So some MRAs are rallying around Herman Cain – not in spite of the sexual harassment allegations against him, but because of them.
On The Spearhead, W. R. Price notes that Cain has gotten a flood of new donations since the scandal broke. His conclusion:
The support for the conservative candidate suggests that the decades-old trend of male helplessness in the face of female accusations may be coming to an end.
Other Spearheaders are a bit more blunt:
It is refreshing to see a man (politician or otherwise) in the spotlight stand up and defend himself against a P.C. hatchet-job such as “sexual harrassment” when so many before him did the whiney-baby kiss-up “I was wrong” pandering while bowing before the golden hoochie.
Meanwhile, white and nerdy on Omega Virgin Revolt (yes, that’s a real blog) has actually put his money where his mouth is, sending along a donation to Cain.
I usually don’t bother with voting. Everyone running for most offices is either a liberal feminist or a conservative feminist. To me that is no difference. However, if Herman Cain is still in the running by the time my state’s primary happens (and if he is the Republican nominee) I will vote for him.
Herman Cain is now dealing with at least three women who are claiming that he sexually harassed them. Public figures who were accused of sexual harassment in the past didn’t take on their accusers directly, but Herman Cain did. He pointed out how what is happening to him is a false accusation. As a result of this Cain has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in the last few days. One of those donations was my donation.
This may not seem like much, but this small act as made Cain more anti-feminist than all of the other candidates for president.
Notice that in white and nerdy’s version of the controversy, Cain has “pointed out” that he’s being falsely accused. Actually, what Cain has done is to deny that he harassed anyone. At this point, we don’t actually know enough to judge definitively whether the allegations are true — though the fact that the National Restaurant Association paid out tens of thousands of dollars to settle the cases makes me a bit skeptical of Cain’s denials. But apparently, in W&N’s brain, there’s not even a chance he’s guilty of anything other than standing up to the dirty feminazis.
One of the commenters on Omega Virgin Revolt is even more enthusiastic about Cain than the blogger himself. Jack writes:
If Cain becomes president, we might actually see an end to the incessant pandering to women by the mindless political class. It’s about time that a politician stood up and declared that women have responsibilities in life and are not entitled to a free ride. Cain might actually do that.
Over on Reddit, meanwhile, OffensiveBrute doesn’t defend Cain so much as he defends not giving a shit about sexual harassment:
I say even if Cain is guilty, who the hell cares? Sexual harassment is illegal, but not immoral. well not the kind that Cain is accused of anyway.
Skooma714 offers a similar take:
He didn’t even touch them. They probably hear shit like that on the DC Metro everyday.
They probably are over it. They want to get some paper and attention.
And, yes, both of these comments garnered some upvotes.
Of course, not every MRA out there is rallying around Cain. On Reddit, there are plenty of MRAs who are suspending judgment on the allegations, or who dislike Cain because he’s, you know, a right wing asshole. Over on The Spearhead, the only ones who seem to have an issue with Cain are those who, well, let’s just say that they probably also think burning crosses make great lawn decorations:
Black men are notorious for their sexual escapades, their testosterone being greater than that of White Men – as is their level of rape accusation. He may be innocent but he may just as well be guilty of a real indescretion.
I am happy to report that this comment got a lot of downvotes there; not every Spearheader is a raving Stormfronter. Of course, it says something about the general political and social backwardness of the site that those Spearheaders who are defending Cain from the crudest Klan-tastic racist attacks are doing so basically because they think he’s a credit to his race:
If the Blacks in America were like Herman Cain, this country would be measurably better for it and most of us would be hating on someone else.
But don’t worry: On The Spearhead they can still all agree on one central point – that women are evil, lying whores. As Keyster put it, in one of the most-highly upvoted comments in the thread:
What this indicates is that people are fed up with political correctness and the feminist/sexual grievance industry. …
In the new Femocracy you can’t date them, you can’t marry them and you can’t even work among them, without risking untold trouble for life. Is it any wonder men are distancing themselves from women, if not abandoning them altogether? How’s a man to know whether she has a “false accusation bomb” strapped to her waist or not? If you’re a man among women stay alert, you’re outside the Green Zone.
Will MRAs end up rallying around Cain in the way they rallied around Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Or will something – his political views, his race? – prevent them from jumping on the Cain train? I guess we’ll just have to see.
Nobinayamu,
Yeah. Pretty much.
I don’t mind if a feminist guy tries to get into my pants. I might not go along with it–if he’s actually a feminist he ought to be cool with that and not get pouty or pushy if I don’t–but I don’t mind a little bit of respectful trying.
I’m uncertain how often that works on Internet forums, though.
Did I mention how incredibly dumb you are? Brandon, the male feminists that I’ve known who wanted to have sex with me weren’t “game”-studying morons, who view sex as something you have to trick out of a woman. They managed to, simultaneously, believe that having female genitalia doesn’t make half of the people in the world inherently inferior while also being able to be upfront about sex and attraction and wanting to get-down with the get-down.
