologically overdetermined; it could have been caused by any or all of these things.
Using his suicide to score cheap rhetorical points against feminism is not only dishonest but highly disrespectful to his memory.
To top off this gigantic platter of disrespect, whoever wrote the headline on AVFM didn’t even bother to spell Cobain’s first name correctly. It’s Kurt, with a K.
Below, “Byron’s” own reading of his poem. If you can’t bear listening to it — I only made it a couple of stanzas in before I had to shut it off — you can make your way to AVFM, or to YouTube, to read the rest. I feel safe in saying that Kurt, who considered himself a feminist, would have hated it, and A Voice for Men as well.
Pickup artist: “If God ever created a better replacement for women, we’d exterminate them overnight.”
The problem — well, one of the many problems — with a lot of so-called pickup artists is that they think with their dicks, and then use their relatively underpowered brains to rationalize their dickular preferences as The Way The World Should Be.
By contrast, the problems with Lance Christopher, a so-called pickup artist who hangs out in the comments section on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog, really start when he stops thinking with his dick.
Some dudes roll over and fall asleep the moment after they come; Mr. Christopher contemplates genocide because women don’t want to hear him pontificate about Ukrainian history.
In case you’re wondering, no one else in the discussion suggests that Mr. Christopher’s opinion here might be a teensy bit extreme.
No, the commenters happily share terrible opinion after terrible opinion about the inferior creatures known as women.
Oh, it gets worse.
Cleanup in the pompous misogyny aisle!
You’ll notice that all of these comments have upvotes, by the way.
There may be some even more terrible comments in that thread, but I gave up reading them after a few screens full of this sort of garbage.
After a feminist activist at Queen’s University reports being attacked, possibly by an MRA, the king of “fuck their shit up” responds with angry denial
Paul Elam: Anger is “pulsing through my veins like molten lava.”
A student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, says she was attacked and beaten by a strange man after receiving threatening messages about her opposition to a Men’s Rights group on campus. On Thursday, Danielle d’Entremont posted a picture of her bruised face to Facebook along with this explanation:
Just walked out of my house and got attacked by a stranger. I was punched in the face multiple times and lost half my tooth. This was after a few threatening emails regarding my support for feminist activities on campus. I can’t say for sure if the two are connected, however the attacker was a male who knew my name.
The campus Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) – the group d’Entremont has been fighting – has condemned the attack, as has the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), which co-sponsored a talk the MIAS put on Thursday. The police are investigating.
Right now, this is pretty much all we know about the story. Not that it this has stopped MRAs from offering their very fervent opinions on the matter.
Before we get to them, here are a few of my own:
Check out the “Farrell’s Follies” series of posts on Reddit
Warren Farrell: His ideas are as bad as that logo
Today, just a recommendation: if you’d like to learn more about the wrongheaded and often quite bewildering opinions of Men’s Rights grandpappy Warren Farrell, take a look at the excellent Farrell’s Follies series now being posted on the AgainstMensRights subreddit. The Redditor known as feminista_throwaway has been systematically going through Farrell’s Myth of Male Power and looking in detail at Farrell’s positions on such issues as “Date Fraud,” why it’s supposedly easier to be a gay man than a straight man, why patriarchy is women’s fault, and how men and women don’t really love each other. There’s a guide to the whole series here.
Return of Kings: “You must recognize feminism for what it truly is: one of the arms of Communism.”
From cosmarxpolitan.tumblr.com
Today, some cutting edge POLITICAL SCIENCE from the fellows over at Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings blog. Specifically, one fellow named Samson Lamont who offers up some warnings about a dire threat to western civilization that most people have probably forgotten about: COMMUNISM.
Yes, it seems that the wily Communists are still trying to take over the United States. Only this time they’re not threatening us with missiles and stealing our atomic secrets and recruiting our young people into Maoist sects. (Well, a few of them are doing the latter.) Nope, they’re trying to sneak it past us in the form of FEMINISM. Let’s let Mr. Lamont explain:
It is a mistake to look at dealing with the effects of feminism as just putting up with spoiled, entitled bitches and learning how to deal with their endless shit tests so you can get in their pants. It is not some phase or fad that will eventually fade away. You must recognize feminism for what it truly is: one of the arms of Communism, with its goals being to break up the nuclear family, effectively weaken the country from within, and to eradicate any form of masculinity or aggression, thereby reducing the number of people who can engage in dissent.
But golly, you may say, I know a bunch of feminists, and I’m pretty sure none of them are – what did you call them? – Communists. But that’s where you’re wrong!
Now some of the younger readers might not be too familiar with the term Communism. That’s because you know it as Socialism, Progressivism, Liberalism, or Social Democracy. Same shit, different bull. I don’t use any of these synonyms because, just as we should engage in fat-shaming and slut-shaming, we should engage in Commie-shaming.
One of the Left’s favorite tricks is rebranding. Communism is still a bad word here in America, especially with the Baby Boomers that grew up during McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 50’s and 60’s. So the Left refers to them only as “socialists” or “progressives” now, to disguise their true intentions.
Ah! Just like some guys refer to themselves as “pickup artists” rather than “date rapists.”
Anyhoo, so all this Communo-Feminism has pretty much destroyed everything good about the good old U.S. Of A.
[I]n a span of less than 50 years, creeping Communism has eroded all the hard work and sacrifice of our ancestors. … Our populace is lazy, spoiled, arrogant, and fat, while we build nothing of value here anymore.
