Today we celebrate one of history’s greatest, the largely unheralded misogynist douchebag T.M. Zink, who managed to stick it to the ladies even after he died. As Time magazine reported shortly after his death in 1930:
At Le Mars, Iowa, the probated will of T. M. Zink, deceased attorney, revealed:1) His $100,000 estate is to be placed in trust for 75 years; 2) In A. D. 2005 the accumulated principal is to be used to establish, equip and maintain a library on whose shelves will be no woman author, on whose catalogs will be no woman’s name, over whose portal will blaze: “No Women Admitted”; 3) To his daughter went $5; 4) To his widow not 1¢.
As he explained in his will:
My intense hatred of women is not of recent origin or development nor based upon any personal differences I ever had with them but is the result of my experiences with women, observations of them and study of all literatures and philosophical works.
2005 has come and gone and sadly, at least from the point of view of misogynist bibliophiles, the Zink Womanless Library was never built. As a piece in The Guardian noted, his family successfully challenged the will, I’m guessing on the grounds of Quando podeces te regi eorum fecerunt? (“When did you become king of the assholes?“)
T.M. Zink died in 1930. A quick Google search revealed an amusing blurb about him from 1917 which you can read here. For those too lazy to click on the link, the “metallic little lawyer” (love those old newspaper articles, whose authors still felt free to openly make fun of people’s names) was representing a man convicted of larceny for, apparently, offering to sell a woman a car, but instead just taking her money and not delivering the vehicle. Zink handled the appeal, which was based entirely around the argument that women are all liars, and therefore a conviction based on the testimony of a woman (who paid his douchebag client $2500 in pre-1917 money) could not be sustained. So he submitted a 40-page brief detailing all the “reasons” why the victim in this case should not be believed.
Doesn’t this bit, written in 1917, sound eerily familiar? “When they weren’t hauling him out of croup, chickenpox and juvenile court, mending his toys, bruised toes and broken heart, darning clothing, feeding him—all of which he has doubtless forgotten since he attained the wisdom of lordly manhood—that is what the ladies of Mr. Zink’s acquaintance have been doing all his life and are still doing, according to his brief. Powdering, painting and paddling; posing, chattering and hunting scandal like vultures; blocking every public place and talking out loud in the movies; devoting their lives to falseness, folly and meanness and then boasting that the word of one woman in court was equal to that of at least two men.”
Remember, this was 1917. The time when women could not vote, serve on juries or become judges. And this man was going completely off the rails because women could nevertheless testify. In criminal cases where they were victims, no less! Clearly, this was a sign that men were already horribly oppressed by women’s ability to buy cars and come to court seeking justice. The MRM would feel right at home in that day and age.
Or maybe not. Even in 1917, this was a bit strong for, you know, normal people. Zink’s so-called brief was stricken from the record and returned to him, and the appellant was instructed to submit a “proper brief”.
This is a VERY funny article Amused. I really want to read that brief now to find out why having a bird on one’s hat is worse then say, selling a car you have no intention of delivering.
I was so cool in high school I graduated a year early and was the only student in the AP Calculus class.
Hmm…I’m wondering whom Zink most resembles among our resident MRAs. David K. Mellar? Eoghan? AWS? NWO? He’s a classic MGOTW misogynist.
That does sound like NWO xD
I’d go with NWO too.
totally NWO. I could also sorta see Egohan, though, especially with the ‘women are all liars’.
“Before you get too pleased with yourself for that oh-so-witty reply, consider the amount of time I spend posting here, and the amount of time you people spend replying to me. In other words, your statement might have been intended as sarcasm, but it’s pretty much true.”
Ah, too late, I’m all ready pretty pleased about my oh-so-witty reply. I appreciate your concern though.
I guess you must’ve missed all the posts between then and now that weren’t about you. What a surprise.
“Only in your head, dude. Plus you assume I care about ‘winning’ internet arguments as much as you do. As opposed to write a couple of paragraphs and watch you fall all over each other in your rush to prove me wrong.”
And I write two paragraphs about what a garden-variety troll you are and you can’t help but respond. And when I say “garden-variety troll”, I mean you’re pulling all your material directly from the troll playbook chapter entitled “Make vague references to having more of a life than the people you’re trolling and then infer that anything in their lives is either really trivial or a fabrication”. Again, we get it. Your cool disdain for all that we find important and worthy is crystal clear and we’re all ever-so-impressed by how above us you are. And even though you’re so above us, you still find it in your heart to bless us with your presence. And that presence is truly unlike any I could find within five minutes on half a hundred boards on the internet, such a special and unique snowflake you are.
Bright guy like you, I don’t have to point out the sarcasm do I? 🙂 Now be a good boy and come up with some more original and cutting insults for us to snicker at, at least then you’ll be serving some sort of useful purpose around here if you insist on sticking around.
It depends on which category of nerd or geek we’re talking about. My high school (total of 700 people, about 250 in my class, we graduated in 1973, didn’t have an sff nerd/geek group–as far as I could tell, I was the only person who read that weird shit.
There were chess nerds, and the debate team nerd, but the bigger cliques were the future farmers of america and the sports team and the marching band and the cheerleaders. There was also a big town/gown split in some of those since there was a land grant university where my dad taught (geology, thus the sf geekery from a young age).
I didn’t find fellow sf nerds until I got to Western Washington University in 1977 and found a group of fellow Trekkies starting Puget Sound Startrekkers Outpost 13! OMG, I still remembering seeing the dittoed flyer on the bulletin board in the dorm and feeling a shiver of ecstasy run up my spine. I had found my PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!
