Oh, the Men’s Rights subreddit is on a roll! Earlier in the week, as regular readers will already be well aware, a sizeable number of the regulars there were waxing indignant about a spermburgling girlfriend who turned out to be imaginary, and expressing sympathy for the imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary boyfriend, even though he’d admitted to punching her in her imaginary stomach.
Now they’re directing their wrath at a British journalist whom they’ve decided is being insufficiently grateful for being rescued from being hit by a speeding automobile by Ryan Gosling.
The backstory: Earlier in the week, British journalist Laurie Penny was wandering the streets of Manhattan, lost in thought, when she almost stepped off the curb into the path of a taxi. A man standing nearby grabbed her and pulled her to safety. That man happened to be famously hunky young actor Ryan Gosling.
Naturally, Penny tweeted about it, and her tweet aroused something of a Twitterstorm, in part because of the novelty of the situation, and in part because the thought of someone so dashing performing this little act of urban heroism made more than a few ladies (and men) swoon a little. I would probably react the same way if I heard a story about Kate Winslet saving a kitten.
Anyway, Penny was a little bit overwhelmed by all the attention her story was getting, and ended up writing a funny, spiky little essay for Gawker reminding people that while, yes, Ryan Gosling had indeed done a very nice thing for her, for which she was grateful, that it wasn’t really the biggest deal in the world. For one thing, she pointed out, lots of ordinary decent people perform similar acts of “heroism” all the time. For another, there are bigger heroes out there – like those working tirelessly to keep Rick Santorum from becoming our next president.
She ended the piece with this:
I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story. I do not mean any disrespect to Ryan Gosling, who is an excellent actor and, by all accounts, a personable and decent chap. …
But as a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.
And the thing is, I’m sure he would. I’m sure he’s as embarrassed about the attention as Penny is.
Well, for some people, Penny’s refusal to play the “boring supportive role” was simply unacceptable. Over on The National Review, antifeminist asshole Suzanne Venker wrote a snide and misleading piece portraying Penny as an ungrateful bitch:
If Western women want to know where all the good men have gone, they need only look in the mirror. Not only can men no longer hold the door open for women or pay the check after dinner, they can’t even save a woman’s life and get a simple thank you.
Never mind that Penny wrote explicitly that she was “grateful to the dashing and meme-worthy Mr. Gosling.” We can conclude that Venker either has terrible reading comprehension, or is deliberately lying about Penny. In any case, she continued on in this vein:
Feminists have totally destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Not all women seek the feminized version of the American male. Most women like big, strong, sexy men. They want men who are willing to put out fires, fight in combat, and, yes, even save damsels in distress. But in post-feminist America, Marlboro Man is a rare breed. We can thank women like Penny for that.
Well, actually, the reason the Marlboro Man isn’t around any more is that he died of lung cancer. (Well, to be more specific, two of the actors who portrayed the Marlboro Man did in fact die that way.) But let’s continue:
If Americans don’t wake up to the evils of feminism, the next time a woman walks down the wrong side of the street, the men of America will simply walk right past her and let her get hit.
And we’ll have no one blame but ourselves.
Really? Really? I’m pretty sure that Penny’s Gawker essay isn’t actually going to turn American men into a bunch of woman-hating psychopaths. I think we can all agree that Venker is being a giant turd here.
Well, not all of us, I guess. Someone posted Venker’s little screed to the Men’s Rights subreddit – you were wondering when I’d get back to them, weren’t you? And the regulars responded, well, like you would expect them to. Here are two of the most highly upvoted comments there, from two of the subreddit’s most prolific posters.
Stay classy. Men’s Rights Redditors!
I am bad at memory-I cannot remember the name of the coins that are huge from one of the Terry Pratchett books that there is a great joke with.
I remember the Ningi from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side.
Everybody needs to calm down about Anthony Zarat and his plan to replace me with a VR simulation.
It was a curious thing that happened to me on the way to somewhere else. I had just given birth in three pushes through sheer force of will. I was thinking about awesome lines from “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” that would be appropriate to the situation, and I didn’t remember to reassure my husband that I would not take the baby and run out on him the minute he unlocked the manacle around my ankle. He decided that the only solution was to replace me with a computer program. And that was that.
I am grateful to the very meme-worthy Zarat, just as I am grateful to all the other fine pharmaco-genetic scientists working every day to perfect sonic sperm extractors so women will be obsolete, good citizens making the eastern half of the country that much better in the future when I and all other women are shipped across the Mississippi. It was a little bit like being in a cheesy film, possibly “Lawnmower Man,” but every day with Zarat is like being in a cheesy film. I’ve been with him ever since I left my FOREIGN HOMELAND, and sometimes I think I’M the one in VR! Ha ha!
