Over on the always repugnant In Mala Fide, a guest blogger by the name of What is To Be Done recently offered his comrades in the “anti-establishment / man/ biorealist / HBD/ reactionary / racist / patriarch / tradcon / whatever blogosphere” what he evidently sees as a revolutionary suggestion: instead of trying to fight the evil feminists with “well-reasoned arguments,” why not simply set up fake feminist blogs, and post shit on them to make feminists looks bad?
WITBD explained:
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a saboteur. We are naturally smarter than the feminists (in fact, objectively better in every conceivable way), and in addition, we are well-trained in deception by our studies of game. In other words, it’ll be a piece of cake for us to mimic their arguments and appear to them as really smart girls who really know their shit.
Really? Because no one I’ve ever run across in the manosphere has managed to pull off a particularly convincing impersonation of a really smart anything. And in order to effectively parody something, you have to actually understand it first. Given some of the truly odd things MRAs and manospherians believe about feminism and feminists – see my post on Operation Alimony yesterday for one recent example — I’m somehow thinking that the only people dumb enough to be fooled by these “false-flag-feminist” blogs will be other, yep, MRAs and manosphereians.
Nonetheless, WITBD claimed that’s he’s already started putting his little plan into action:
I have already begun false flag blogging myself. At this stage, giving the link would ruin the whole thing. But it’s out there. And “false flag blogging” returned only 87 results, of which only a few actually seemed to discuss what I’m talking about, so for the time being it seems nobody is watching out for it. Not that they’d be able to tell anyway.
His fantasies got more and more extravagant:
Think long term. The endgame is to build a big enough presence that coming out as a fake feminist generates buzz in and of itself. Imagine if it came out that the founder of Feministing was actually a men’s rights activist.
And that he could fly, and shoot lasers from his eyes! Imagination is fun!
(Note: The founder of Feministing is not actually an MRA, or a man. Nor can she fly or shoot lasers from her eyes.)
WITBD continued fantasizing:
Eventually, our false flag bloggers will coordinate with our legitimate bloggers and have “debates” where both sides are controlled by us.
And where the only people paying attention are you guys.
If you feel you are getting really good at this, attack some prominent feminists for not being feminist enough. I don’t even know what that would mean, but, hey, this is feminism. Nonsense is our bread and butter.
Wheels within wheels!
Some on In Mala Fide thought this was a dandy idea. Frost wrote:
Fuck yeah. Awesome post. …
[W]e need to get bold and creative with how we fight the war for the best minds in the western world. False flag blogging is a wide-open front. Especially if you’re new to writing and aren’t yet confident in your voice – and unless you have written many thousands of words already, the truth is your writing is probably going to suck – a false-flag blog would be a great way to hone your skills while only having to actually write at the level of typical mid-twenties gender studies grad student.
Here’s a post of mine that sadly didn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s one of my own personal favourites:
http://www.freedomtwentyfive.com/2011/08/an-open-letter-to-the-manginas-of-the-internet/
I submitted it to The Good Men project, Manboobz, and a few other Mangina sites as a guest post, but sadly no one bit. These people are just so easy to parody, it’s ridiculous.
Regular Man Boobz readers may have a rather different assessment of how effective his parody was.
Others on In Mala Fide were a bit more skeptical of the “false-flag” idea. As out-and-proud racist thwak put it:
It sounds like a good idea, but it won’t work. Its been tried by white people on counter racism forums and they always got busted. We used to call it the “nigger impersonation syndrome”.
A white person would sign up with a name like “Jamal” and speak ebonics… but they always got busted cause at some point they hafta come out of “nigger cloak” to practice racism; i.e, say and/or do something a black person would not say/do.
Sure, they have the option of coming on the discussion board and pretending to be a full time nigger, but how does that advance the racist agenda? …
The “black White Supremacist” stuck out like a nun in a whore house everytime.
And got busted everytime.
Gosh, it’s almost as if black people are actual human beings and not just racist caricatures. And that real black people can somehow magically spot the difference between other real black people and racist assholes posting in “ebonics.”
Huh. Could the same happen with feminists?