Off topic:
One of the odder MRA blogs listed in the links on the right side is The Thinking Housewife.
You have to be pretty special to write your blog in such a way as to make a reader ask themselves “Wait, so, does she hate pizza or black people more?”
“And I write two paragraphs about what a garden-variety troll you are and you can’t help but respond.”
Yeah, he’s pretty generic. There’s not much there there.
NWOaf for Zink, or maybe some sort of NWOaf/Eoghan mix.
caseymordred, from what I can tell Laura Wood, aka the Thinking Housewife, is more of a gender traditionalist than an MRA. Naturally most MRA’s hate her guts even though she agrees with them about 90% of the time.
I did a post on The Thinking Housewife a while back:
http://manboobz.com/2010/10/11/the-surreal-housewife/
My graduating class had 26 kids in it. When I said I was the only kid in Calc, I was being literal. And, yes, it was the public school, and, no, not the smallest one of the three in the county. The highschool/middleschool was a building attached to the elementary school by a walkway. Really, it is basically just one building. There are less than 500 kids from preschool to twelth grade. Which might give you some context for just how cool and sociable I was with my copy of The Stainless Steel Rat in tow. 😉
@Ami, speedlines, Nobby, it can’t be NWO, because he works fifty hours a week and lives in a car with no food. He certainly can’t afford a fancy evil lawyer to manage a hoity-toity $100,000 estate.
Well, NWO also didn’t die in 1930. Well, as far as we know. Though the currently absent Zombie McDonald would probably not like such an affronts to the character of zombies.
Though it would explain how he lives off so little sleep…
Well, NWO also didn’t die in 1930.
Or did he?
I had five hundred kids in my own graduating class so that is teeny tiny DSC.
Ion: Mocking you is more like nine-men’s morris than chess, but still a pleasant pastime. I confess, you are better than Crack Emcee in terms of attempted insult; you at least try to tailor your barbs to the audience, but you need to work on the content; now that you have the form down.
1: Accusing people of things which aren’t true, esp. things like their lives, is pointless. Trying to point out lacks in their lives has a huge likelihood of failure. We know what we do. We know if things like, “you spend too much time on the internet” are going to offend (protip, that’s a charge meant to sway the audience. We don’t think we spend too much time here. If we did, we’d spend it esltwise. This works better in live situations, where you can hear the applause you expect the crowd to make, unless the lurkers really are supporting you in email).
2: Things lie, “Kave has become an internet tough guy”, need some support. Want to call me a pseudointellectual… show places where I am engaging in it. Otherwise it’s just blather. I’ve got a blog, people can look me up, and see what I have to say about things. Charges about character stand, or fall, on observable behavior. Intellectual as an insult is pretty weak. So is, “internet tough guy”, random and the accusation that we don’t have the lives we say we do.
3: If you want to avoid analytic comments about your motivations, best to just stick to things like the merits of female authors vs. male authors. The folks here are pretty good at responding to what is said. If you don’t say, “ooh, you have no lives but Man Boobz”, they aren’t likely to point out how much effort/time you spend here.
In other words, you reap what you sow.
@Hippodameia:
“Yeah, he’s pretty generic. There’s not much there there.”
Any idiot can do the world-weary-jaded “I’m soooo much better than all of this and all of you. Every time you respond to me only proves how important I am. Dance, puppets! Dance!” routine. Internet’s full of them and they’ve been around since the days of “content providers” like AOL. But every one of them is an under-appreciated genius of unparalleled wit, descended from upon high to show us, the little people, the error of our ways and the shining light of their intellect.
All you can really do with them is either ignore them and wait for them to ragequit or mock them and wait for them to ragequit. We’ll see how long this paragon holds out before he’s reduced to babbling about reptiloids and jewish bankers just to try and get attention. 🙂
@Ami Angelwings:
“Well, NWO also didn’t die in 1930.
Or did he?”
@Mertvaya Well, Ion’s actually been around for a while. He has spurts now and then, so he doesn’t seem likely to burn out too fast. He is boring, though, tends to show up, throw out random claims, get huffy when we rebutt them, and then disappear for a while.
Talking of NWO, he took his queerphobic act on the road xD and is now banned from No Seriously… xD
Also it took him one whole day to break his “I’M NEVER RESPONDING TO YOU UNTIL YOU STOP USING SMILEYS” thing for me xD
It’s too bad my response to him was deleted too D: He did the usual “so is it a choice or biological! be careful! i have you in a trap! if you say homosexuality is biological therefore you think thieves committing theft s biological!” thing which I’m sure he thought was v clever xD
He just can’t let go… XD
@Nobby: Sounds about typical. Troll, flounce, return, troll, flounce, repeat. Yep, sounding more unique and special by the moment. 🙂
I was the nerd/brainy kid in I forget how many shcools… let’s see, started about 3rd grade, so BGE, BGI, SG, back to BGI, BGHS, MHS: Six.
I was lucky… we had a room. an English teacher hosted a D&D club. So that was social mixing. I was also in theater, so when she retired, I managed to take over the little theater for lunch. School of about 2,000 so there was a pretty large mix. Drama, the paper, the academic clubs, the stoners, the surfers and (this was the 80s) the “valley girl” Crowd.
My first high school, I was in the choir, my junior high I was in the orchestra. SG was a small school, maybe 140 students, grades 1-8. There weren’t really any cliques, because the individual cohorts (four room, eight grades) were small.
Sorry I missed NWO’s brief moment of glory on No Seriously.