Blog Archives
Woah, what’s this? Is A Voice for Men engaging in honest self-criticism?
This could come in handy.
I was skimming through the A Voice for Men forum the other day and was stunned to find, hidden away amongst the other posts in the “rants” section, an absolutely blistering critique of AVFM itself:
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. … Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability … and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of [misandry], ad hominem attacks, constant contempt … public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets … going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Nailed it, huh?
Ok. SPOILER ALERT. I kind of lied. This comment wasn’t aimed at AVFM. It was aimed at “bitches.”
Here’s the opening wall-of-text paragraph that I left out:
I think manipulative, catty, conniving, calculating females are pure evil. Applying indirect, covert aggression as a power play, manipulating men to get in their good graces and climb up the pecking order, before aggressively attacking those who don’t “fit in” for their own sadistic pleasure, to aggrandise their own ego and to raise their own status. Playing the victim to stir white knights to go on the attack at their target, when they are the aggressor. Having utter contempt and disdain for anyone they sleep with. Expecting males to be Teflon and always shifting the blame when anyone else gets hurt – it’s always the other person’s fault for being hurtable, for not being Teflon – they always have zero accountability for any harm caused, deny any role in it, and tell themselves it’s not them to feel good and look good. Deluding people, by putting on a cute demeanour, that “she wouldn’t do that”. Using charm to beguile, while calculatingly lashing out at anyone who dares to reveal their true colours or who even sees through their mask at what they really are. Totally void of empathy or sympathy, while putting it on purely fakely to gain an advantage.
And here’s the bit I quoted at the start, though this time I’ve put all the bits I carefully reworded or ellipsed away the first time through back in again; they’re in bold.
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. Seeing their own cuntish wiles as meritous. Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability, being placed on a pedestal and feeling they belong there, sneering down their noses in contempt at those who respect them (the latter being pawns in their power play), and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of misogyny, ad hominem attacks, constant contempt and a complete disregard for other people’s boundaries, malicious back-talk, public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets, an opportunistic use of political correctness, going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Yeah, it sounds a lot more AVFMish that way.
Even after four years of reading this bullshit, I’m a bit amazed at just how much of MRA, er, philosophy seems to be little more than projection.
Elliot Rodger and Me: The anatomy of a “Honey Badger” smear campaign
I have a new theory that I think might help to explain why so many Men’s Rights Activists are so obsessed with false accusations of rape. It’s simple: They are so used to making false accusations themselves, about pretty much everything, that it’s hard for them to conceive of someone making an accusation that is actually true.
Naturally, as a critic of the Men’s Rights movement I’m a fairly reliable target for these false charges, and rarely does a day go by in which I don’t learn some new, terrible, and wholly imaginary thing I’m alleged to have said or done. Hell, these days I can barely make it through a Twitter conversation with A Voice for Men’s Dean Esmay without him spouting some grotesque falsehood about me.
The latest accusation from the A Voice for Men crowd – or at least from AVFM’s so-called Honey Badger Brigade – is that all the media talk about Elliot Rodger being an MRA was my fault. Or, as “Honey Badger” Alison Tieman put it in a tweet that she sent to an assortment of media outlets that had written about Rodger and the MRAs,
Can Sluts Fall in Love? Heartiste on “hard sluts” and the difference between emotional and “spermal bonding.”
Alpha cat demonstrating higher value.
Love is in the air at the Chateau Heartiste, the online home of the racist, woman-hating pickup artiste with an “he” at the start of his made up name. In a recent post, Heartiste responds to a reader with the plaintive question: Can sluts fall in love?
Heartiste takes the opportunity to drop some (pseudo)science on the questioner. By which I mean he plucks this nugget of not-quite-scientific nonsense from his posterior:
Absolutely. But they can also fall out of love. And they do both more easily than non-sluts.
Sluts are a strange amalgam of genetic, environmental, and “gray area” influences. Hormones are a good example of a gray area somewhere between the environment and genes which shapes character. While I’ve no hard evidence, I’d bet that sluts release less oxytocin than normal women do during lovemaking, which means the hard slut is less likely to emotionally bond when she’s spermally bonded.
Ah love, sweet ineffable love!
It’s not quite clear how Heartiste became an expert on love, since he seems to thoroughly hate the women he spends so much of his life obsessing about.
Elsewhere in the same “reader mailbag” post, for example, he urges another question-writer to gaslight a former girlfriend who is still showing interest in him in order to score some easy sex. I’ve bolded some of the more repugnant bits for those who’d rather skim than read Mr. H.
She wants the lines of communication open, because she still has hope you’ll give her what she needs. Reply, but only a fraction of the time she texts. Initially, keep it friendly and frivolous, but don’t allow yourself to get boxed into a “friends forever?” interrogation. If she starts down that road, first, know she doesn’t really mean it, and second, amputate that rotten limb of conversation promptly. “You’re so funny” is a reply that will light a fire under her hamster’s ass. Anytime she sends you one of those “just thinking about you” texts, reply “aw that’s sweet.” If she texts, “just got our hair done”, reply, “thanks! i needed to know this.”