In a followup post, WITBD dismissed the critics as uncreative cowards. And it turns out that fake blogs are only the starting point in his grand plan.
The fact is we are not the alt-right. We are the new left. We are the oppressed proles … They are the establishment. We lost “our” country. They control it all now. We have blogs. And a handful of churches and seasteading. Sucks.
Now it’s time to move on. We have to take these pieces of shit down and that means we must use leftist tactics. This kind of blogging operation is the beginning of a long march to infiltrate and undermine their institutions.
Sounds like someone has been reading Mao’s Little Red Book!
Playing around? Real men fight to win, period. We fight feminism specifically because it’s the weak point of liberalism. Read your Sun Tzu. Attacking the entire rainbow coalition at once is madness. You always attack the enemy where he is weakest.
And the weakest links are the ladies, naturally.
[N]ot all women actually benefit from feminism. They may think they win at first, but we know full well that feminist sex and the city-type women lose big time: no kids, no committed alpha, no nothing. Most women don’t benefit, and many women are recognizing this.
Right now among women, feminism is high status and actually being feminine is low status. But all women instinctively want to actually be feminine, and they have better life results when they do. We all know about how to manipulate women’s idea of status. This should be easy to work out.
If we take out or marginally disrupt feminism, and pull lots of white women out of the coalition, it crumbles in short order.
Oh no! Not the white women! Don’t take the white women!
High-IQ thundercunts are major war engines of the regime, and especially the childless ones. They actually run the agencies, corporations, HR departments, universities, etc. Without them, the enemy has a harder time operating. As well, white women are blatantly used as bait to recruit minority men into liberal groups.
Anti-feminism is something that we know well … and it is something that the other elements of the liberal coalition actually somewhat agree with us on because its not like the blacks, Mexicans, Arabs etc. are keen on empowering their women. All men of all races have common ground in dealing with the unique female brand of bullshit and thus are potential sympathizers on this issue.
So this is his grand plan: for racist white dudes like him (and much of In Mala Fide’s readership) to build a sort of antifeminist rainbow coalition with “blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, etc” … in order to take down feminism … in order to weaken liberalism … in order to screw over the “blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, etc.”
Yeah, that’s totally gonna work.
You’re not fooling anyone, Emma. Give it a rest already. Or at least troll in a more amusing manner,
Viscaria,
Why do you condone it? Neither me nor Eivind Berge really condones anything like that. You can use this logic for any affirmative action designed to create equality of result (“if it’s not given freely, we should force it”). “Rape is equality” argument just shows the absurdity of forcing any equality of result to appear. It looks like you understand that absurdity already!
Lauralot,
Sorry for not being funny, but I’m not trolling.
Emma: I have a libido higher than that of any of my partners. Would I be justified, in your opinion, in throwing a fit when my male partner would rather play GalCiv than sleep with me?
NWO: Oh, don’t flounce now. If you did CIA conspiracies and women wearing things at men being worse than rape I’d have bingo!
Also, I was referring to the institutional inequality between men and women liberal feminism set itself up to fight. If you agree that people being denied jobs on account of their sex is oppression, you must agree that women in the seventies were oppressed.
Emma, I don’t think you understand “equality of result” arguments. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that men and women have fundamentally similar capabilites and desires. Therefore, if there is equivalent equality of opportunity, they will tend to get equivalent results. If they aren’t getting equivalent results, it’s probably because there’s some hidden inequality of opportunity to be corrected (such as a inhospitable workplace or subconscious sexism).
NWO’s commitment to his stupidity is truly amazing. He just digs in and won’t budge come hell or high water.
Not that that’s news, but sometimes he really gets going, and it’s a sight to behold.
oh is that what he was doing? I thought he was just being an idiot like usual xD
hahaha Viscaria…I see what you did there!
Only if you 1) think of sex as an object a woman gives a man as opposed to an activity two people share/experience together, and/or 2) conflates rape and consensual sex.
Why? Is it a class project?
