I didn’t bother to watch the VMAs last night, but something in the air has led me to want to give out some awards of my own. So: the coveted Man Boobz “We Hunted the Mammoth” Award this month goes to some comments from MRA oddball Uncle Elmer on women in the workplace that were recently highlighted on the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog. They are, of course, magnificently stupid.
Without further ado, here are some of the choicer bits of Elmer’s rant.
Women are competing for jobs but are not creating them. Other than providing a mass market for their vanity products, they are not forging new industries or technologies. …
Though men shank me and insult me, only men provide me with opportunity. … Only men, and only a small fraction of them, take the risks that create industry and opportunity. Women can only serve as mere functionaries in man-created structures. When an organization becomes feminized, priority shifts from efficient and profitable production of goods and services to development of labarynthine rules for the comfort and security of women. …
No woman can or will provide me or any man employment, yet all western women feel entitled to help and opportunities from men, even as they drive men out of the workplace.
[W]orkplace women are your enemy. They cannot help you but can and will hurt you. Do not look at them, do not talk to them.
And now the “we hunted the mammoth” moment:
Females want to inhabit man-created business structures as if those structures existed before man appeared on the veldt. … When you have pushed the last man out of the corporation it will collapse under its own dead weight.
And while I’m handing out awards, I’d like to give the Man Boobz Whaaaa?! Award for the strangest, dumbest and least true thing said about me in the past week to Wytchfinde (presumably the same guy who used to comment here as Wytchfinde555), who posted this strange and not-altogether-grammatical comment on my latest YouTube video (which you should all go watch if you haven’t already).
David Futrelle is an opportunist that pretends to worship white women (which is true to a certain extent) helps just fuel more fire for hating men.
Whaaaa?!
My favorite was the local (which has become a dirty word for me due to a few very bad experiences) who claimed that the river cobble he found that was maybe a foot across was a fossilized duck gizzard. “You know, from when ducks were really big”.
I would sincerely love to dig in Eurasia someday. Hell, even doing one of those touristy trips to see the ruins and a couple of sites would be amazing.
According to Markeymark in the Glenn Beck thread, it’s by forming words and stringing them into sentences.
No.
We are DEVO.
this is where I should put my forum avatar of girls on the beach, but I don’t know how 🙁
“You know, from when ducks were really big”.
Not the dreaded Sabre-toothed duck!!!!
Genyornis newtoni?
http://australianmuseum.net.au/image/Genyornis/
F’ing Australians and their freaks of nature!
…Well, I’m glad to have not seen Juan’s link…or is it still here and I have blanked it out of my mind?
I have nothing to hide! >_> <__<
Whereas I, of course, have never seen a minute of it. Obviously. Especially not at my age (34). And I definitely am not holding out for the dub of Season 3.
It’s okay…I resisted that series for the longest time because the impression I got from the fandom was that it was nothing but dudes snogging as a metaphor for international politics. I’m surprised none of the people telling me “No, it’s really funny, you should watch it,” bothered to add “And the fans grossly exaggerate the amount of actual yaoi in it.”
It’s kind of a given. How much of Harry Potter do you think is about sex? 😛
The difference there being that Harry Potter is a British children’s/YA book series, and Hetalia is a manga/anime series. I can be excused for taking the fan portrayal of a manga/anime series at face value. Ain’t nothin’ off the table in that category of media.
That’s like saying I can assume Harry Potter is all teens having sex because harlequin romance novels are books too, right? There’s nothing off the table in books!
Seriously, there’s no point in that kind of conflation. Fandom in general loves shipping, and this seems to cross all media, and almost all genres. Give people decent characters, and a significant number will just want to imagine who’s fucking who. Fans shipping isn’t evidence that the series is predominantly oriented on romance or sex.
Heck, I’ve seen a lot more shipping where these things aren’t explicit than where they are.
Yeh, shipping canon relationships is kinda boring >.>
Shipping cannons is what sank the Lusitania.
WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE EDWARDIAN CRUISE SHIPS!?!
I dunno, canon relationships in Hetalia can be pretty fucked up…and the fandom amplifies that to the max. But when all the characters are countries, shit like the Cold War and the Rape of Nanking are legitimate pairings. (Yes. Yes that latter one is a real fic. Not gonna lie, Hetalia fandom does deserve a little bit of its reputation. ^^;)
And if I knew nothing about Harry Potter other than that it was a book series, I would also be justified in suspecting that the fandom was portraying it accurately. But knowing that it was a children’s book series, I could be a little more confident that the fans were just being fannish.
Let me put it another way: if you knew nothing about Harry Potter and asked its fans “What’s the genre?”, they probably would not say “romance,” even if that’s the way they treat it in fanfic and fanart. They would say “fantasy.” But you can find any number of Hetalia fans who start out by saying “It’s a yaoi series.” And it’s really not. If you’ve ever seen a real yaoi series, you can tell that Hetalia ain’t one. The creator invites you to interpret it that way if you want, but in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion rather than making it unambiguous.
Of course, I say all this as someone who has little patience for shipping in any case. I’m not particularly fond of romance in fiction. I watch Hetalia for the comedy, and the sheer outrageous joy of watching the dub be more crazy and offensive than the original.
Why? When does this happen when fans are among their own?
I watch it for the historical accuracy!
…what?
Um…when the thing they are fans of is a romance series?
What am I supposed to do? I don’t have time to read/watch everything in order to figure out what it’s about and whether it would be worth looking into further. I have to go by what people tell me…and what people were telling me about Hetalia was that it was really funny and that it was a yaoi series. Should I have assumed they were lying, but only about the second part?
I usually see those get focused on for other things. Fandom is weird like that.
Wikipedia the basic premise, or find a specific individual you can already trust to give you basics.
Anything else is just asking for wrong information by going to a fandom that frequently has its own memes and tenor, however much they all enjoy a given piece of fiction.
This is entirely fair — if I was trying to be precise I would not describe Hetalia as “yaoi” (the main “marriage” is heterosexual, in fact) but when my sister asked me to recommend an anime series that was “funny and gay” I showed her Hetalia and she thought it perfectly nailed her checklist ’cause it’s very tease-y and the vast majority of characters are pretty and male (which a lot of fans use “yaoi” as a kind of shorthand for.)
Yeah, okay, fair enough. I’ve actually made that observation myself. Call it a 95-5 rule: 95% of fanworks for a given series focus on 5% of the actual content. Still, “start by assuming it’s not very much like the fandom portrays it” is not very helpful, because you have no way of knowing what the other 95% of the content is like.
You are assuming I did not already do these things. *gasp* You’re Rutee-splaining!
Pfft. That’s not a yaoi series, that’s a bishounen series! Don’t otaku kids these days know anything?
Oh, come on, you guys. You missed the most obvious yet damned funny obvious punchline about the sabretooth salmon. “In (formerly) Soviet Russia, dinner eats you!”
I’m way too amused by this but I haven’t eaten yet.
Try France for ruins….everywhere. They live alongside them, and in some cases, in them. There’s Roman ruins right in the center of Tours.
David, and everyone, thank you so much for calling attention to my seminal work.
Will I be getting some kind of bronze mammoth-hunter statue that I can proudly display on my executive credenza?