The idea is that you are reinforcing your relative higher value by repeatedly and (some would say) sadistically mocking her eagerness to keep you in her life.
Allow for a few weeks of this empty banter, then maneuver her into your fornication zone with a disarming suggestion: “If you need to talk, you can swing by tomorrow (tonight’s no good)”. Through the expert deployment of ambiguous promises, you want her to believe you are warming to the idea of a committed, conventional long-term relationship. The goal is increasing perceptions of your “commitment attainability”, and that will require some feints to the beta side. Convinced of your good intentions, you can extract sexual goodies in this manner for another six months or so, before the process begins anew.
What a charmer!
Heartiste is fond of spinning out these sorts of sadistic fantasies, and his fans lap them up. It’s not clear if any of them have spoken to an actual human woman in years.
Coming Attractions: We Hunted the Mammoth announces new animated video series!
Ok, so, yeah, the rumors are true. I am a cat.
But the important thing here is that I’m starting up a new series of (barely) animated videos to explore the one part of online misogyny-land I have generally avoided up until now: YouTube.
Well, internet “radio” shows, podcasts and so on are fair game as well. Basically anything that involves these people talking into a microphone and putting it online.
My videos will be highlight some of the best of the worst of this stuff, and, as I say in the video, distil it into bite-sized morsels instead of the half-hour ordeals that MRAs and men going their own way and girls who write WTF tend to put forth with such alarming regularity.
Plus they’ll be animated in amusing and possibly slightly disturbing ways.
I’m also serious about needing some help.
Like I said, I hate watching their stupid fucking videos. I mean, reading this stuff I can handle. But listening to these assholes blathering on interminably, so full of anger, in their smug, ignorant voices is about as entertaining to me as dental work. I’m going to force myself to do it, but I’m not going to like it.
But I know there are a few of you out there who are actually willing to subject yourselves on a regular basis to this crap. And so I ask of you: if you’re one of them, and you run across something in one of these videos that is so astoundingly terrible that you would like to see it rendered in cartoon form, drop me an email (my last name at manboobz dot com) or leave a link in the comments below.
It’s especially helpful if you can include a rough time-stamp so I can find the particularly egregious bits. See, I’m not interested in analyzing their entire videos here. Only the brief revealing moments where they let something truly astounding slip. I’m also looking specifically for contradictions: if one of these guys or gals says something in one video that directly contradicts something they say in another.
Also, and I didn’t mention this in the video, but this may be your great chance to become a talking kitty, or some other interesting and/or adorable animal!
If you want to volunteeer your voice talents for a future video, let me know! I may come back to some of you who already helped with that last video project, and reach out to some of the rest of you who volunteered after all the slots were filled. I’ll post more about this when I get into making these videos.
This could also be your kitty’s great chance to become a talking kitty! If you have adorable pics of your cat or some other animal that might work well for a video, send me your pics, or link me to them online, and I may use one or more of them in a future video! I’m also looking for interesting photos to use as backdrops. And weird pics in general.
Oh, and if any of you have experience running your own channels on YouTube, I’m interested in any advice you can give on promotion, handling comments, and all that jazz. The last time I put videos on YouTube I sort of felt that they could, and should, have had a lot more viewers than they ultimately did.
Onward and upward.
Together, we can do this.
#EndFathersDay: Trolls being trolls, or “black propaganda” designed to tear apart feminism?
Not actual feminist
You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
“Stealing me for daddy’s money hurts me too,” and other nuggets of wisdom from some dude’s MRA memes
Woah, dude, that’s like … incomprehensible.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re being unfair to Men’s Rights Activists by allowing them to handle their own publicity. I mean, it’s pretty clear that they’re terrible at it. Worse than terrible, really. Terribler. Possibly the terriblest.
I mean, just this week we saw the official social media director of A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit announcing the conference’s new venue with this:
Dizzy With Success: Paul Elam announces triumphant move of AVFM conference to less convenient venue
Quick, look over there!
So A Voice for Men, having lost or abandoned the original venue for their “Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, has announced its new location: A VFW post some 18 miles away from the original hotel where, presumably, most of the conference’s attendees will be staying.
According to Paul Elam, they made the move in large part to spare conference-goers the terrible inconvenience of having to watch the no-doubt riveting presentations from an “overflow room.”
No, really.
In a post last night, Elam declared that all the media attention given to the conference
Erin Pizzey and the Canadian Elevator of Misandry
Men in Canadian elevators are sometimes also used as chairs.
Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
The 5 most ridiculous things causing misogynists to lose their sh*t this week
It’s the eternal question: do misogynists spend their entire lives looking for excuses to get mad at women, or are they so naturally enraged by any evidence of female autonomy that they can’t help but erupt in rage over the tiniest of things?
We may never know the answer to that question. What we do know: almost anything can provoke them, no matter how trivial it is, no matter how misguided their anger might seem to anyone who doesn’t actually, you know, hate women. Let’s look at some of the latest things to cause women-haters to lose their shit.