Look, I am kind of an idiot. Look who I married. If Zarat hadn’t happened to be the nearest person at the time, I’m sure someone else would have come along and started the preparations to replace me with a VR simulation, for my own good.
Yes, I was a little bit disturbed — but in fairness, a lot Zarat’s inventions are disturbing. What’s with the sonic thing, for instance? I really think the sentiment “Anthony Zarat is a creepy as hell and his hypothetical family needs to get away from him” needs to be reassessed, even though it’s technically accurate.
People completely flip out over not having total control over their partners all the time. I don’t believe that the fact that pharmaco-genetic scientists occasionally take a break to program virtual girlfriends so they can leave their human spouses is in itself news — it might have been slightly newsworthy had Zarat simply floated by on a cloud of his own genius whilst his wife continued to walk around and have free will like she thinks she’s people, but lucky for me, even men who are fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese can be depended on to save themselves from the peril of flesh-women.
Non-FOREIGN people are very strange. They can and do hyperventilate about the most everyday happenings as if they are the most important thing in the world, and then they act completely normal when public conversations are had about letting women live in the same cities as men — on the same streets, sometimes even in the same houses! The real heroes I’ve met in America are risking everything to make sure that their sons will never have contact with human females and will never, ever be taught that hitting is wrong.
What’s more, I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story. I do not mean any disrespect to Anthony Zarat, who is by his own account a polymath, inventor, and the son of a feminist scholar. I thought he was marvelous when he went around calling everyone bigots for being bigoted about his bigotry, and will feel weird about our marriage if his invention doesn’t work and I have to encounter him briefly as an actual human.
But as a meat-woman, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though my husband is plotting to replace me, and even though my all-too-human flesh did crawl the tiniest bit when I realized it. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Anthony Zarat would agree with me.
Sincerely,
FOREIGN BRIDE
I found drive weirdly sexist; in part certainly because I earlier read the novel and the changes were almost exclusively misogynist. They added a quasi rape scene where Gosling shuts down a woman, I swear, he closes the door silently, puts on leather gloves, shoves her to the bed, god. The whole movie crawls with creepy sex/violence equivocations, it adds a madonna/whore dichotomy that isn’t in the book. A regular scene where someone gets killed, iirc, in his car, is changed to a quasi-oral sex rape scene (man on man this time) in the dressing room of a strip club, surrounded by naked women. The misogyny this movie revels in flabbergasted me. God on earth.
Shaenon, that was lovely, but properly you ought to post it under a sock.
shigekuni – Yeesh. Thanks for the warning. There needs to be a site that lists all the possible triggers in movies and stuff for those of us who don’t want to see them, or even give money for that kind of content.
You mean like this katz?
Dear Manboobzers,
Everybody needs to calm down about Anthony Zarat and his plan to replace me with a VR simulation.
It was a curious thing that happened to me on the way to somewhere else. I had just given birth in three pushes through sheer force of will. I was thinking about awesome lines from “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” that would be appropriate to the situation, and I didn’t remember to reassure my husband that I would not take the baby and run out on him the minute he unlocked the manacle around my ankle. He decided that the only solution was to replace me with a computer program. And that was that.
I am grateful to the very meme-worthy Zarat, just as I am grateful to all the other fine pharmaco-genetic scientists working every day to perfect sonic sperm extractors so women will be obsolete, good citizens making the eastern half of the country that much better in the future when I and all other women are shipped across the Mississippi. It was a little bit like being in a cheesy film, possibly “Lawnmower Man,” but every day with Zarat is like being in a cheesy film. I’ve been with him ever since I left my FOREIGN HOMELAND, and sometimes I think I’M the one in VR! Ha ha!
Look, I am kind of an idiot. Look who I married. If Zarat hadn’t happened to be the nearest person at the time, I’m sure someone else would have come along and started the preparations to replace me with a VR simulation, for my own good.
Yes, I was a little bit disturbed — but in fairness, a lot Zarat’s inventions are disturbing. What’s with the sonic thing, for instance? I really think the sentiment “Anthony Zarat is a creepy as hell and his hypothetical family needs to get away from him” needs to be reassessed, even though it’s technically accurate.