You actually don’t have to communicate with us. You know what’s a really great way to learn? Listening. Shutting up and listening. If you have questions, or something seems weird or wonky, write it down and see if it resolves itself over time, or with more research. But the truth is, you’re not interested in being a feminist. You’re interested in knowing more about feminists so that you can talk to your boyfriend about it and he’ll think more highly of you because you have thusly distinguished yourself from all lines of feminist thought. So, that’s cool, if that’s what you want to do. I wish you well in it, but I also think you need to do your research somewhere else, ‘kay? You hold some deeply wrong and troubling ideas; we’re never going to agree with them; and talking about it further actually isn’t even amusing.
@Emma
No, because basketball is an activity that a number of individuals choose to engage in, not something finite like available jobs. But, okay, ignore the bit about affirmative action if you’d like. Is basketball something other people own or control? Are people who play basketball with others who–in my estimation–are above their station, cheating me in some way?
I worry that you have very negative attitudes towards sex that are harming you. I worry that you think you are a sex dispenser, not an agent who can choose to have sex (or go on a walk, or dance, or chat about your favourite bands) with other willing partners. You’re not a sex toy, you’re a person.
/Viscaria’s preach time.
Emma Troll: I guess I can say that feminism started out good, gave women rights they didn’t have before, but some directions of it are too crazy for me.
Nonsense. Women are either human beings with human rights (that are not recognized or granted by the kyriarchal nations controlled by elite males), or they’re not. Nobody “gives” anybody rights.
And if the MEN that an MRA is concerned with is white men, then they’re racist (whether in the American definition or some other definition). I don’t know about Norway, but you know jackshit about the U.S.
You can actually name a few feminists, which is more than any other troll has done, but I think that you’re right in that your ideas are all about what individuals may or may not do, which is fairly closely aligned to liberal feminism (which is in the US quite racist — Betty Friedan’s famous FEMININE MYSTIQUE advised (white) women to hire someone to look after their children so the white women could go to college–and racist, i.e. some white women from the middle class have benefitted from class and skin privilege while doing nothing to change the oppression exercised against women who members of marginalized ethnic groups and/or poor). Adidtionally, if you conceive of all women as heterosexual/and or married, then it’s not too surprising a lot of work is too “crazy” for you. I’m a queer woman, age 56, never married, in a lifetime partnership with a woman–so this crazy fat queer has only one response to your crap: you’re a troll, you’re boring, and as far as I’m concerned you can take a long walk off a short dock.
@Molly Ren
Unfortunately, there aren’t as many english articles about this phenomenon (there’s a fanmade “hetalia comic about it, though 😀 It seems pretty accurate).
I think this one puts it quite nicely (the last three paragraphs). Nutella doesn’t have an official gender in German, but that doesn’t keep people from arguing about the correct one. A friend also told me that the gender of Nutella may depend on the context in which it is used.
Yeah, I don’t know either.
(Personally, I’m firmly in the fraction that genders Nutella female. Everything else just sounds wrong 🙁 )
/”What gender is Nutella” derail
@Kollege Messerschmitt
Please, nutella is clearly gendered male. It’s the Luther Vandross of spreads! :d
The ancient persians castrated boys from peasant families and used them as sex slaves. The greeks adopted this practice, most famously with Iskandar who had persian eunuch named Bagoas whom he sodomized on a regular basis. In fact, Iskandar preferred boys to women when it came to sex. The whole idea of castration in Persian, Greek, and medieval european culture was emasculation. A castrato was viewed as the equivalent of a woman and those choirboys of renaissance Italy were used by priests and monks as sex toys since they weren’t allowed to sleep with women.
@NWO: yes, you’re right, all the aid goes to women! And we keep it all to buy bon-bons and never help anybody else!
Except, NOT:
http://50.usaid.gov/infographic-why-invest-in-women/usaid-women/
Well, it looks as though NWO has scored yet another stunning victory over imaginary feminism. All hail NWO’s imaginary victory!
Meanwhile, real feminism continues on unperturbed.
MSN,
You left out the part where women giggled while boys were being castrated.
@Emma
So, you acknowledge that there is racism (and ageism) – discrimination based on things that are entirely beyond one’s control. Why are you against affirmative action? If employers are free to discriminate against marginalized groups, isn’t that benefiting the privileged?