So, care to elaborate on the anti-male advocacy of feminists, male or female? Or provide any evidence that feminists on this site hate men?
“I’m uncertain how often that works on Internet forums, though.”
Certainly you know that the “forum” is actually a sooper seekrit dating hotspot for all the feminists and their lapdogs? It’s like a big gay/fat/queer/non-ableist bath house in there! 😀
Mags:
You live in San Francisco.
Also, I think I, my girlfriend, and her daughter would consider ourselves quite satisfied in New York on well under half that.
AntZ:
Leaving aside that the only indication that it’s “feminist” is your say-so, “there are people who believe vile things who are X” =/= “X-type people are vile”
It’s going to take more than one pamphlet someone with an agenda was able to dig up in the vastness of the web to convince me that calling oneself a feminist is a good predictor of eliminationist beliefs. It would take a lot of inbounds, a lot of feminists acknowledging the page as representative of feminism, a lot of feminists agreeably engaging with and supporting/being supported by the author(s) of the page, etc.
Brandon:
So if they sleep with you, you’ll believe them?
I mean, you’d have to, the tape wouldn’t lie.
Yeah not really sure how posting here is going to help any guys do the no-pants dance. Maybe straight feminist men invite women over to watch them post feminist comments on the Internet, and then they’re all “well, how ’bout it then?”
You know HP, me and my spouse make over $300K a year, but we still feel rather poor.
That made me throw up in my mouth a little, thanks for that. When you are in the top five percent income class, never, ever start talking about how it makes you feel poor. Just fucking don’t. Especially fucking don’t when others are discussing homelessness.
Moving on, the claims about women and homelessness activism are…interesting. Here’s a list of a few reasons why they don’t seem to fit:
1) Traditionally, in the west, among the upperclass, charity was seen as women’s work.
2) Social services jobs, especially social work, tend to be heavily female dominated.
3) There have been both citywide and federal cases regarding gender discrimination against the homeless with female plaintiffs, but I have not located one yet with a male one in the US. I recommend Community House Inc. v City of Boise 490 F.3d 1041, 2007, or looking into the Callahan v Carey line of cases from NYC.
4) I have never been able to locate a widespread good statistical analysis on gender and homelessness. Most statistics measure single adults in cities. However, we know that homeless women are more likely to have accompanying children, hence being counted under “homeless family” instead, and what data there is from rural and suburban areas suggest single adult women have higher homelessness rates there. In the US, it is certainly far from clear that men have higher homelessness rates in general than women.
5) It doesn’t match my own experiences. This one is the weakest, but Brandon and NWO are claiming this is a general phenomena, but when my family has been hungry, cold, etc. it was women who helped us. It was a woman who forged paperwork saying that she was going to use surplus past dated but still good food for livestock and gave it out free to hungry families who couldn’t access other food resources. It is women who run the local foodbank. It was women who gave us coats. Many people I have known have reported similar experiences, and most individuals I know who have taken in homeless people have been women. It is not that I have never seen a man be generous to a person in need, but my experiences have found that women do this more, not less.
Gosh, that sounds… pretty nice actually.
It all sounds a lot less threatening when you stop thinking of having sex with a woman as a nasty trick you play on her. “Haw haw, you slept with me, sucker!” is for guys who must not think much of themselves. (And who don’t understand the concept of “repeat business.”)
I just got the Fridge Logic laugh of realizing that NWO thinks MRAs can’t start their own charity because starting a charity is really hard and no one will do it for them… and NWO thinks starting a charity just means putting up a flyer.
And I just got the Fridge Logic of realizing that NWO makes up his “facts” out of thin air, based purely on his feelings, because he thinks that’s how facts work. After all, you can’t trust any source of information outside your own head; it might be infected with feminism! Or written by Jews!
You live in San Francisco.
Also, I think I, my girlfriend, and her daughter would consider ourselves quite satisfied in New York on well under half that.
Between Silicon Valley Libertarians and all the hipster trust-fund kids who move out here, the San Francisco area is riddled with wealthy-yet-self-pitying douchebags. You just have to roll your eyes and move on.
It all sounds a lot less threatening when you stop thinking of having sex with a woman as a nasty trick you play on her.
This does seem to be the underlying misunderstanding.
I must be doing something wrong, then.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m a male feminist, on the grounds of being demonstrably male and believing passionately in genuine equality of opportunity regardless of gender. But the phrase “equality of opportunity” means precisely that.
This naturally means that I view women and men as equally important. Or rather, I gauge their importance according to their achievements, not their sex.
As for putting women on a pedestal, my least favourite British prime minister in my lifetime is Margaret Thatcher, and my least favourite candidate for POTUS or VPOTUS is Sarah Palin. And if my wife says something I disagree with, I’m not the least bit shy about challenging her: in fact, I relish it, as we both love a good argument.
Now I don’t think I’m especially unusual: most of my male friends would fall into a very similar category. More to the point, I don’t know, and genuinely don’t think I’ve ever met, anyone in real life who comes anywhere close to matching the stereotype that you put forward, or comes anywhere close.