We all know what happened to our women. Thanks to feminism, the nuclear family is gone and homosexual perversion is not only deemed normal, but is now openly promoted, accepted, and forced on us. Honor and integrity are now quaint remnants of a bygone era, existing only in small pockets of civilization. Workers are basically drones or expendable cannon fodder, known more by their number designations than by their names. If you are a man, the validity of your rights is determined by man-hating feminists and homosexuals and you are now guilty until proven innocent. Long story short, we are inexorably headed towards … hell … .
The only solution? Stop talking about equality and accept that attractive rich people are simply better than you.
This may be hard to swallow for some, but there is no such thing as equality. Life isn’t fair. Deal with it. Strong/weak, beautiful/ugly, tall/short, smart/dumb, rich/poor—some people are just simply better than others. …
Equality must be earned, and cannot be given.
Wait, what? I think I’m going to stick with the Communo-Feminists and the Homosexual perverts, thank you very much.
NOTE: I don’t like giving Return of Kings traffic, but I feel obligated to link to my sources, so I’ve hidden the link somewhere in the text above, if you feel the need to investigate further.
A Voice for Men fans have appropriated logos of real anti-violence organizations for new “Don’t Be That Girl” postering campaign
From @im_adam_barrett on Twitter
Here we go again. Like small children who have just discovered the power of the tantrum, the terrible people at A Voice for Men seem to have realized that the only reliable way for them to get the attention of the world is to act like complete assholes in public. And so some fans of AVFM have decided to bring back the “Don’t Be That Girl” campaign — you know, the witless and misogynistic “parody” of the successful Canadian “Don’t Be That Guy” rape awareness campaign. Now they’re postering in Halifax.
But there’s one difference: this time they’ve put the logos of the real sponsors of the real “Don’t Be That Guy” rape awareness project on their phony posters. (You can see the whole list by downloading one of the pdfs of the real posters on this page.)
So far, two of the organizations listed on their phony posters – the Bryony House shelter for victims of domestic violence and the Halifax Police Department – have made very clear that their logos are being used without permission.
https://twitter.com/BryonyHouse/status/448148862193389568
It’s a pretty safe bet that the other organizations whose logos were appropriated feel similarly.
I’d like to encourage anyone who can afford it to follow up on a suggestion from Cloudiah in the comments and donate to Bryony House so that some good can come out of all this.
Now, I’m no expert on Canadian law, but it seems rather unlikely to me that it’s legal to simply stick some organization’s logo on something and pretend that they have endorsed it. Especially when that organization is the police.
Apparently some MRAs disagree with me on that:
“Your consent is not required” seems to be the operating assumption of a lot of those drawn to the Men’s Rights movement.
In later tweets, Elam claims that using the logos is legal because of “fair use,” which is not actually a term used in Canadian law, and promises that the “[p]osters will continue, cupcake.”
I guess we will see. Here are several more photos of the posters. There’s more discussion of this in the AgainstMensRights subreddit.
EDITED TO ADD: Elam has now responded to the critics, and promises to bankroll any legal challenges against the posterers. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t understand why the logos are a problem.
EDIT/CORRECTION: It’s not completely clear that this postering campaign originated with AVFM. It’s pretty clear, though, that it’s supported by AVFM, and that those involved in it are supporters of AVFM. I’ve made a few changes to the headline and first graf to reflect this.
Today’s completely true totally not-made-up story of Feminazi misandering from the Men’s Rights subreddit
Totally real high school teacher
Ok, folks, brace yourself, because this story of anti-male oppression is tough to read. Not because it’s badly written and completely implausible — no, no, not that — but because it reveals the evil workings of the feminazi oppressors at their most vicious: when they are targeting high school juniors for no other reason than because they are walking down the hallway too close to FEMALES involved in the annual Eating of the Fetuses Women’s Mentor Day, during which the school’s FEMALES are given inspiring talks and free lunch and gift certificates for, I dunno, let’s just assume they’re for some of those “Boys are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them” t-shirts.
Anyway, so it’s Women’s Mentor Day, and young Zorfsic is going about his business:
I was walking to my 4th hour class that just so happen to stray near the Women’s Mentor Meeting. Thinking to myself “That time of the mont… I mean year, again!”. When all of a sudden a woman who does not work at the school grabs me by the arm and throws me onto the stairs as if she wanted me to sit. “What are you doing here! This is for females only! That mean girls, if you aren’t smart enough to catch on!”. My friend and my girlfriend came to me and as he planned it for year my buddy yells “Back off! This young man has nothing to do with you Feminist Nazi camp! He was just walk to his class!”. She grabbed him and took him to the office. My girlfriend was trying to help me up but another woman told her to stop and said “Let him do it. He doesn’t deserve your help.” and at that moment the schools security came to take me to the office. After explaining what happened me and my friend got suspended for trying to “stop a school planned event” that we tried to stay away from.
I cannot believe how completely true this story is. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more true than this. It’s true SO HARD I had to put the especially true parts in bold. Apparently a good number of Men’s Rights Redditors agreed, as the post got more than a dozen upvotes, and poor misandried Zorfsic got mostly supportive comments from the crowd.
Granted, one dude — who was quick to point out that he totally thought the story was true — did suggest that Zorfsic might possibly consider trying to improve his writing ability, given that his post was “written with some level of theatrics and could easily be posted on an anti-MRM website to discredit what MRA s work for.” But, you know, every true prophet has his naysayers.
Note: I found this story through a post in the AntiMensRights subreddit. Amazingly, some of the people there doubt its veracity. Or at least they’re pretending that they do.
Note 2: In case any MRAs come by and get mad, yes, I Googled it, there actually is such a thing as Women’s Mentor Day, which is an annual event at one Arizona High School, and, yes, girls do get free lunches and gift bags. It’s the rest of the story that seems a tad made-the-fuck-up.