You said that Norwegian people are kind of racist, yet you don’t think that there’s any need to level the playing field.
How is that not racist? Or discriminating?
You would, passively, be giving privileged people the benefit over marginalized people.
Do privileged people deserve jobs more, in your opinion?
Uhhh, why doesn’t the other partner have to be nice and caring, though? If you don’t feel like it, and they still demand sex from you, doesn’t it make THEM the opposite of caring? Why should only one partner be obliged to be nice and caring?
Wouldn’t it be better if both partners would be respectful and make EACH OTHER happy?
If your partner thinks that “refusing [sex] too often indeed means you are not nice and caring”, they obviously don’t give a shit about your feelings, and they don’t care about wanting to make YOU happy.
Why are the wants of one partner more important?
You say the right partner wouldn’t be a demanding jerk, yet you argue that refusing “too often” makes the refuser the bad person (how much is too often, btw? Is there an official number of times you can refuse sex, and after that, you are a mean and uncaring person? Does your niceness and carefulness decrease with every time you refuse to have sex with your partner? Inquiring minds want to know!)
Seriously, your views on sex and relationships are… problematic, to say the least :
I didn’t see anyone answer this, so I will. The flags are many (and, don’t worry, none of them apply to you for supporting the campaign).
1. He pops up out of nowhere and says something off-topic. Trolls are impatient and have no interest in joining the actual conversation.
2. “My Strength” is a common MRA hot-button. Their best idea of how to act feminist is to take something they hate and pretend to like it.
3. He said it was a new campaign when the website is copyright 2005. MRAs often stumble upon old stuff and suddenly freak out, whereas someone actually interested in rape prevention would be familiar with it.
4. His support is vague and unreserved. I’m cautiously supportive of the campaign for the reasons you mention, but it’s also based on really gender-normative ideas that I’m skeptical about. Someone honest would say what they liked about it and what they didn’t like. The overenthusiasm and lack of reasons sounds like someone who doesn’t like it and doesn’t know why anyone would like it.
Look on the bright side, Emma! Norwegians are just protecting your mom from having an income. Quite chivalrous of them, actually.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Emma Troll: I guess I can say that feminism started out good, gave women rights they didn’t have before, but some directions of it are too crazy for me.
Nonsense. Women are either human beings with human rights (that are not recognized or granted by the kyriarchal nations controlled by elite males), or they’re not. Nobody “gives” anybody rights.
….
I agree. Emma, I’m gong to put down any of the more angry things I might say to you, and I’m going to address you in good faith.
Emma, I hear this a lot as a libertarian, even from women who are making very well-intentioned attempts at libertarian feminism. The idea that feminism started out as being about equality, but then went mad, and became a great, big, statist, man-hating tyrannosaur. I leaned that way myself for a while. But it all dissolves in a puff of smoke when you look at the real history.
I’m not for forcing equality of outcome, whatever that means. I’m not really for the state doing anything. But if all the complaints are about small bandaids like affirmative action or welfare, which are really, indeed, only bandaids on state-corporate kyriarchal nation inflicted puncture wounds, the conversation is completely distracted from anything that might really do us any good. And away from those actually in power, to the imagined power of feminists. Classic divide and conquer. If all affirmative action and alimony were done away with today, we’d still live in a broken, rights denying system for both men and women. I suppose I am “against” those things in the larger sense, but not nearly as I’m about stopping the system of privelege – And here I mean not just privelege in the feminist sense, but good, old fashioned, naked power, that makes those things necessary.
I don’t think you’re evil. I don’t think you’re even badly intentioned. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with opposing taxes and alimony… But. Be. Careful.
Be careful of the men’s right’s movement. Be careful of traditionalism. Be careful of the misogyny around you. I started out, as a more conservative woman, very sympathetic to MRA in it’s early stages. Very sympathetic to father’s rights, child custody, unfair alimony, and (Along with the ACLU at the time, it really was an awful document, but it HAS been improved) against VAWA.
