So it turns out that the heartbreaking yet highly implausible story of attempted spermburgling that got the Men’s Rights subreddit so riled up on the first of the month … was in fact fake.
Mr. ineedhelpnow1234 himself wrote me a note today alerting me to a post on his blog explaining the whole thing, and why he did it. Some highlights:
I wanted to reveal just how twisted these men can be in the pursuit of their agenda so I came up with a story they could not resist. …
The spermjacker trope is irresistible to “men’s rights” activists because they believe they are perfect Darwinian examples of masculinity and as a result are irresistible to the hormonally irrational schemers that make up womankind. Narcissism and misogyny collide to make a toxic brew.
Oh, and I added the twist that this man punched his girlfriend so hard in the stomach that she bruised. Surely such fierce proponents of “gender equality” would not support violence against women. Right?
Well, we all know how that turned out. Ineedhelpnow1234/the blogger Eschatology continued:
The “men’s rights” movement is morally bankrupt. It is made up of people who support hitting women. It is made up of people who refuse to say it is wrong to hit women. It is made up of people who are so paranoid of women that they think people actually talk like this:
You fucking bastard, how dare you punch me for what I’m entitled to! Call me the minute you get this god damn message or I’ll call the fucking police and end your future. CALL MEEEE.
Attention MRA’s: You have all exposed yourselves as rotten human beings and you have discredited your movement (again). …
I wrote this story by stitching together nearly every cliche I have ever come across in the “men’s rights” movement. I tried to see if the MRAs had any line they would not cross. Apparently they do not. Looks like the SPLC made a good call.
Heck, even after they got called out for supporting the (imaginary) puncher, both here and on Jezebel, and were roundly mocked for believing such an utterly ridiculous tall tale, this is about as close as any Men’s Rights redditor got to criticizing the punch that never was:
He panicked and hit her. Sure he should have just have restrained her and took the condom out of her hands but we’re human and its not like he continually beat her into a pulp.
Yep, no big deal, “its not like he continually beat her into a pulp.”
The comment containing that line got 11 upvotes, and zero downvotes.
The Men’s Rights Movement, beyond the pale — but also beyond parody.
EDITED TO ADD: The Men’s Rights regulars respond to the big reveal here. They are apparently determined to learn absolutely nothing from the whole episode. At the moment this is the most highly upvoted comment:
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: Ineedhelpnow1234/Eschatology posted about this in the TwoXChromosomes subreddit, Naturally, a small horde of r/mensrightsers invaded the thread and pooped all over it.
Oh… just your average sexist, misogynist assholes like members of congress and Republican candidates for president. There’s plenty of sexism without MRAs.
RE: Mags
I’m a man who has been abused by men. I’ve been steeped in the toxic masculinity goo too.
You know what? I don’t lash out at all men. Because my pain is NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN. People rape each other and abuse each other all the fucking time. Also, I know for a fact that those men were a minority. (Plus, I’ve had some pretty toxic shit with women too.)
Somehow, I manage to restrain myself from writing long ragey screeds on the net, and the few times I have, my friends slapped me upside the head and told me to get over myself.
I hold other men to the same standards as I do myself. I’m not going to patronize them by telling them, “Aw, poor baby, sure you’ve gone through pain just like me, but I don’t expect you to have the same standards of decency as I do.” That’s treating them like children. They have to learn fucking self-control just like I did.
Also to MRAs …men are the ruling class, men commit most of the abuse… so why not cut slack to women if they behave as MRAs do? There’s a def power imbalance.
But no we’re supposed to bash rad fems with their non existent power… and say oh the poor menz just cannot be helped when they lash out. Shucks.
Sorry, but I’m more willing to cut slack to the black panthers and the SCUM manifesto than the whiny KKK.
RE: Anthony
Taking your thing for serious, and IF I were fertile and cis so I could actually impregnate someone…
I couldn’t hit them. I couldn’t hit someone when they were screaming and coming at me for interrupting their beating someone in the street, so no way I could hit this person who isn’t posing an immediate threat to me. (I mean, Jesus, man, what if this person is bigger and stronger than me? I might get completely beaten up ON TOP of whatever’s happening! At least for now, the situation is nonviolent!)