Magpie: Heifer Project is amazing. They do really, really good work. Laurie R King does charity work associated with her Russell-Holmes books, and the money goes to help Heifer Project set people up with apiaries and bees. (anything that puts more honey into the world is fine and shiny with me, means more MEAD!)
I wish I was poor like Maggie.
Poor thing. How is she able to live in a world where she can probably only change one of their two cars when the new models come in every year?
Mags: Do you have to worry about where your next meal is coming from of if you’ll be able to feed the cats or afford enough gas to get to work and back? Somehow i doubt it. This is my LIFE right now. I have prescriptions coming up that I HAVE to refill, and I don’t know where the money will come from. MrB has work hours he can’t submit until his client’s funding gets renewed, then another week or two for the check to get here, so if we’re lucky, we’ll get whatever money is due to him before December.
Holly:
Repeat business is for people who enjoy sex. If you’re looking for someone whom you mesh well with, when you find that person you’ll want to, um, mesh with them fairly often. If sex is points, in the benign version you’re more interested in the amount you have than whom you have it with; in the not so benign version there’s no reason to sleep with someone you’ve slept with before.
I think this is what underlies the advice often (formerly?) given to women that if you “put out” on the first date, you’ll never see him again: if he thinks in terms of “I’ve already beaten that one,” then sure. I just don’t know that a lot of men do. Or ever did.
Holly: I agree, a bath house would be heaven right about now. The cold+rain we’ve been having lately has been playing merry hob with my fuckleg, and the cold+cold is going to be even more… fun.
My household income is $80,000 before tax, and I don’t feel poor at all – no-one is in danger of freezing or starving, our only debt is the mortgage, and the car still works perfectly well despite being older than both my kids put together.
In fact, I have no idea what I’d do with the extra $220,000. And I really have no idea why bankers “need” multi-million bonuses.
@Wetherby: I could probably find some use for the extra 230K$ (I’m more in the 70K$ range) but all of it outside of savings would be frivolous spendings. Most of my income is already being pissed away on frivolous spendings anyway. I could always use more vidgames or Magic cards or a more recent computer, maybe I’d like an iPad instead of this crap laptop (though I’m pretty proud that it’s open source and M$/Apple-free) but I’m already pretty much time-constrained rather than money constrained when it comes to living the fun parts of my life. Would like to be able to make GenCon a yearly pilgrimage instead of sporadic, and maybe actually make a serious stab at Magic Pro Tour Road Warrior instead of keeping to the Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal corridor for premium events.
Note that none of these things are, you know, food, or shelter, or anything that’s actually significantly important. That’s miles away from poor. 300K$ is on another planet from poor.
This always makes me want to say “look, I have zero interest in having actual sex with you, but I will let you mark on your little score card that we did. So that way we both leave happy-you with more points and me without the memory of bad sex.”
Man, I wish I had $300,000 a year. I don’t even know what I would do with all of it. Broadway, WisCon and ComicCon every year would take up, what, twenty thousand at the absolute worst? And besides that I already have everything I want. Donate large sums of money to charity? Pay off my friends’ student loan debt? Buy my girlfriend more yarn and my fuckbuddies more Magic cards?
I have had a feminist orgy, but I am pretty sure that the dude involved wasn’t a feminist to get into my pants. Mostly because he broke up with me and continued to be a feminist. Either it’s twelve-dimensional pants-getting-into chess, or he actually believes that women are people.
Any money I’d make over what I do now would basically be “fuck you money”. As in, if I made 300K$ a year, it would be so that I was going to do that for X years while living on only 100K$ a year, so I could then say “fuck you” to my bosses for the following roughly 2X years.
(Increasing my yearly income by about 50% to 100K$ would already cover most of even the frivolous shit I want to do that I can’t already do.)
Can I leave my hat on?
@Nobinayamu – Unfortunately Brandon, like Anthony, will probably go pull some quotes off Heart’s blog and claim that they represent mainstream feminist thought. Which is kind of funny, since I used to belong to a feminist Google group that was created partly in order to make fun of Heart (and various other similar people). First time I ever encountered her she showed up on a feminist blog and the commentariat turned on her very quickly. Turns out that the combination of fear and loathing of men with lots of vague woo designed to justify the loathing is not actually very popular with most mainstream feminists. Which, ironically, is a big part of why she’s so paranoid and prone to rhetorical excess. (She’s also ex-Quiverfull, which explains a lot.)
But yeah, that’s where they’re getting this stuff from. Mary Sunshine etc are real people, or at least real internet handles, it’s just that they’re also delusional oddities who hang out in their own little spaces and don’t talk to other feminists because apparently we’re just not radical enough.
(For “not radical enough” please feel free to read as “not batshit crazy”.)
I’ve met lots of Nice Guys, Brandon, and none of them were feminists. Lots of proto-MRAs in there, though – a Nice Guy is basically a sexist trying to hide his sexism in order to get laid.
And, you know, “radical feminist” doesn’t mean “feminist who hates men” either. bell hooks, for instance, identifies as a radical feminist.