But the good in the movement was very soon swallowed up by the bad. And OH! The bad. And not just me, not just feminist women, but many women, many men left in horror.
I’m going to leave you this, written by a woman who is one of the prime examples of the “I love you as a libertarian, but why are you strawing the other feminists” types. Heck, the prime example. A woman who writes for Fox News, and who was VERY, very involved in the Men’s Rights Movement for a long, long time. And left, shaking the dust from her feet. Because it is nothing worth staying in, nothing worth fighting for, nothing worth appeasing.
Here is the queen of “Feminism Should Be Libertarianism Should Be Libertarianism Should Be Men’s Rights” herself, Wendy McElroy, washing her hands of the pit of hatred that Men’s Rights Is now.
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?item.1381
Please reasd it.
If you want to be around women who hate alimony, taxes, and laws, and even stubbornly hate those “other feminists”, but away from the worst of the man hate, I can tell you just where to go, and I’ll happily send you there. I’m not joking.
But I am telling you, and I am not judging you, and it’s your choice always what you do, Eivind and his ilk are the baddest of bad news.
@Shadow
Here’s a question:
If my male partner spends more time on home-making and cooking (which he does because I suck at it) and I pull in 70% of the household income, and we’re focusing on my career in the relationship (also true), is it equally cool that I just toss him on the street and leave him to fend for himself if we should divorce?
Because personally, I don’t think it is, which is why we have a back-up alimony payment plan (I pay him alimony) to compensate him for the unpaid domestic labor he provides the household. And also because, you know, when someone’s career skills aren’t kept current, they can’t just run out and get any job after a divorce, especially not with a resume gap, especially not in America, and definitely not in a recession.
“but away from the worst of the man hate,” well, yeah, that too, but I meant the worst of the woman hate.
And I do mean it. You’re not evil and anti-woman for being anti-alimony, anti-taxes, etc. But how and why matters, and nothing in the MRA is really about doing any good for any of us. There’s other places to go and be a libertarian or conservative or father’s rightsy woman. You’ll be better off once you find them, or any place other than where you are.
I just looked it up, and 90 percent of divorces are settled out of court. Apparently, the divorces where the man is sucked dry of his income, dignity, and children by the courts, are a minority of divorces in America. Then, there’s the fact that an increasing number of women are opting out of motherhood altogether – so no custody, no child support to worry about. Then, there’s the fact that more and more women are becoming primary breadwinners, so the women in those relationships, earning the higher income, would pay the alimony if the case went to court.
Sure, I agree it’s not right to make ANYONE pay alimony when the other party has an alternative income source (like re-marriage to a wealthy person, or an inheritance), and that alimony and child support fraud going both ways should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but it seems to me the tide is beginning to turn in divorce cases – and relationships in general – far more than the MRAs would let on.
It doesn’t seem like anyone who’s concerned about unfair alimony, child support, or custody settlements has an action plan to tackle the issue, aside from complaining on the Internet, though. This makes sense, because passing legislation to mitigate the outcome of highly individualized divorce cases is extremely problematic. (For the record, I don’t support equal pay acts, etc., either because I feel likewise that there are too many variables involved in compensation for government to be the solution.) And asking us taxpayers to foot the bill is not the answer either.
One service that is becoming increasingly popular, though, is divorce mediation. Promoting the use of guided legal counseling with both parties’ input to ensure a more equitable outcome in a divorce might just be a solution. Of course, it’s always more fun to just complain.
. You’re not evil and anti-woman for being anti-alimony, anti-taxes, etc.
…
And I mean that. THAT doesn’t make you evil. But why you oppose those things counts for something, and for most MRA’s it’s not about higher principle. And Eivind’s rape-thing IS misogyny ahoy. And that’s the MRA. A vile, misogynistic pit sane libertarians and conservatives and traditionalists ran from and are running from like their feet were set on fire. A movement that is still sort of peeling itself like an onion, as the outer layers nearest to reason slowly detach themselves. I was there. I was there at the start. I’m happy I’m out, I weep for the potential that was lost, and I’m watching to see what’s at the center of that onion. Try not to be there when the last layer falls off.