If I managed to remain calm, I’d realize that the odds of someone getting pregnant from a condom (likely full of spermicide) full of cold sperm is really fucking low. No need to do anything in that case, just let the crazy person flee my house, lock the door behind them, and breathe a deep sigh of relief that they left of their own volition.
But say I don’t remain calm. I STILL wouldn’t hit them because like I said, I have proved incapable of hitting someone even when I am in obvious imminent danger. I might try and talk to them. “You know, why don’t we discuss your options. There are way, WAY more effective ways to go about this. Are you even in a good financial situation to support a child? Because god knows I’m not!” If I really panic and forget all of this common sense stuff, I might try to get the condom away from them, if I weren’t afraid they’d beat the shit out of me. But I still wouldn’t HIT them.
In the high unlikelihood that this person got pregnant, AND if they were also diligent enough in their batshittery to come after me for child support… then I’d cough up the child support. I’m on the poverty line, so there’s damn little I could give, but it would be support FOR MY CHILD. A child I didn’t want to sire, a child conceived under horrible circumstances, but still my child. That money is going to THEM. THEIR food, THEIR well-being. If I’m not going to be responsible for their sake, who is?
I don’t have a lot of money. It’d be really hard. But it wouldn’t be nearly as hard for me as it would be for a child who nobody takes responsibility for. It might not be a child I had a choice in creating, but dammit, I will not abandon them for that. Whether I like it or not, they are here, and it is my responsibility as a human being to care for them as best I can.
This. A million times this.
In my judgment there is not a single reason why supporting a man’s rage and desires to lash out is good FOR ANYONE: for society, for women, or for the man himself. Encouraging him to dwell on that, to amplify it and egg it on, is piling abuse on abuse.
And though I’m a feminist through and through, the main reason I stand against the MRM is because of my work in the men’s movement: the old-school, faggy, drum-circle, support group men’s movement. Before this whole clusterfuck of wannabe-Tyler-Durdens showed up on the scene, men were working with each other to reclaim their identity while honoring women as equals.
But these bastards want to turn the clock back to the bad old days of rage and shame. Fuck them.
Re LBT: “toxic masculinity” – Bah! Buzz word for ideologue. We get it, you think there is something wrong with men and masculintiy. “Why can’t a man be more like a woman?” Cliche.
Mags, you’re trans, right? Certainly you’ve figured out that “men” the gender, “men” the sex, and “men” as “performing gendered acts” aren’t all the same thing by now? >.>
RE: Mags
The fuck? I mean the sort of bullshit men are taught like, “If you don’t like sports and drinking, you aren’t a real man,” “real men aren’t afraid to fight anyone anytime,” kinda crap. Of COURSE masculinity isn’t innately toxic; it’s people insisting that there’s only one way to be masculine. What horseshit is this?
Seriously, I felt like you just zeroed in on one phrase I used and COMPLETELY IGNORED everything else I said! Why are you ignoring my male pain, Mags?
LBT, because Mags does not actually care about male pain, like most MRAs. Mags is about defending the abusive dipshits Dave writes about and, well that pretty much sums up the total of Mag’s activism.
RE: Mags
Also, if a man WANTS to be “more like a woman,” however he defines it, I feel that he should have a right. My hubby’s an aspiring drag queen, and he’s got masculinity like DELICIOUS. He wants to express it in a corset and fishnets, I am so, SO not going to protest. At all.
I’m sorry, I just keep getting more WTF over this.
If I’m a gay trans man, so a man who LOVES men and who went though a good amount of heartache to force people to accept me as a man… WHY THE HELL WOULD I SEE SOMETHING INTRINSICALLY WRONG WITH MEN AND MASCULINITY? Am I supposed to just hate myself that much or something? If anything, a chunk of my self-loathing would be paranoid fears over not being masculine ENOUGH!
Seriously, what the hell, Mags. What. The. Hell.
Because teaching little kids that hitting is bad is making them all into girls. -_-
There is a flaw, I think, in Eschatology’s blog post explaining what he did and why, a flaw rooted in patriarchy. Eschatology says, paraphrasing, “MRA’s are ridiculous and extreme because they say that it’s OK to hit women.”
In normal, polite society the spoken rule taught to boys is, “Never hit a girl / woman.” However, the unspoken subtext is, “Unless she deserves it.” This is evidenced by the many men that do hit women and society’s common reaction to it. MRA’s speak this unspoken rule and, as we saw via Eschatology’s trolling, assert that the woman pretty much always deserves it.
The flaw, though, is accepting the spoken rule that it is wrong to hit a WOMAN. The more egalitarian notion is that it is wrong to hit anyone, including women. After all, women are people too.
How much do you wanna bet the MRAs are cooking up a counter-troll scheme to pose as a crazed feminist cliché of some sort to see if we bite? I’m not sure what kind of scenario they could come up with since most of their complaints are not based in reality to begin with; rampant false rape claims, manhating, spermjacking – it would reflect their own delusions, not ours.
These last comments are a great segue for the new post.
I should be amused that Mags appears to object to the notion that forcing people into stereotyped gender roles is bad, but really, that’s just sad.
AntZ :
I can think of at least one relatively non-violent way of dealing with this.
If he’s seriously worried that she might actually be able to get herself pregnant on old sperm taken from a spermicidal condom he could restrain her and take said condom off her and ask her to GTFO of his domicile and never see her again. Even really great sex isn’t worth this kind of drama.
If he’s not worried (as has already been pointed out, her chances of actually being able to get pregnant are negligible) He just needs to turf her out and call a lawyer in the morning and see if there’s any chance she can come after him legally, and what he should do if she tries any more nonsense.
Either way he gets her out of his life and keeps her out. Also he’s gained and kept the high moral ground and will be in a better position to take legal action of his own if he should need to. An accusation of assualt and battery can only weaken his position,
AntZ’s reaction begs the question that the (fictional) punch even makes sense from a purely utilitarian standpoint.
He was close enough to punch. Therefore he was close enough to reach out and restrain the condom-holding hand, or even, maybe, swat it to the ground.
The only way the punch makes sense is from a “Hulk no like! HULK SMASH!” perspective. Which is the whole point.
Sara – I’m a little worried that the counter-troll will be something completely reasonable, like a woman saying that she was harassed or raped in a completely plausible way, and the MRAs will get all “trolled you bigots!” because we believe her.
Which is also all about thee delusions and not ours, but in a nastier way.
Thee = their.
Stupid phone keyboard.
PDA:
No, it seems completely unnecessary. It’s just pointless. The whole story has holes in it that you could drive a truck through. Why would anyone even post such a thing if they weren’t trolling? It was a public forum and if the story had been real could have got him in even deeper trouble.
Cool! Skepchick posted about this and jacked the image you used. “Featured image jacked from Manboobz (click through for the wonderful animated version).”
http://skepchick.org/2012/04/rmensrights-hate-group-trolled/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Skepchick+%28Skepchick%29&utm_content=FaceBook
😀
@Talacaris: attribution is not restricted to scholarly journals–journalists attribute all the time.
The point of attribution is so YOUR readers can go find out what you’re quoting or paraphrasing and evaluate it for themselves–it there is no single place or person you can point to as having said the thing you’re talking about, then I’m going to assume you’re making it up.
And ignore you.
As I will proceed to do. Ta!
OMG, is Talacaris possible B_N who used to reply sulking all the time: you’re not my teacher, you cannot make me, when asked for who said what?????
Unlike these words, which aren’t buzzwords used to illicit emotions at all…
mangina
misandry
female-supremacism
false rape culture
white knight
worthless women
toxic women
irresponsible mother
paternity fraud
forced fatherhood
vagina syndrome
sick older women
Femedia
gynocentrism
shaming language
the pussy pass
hypergamy
feral female
he-woman
jail bait
feministed
red pill
blue pill
etc. etc. ad nauseum. In fact, all of them are buzzwords.
Brought to you by everyone’s favorite UK MRA ManWomanMyth:
http://www.manwomanmyth.com/glossary/