People completely flip out over not having total control over their partners all the time. I don’t believe that the fact that pharmaco-genetic scientists occasionally take a break to program virtual girlfriends so they can leave their human spouses is in itself news — it might have been slightly newsworthy had Zarat simply floated by on a cloud of his own genius whilst his wife continued to walk around and have free will like she thinks she’s people, but lucky for me, even men who are fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese can be depended on to save themselves from the peril of flesh-women.
Non-FOREIGN people are very strange. They can and do hyperventilate about the most everyday happenings as if they are the most important thing in the world, and then they act completely normal when public conversations are had about letting women live in the same cities as men — on the same streets, sometimes even in the same houses! The real heroes I’ve met in America are risking everything to make sure that their sons will never have contact with human females and will never, ever be taught that hitting is wrong.
What’s more, I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story. I do not mean any disrespect to Anthony Zarat, who is by his own account a polymath, inventor, and the son of a feminist scholar. I thought he was marvelous when he went around calling everyone bigots for being bigoted about his bigotry, and will feel weird about our marriage if his invention doesn’t work and I have to encounter him briefly as an actual human.
But as a meat-woman, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though my husband is plotting to replace me, and even though my all-too-human flesh did crawl the tiniest bit when I realized it. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Anthony Zarat would agree with me.
Sincerely,
FOREIGN BRIDE
That was me LOL.
Hey, on the other hand, maybe I’m just sensitive to this shit. Reviews don’t seem to mention it a lot.
Antsy’s “re-gendering” (that isn’t really since it changes the situation too much to be directly comparable) shows he missed the point, just like every other fool in that reddit thread, and Venker to boot.* Laurie Penny’s article was not about how attention ought to be paid to her: the main thrust was about heroism and the overestimation of Gosling’s actions (a point Antsy apparently cannot grasp, as evidenced by turning the incident into a marathon victory in his “re-gendering”). The stuff about being cast as a ditzy damsel in distress (alliteration ftw) came only in the last two paragraphs, practically as an afterthought. A valid point about the media’s coverage of her does not half an article undermining someone else’s achievement make.
*Although we must give credit to Antsy for finding a unique way to misread Penny’s point, motivated by the same underlying misogyny and his own unique ill-equipped mind.
I have nothing to add to this conversation except a righteous Stampede City fistbump to Viscaria.
That apalling display of Canadian patriotism over, please return to your regularily scheduled troll mockery.
@Quackers
“The Spearhead lovelies decide to grace us with their opinions on the matter too
James April 6, 2012 at 12:06
Oh and one more point- that faggot Ryan should have let that dumb bitch get hit and killed by the car. It would be one less worthless feminist bitch on this planet.
and they wonder why they’re considered a hate group.
and they wonder why they’re considered a hate group.”
—————–
What’d you expect? Men the world over to praise her as she goes on a man bashing, grrrrl power tirade? The guy supposedly saved her life and the pampered princess decides to spend her five minutes of fame preaching the laughable war on women. I’m surprised this spoiled little gem hasn’t teamed up with Gloria Allred and charged Ryan with groping and sexual harrassment.
Howdy guys! Miss me while I was away?
Not really.
Oh mah gawd! Deses bitches are so ungrateful and stuff!
But, seriously, Penny said thank you! Did these people expect a parade?
I like that the only option men have is either praise her or declare that she should have been left to die. I had no issue with what she wrote, but if I did, I would be satisfied with saying “That was fucked up of her” rather than run around wishing death on her for not being sufficiently grateful. Then again, that could be because I’m a human being.
Hey NWO-how many decades does this lady have to say “thank you” to be sufficiently grateful for something ordinary people do every day.
Reading the mensrights discussion and then seeing Antsy and Owly talking about it here has made me realize that r/mr is frequented by trolls of the exact same caliber as A and O, and populated by people who upvote them–except that since they’re the mainstream they’re not even trolls over there.
I gotta be honest with ya, Dave. You’ve stooped to a new low with this little blog. You and the rest of the gang are rushing to defend some spoiled princess who basically wrote a hate article about men after having her life saved by a man. Regender the whole thing and the gang would be having a field day. Unless you believe the gang would be rushing to defend the regendered version.
That’s how you know you belong to a hate group. If you defend someone from that group no matter what they say, while ridiculing and vilifying the other group for saying the same thing. Hate groups dictating what constitutes hatred. Priceless!
Are smilies Antz’s latest bullshit trend? It’s only endearing when Ami does it, Zarat.
Next up for Antsy’s creative writing homework: apostrophe, metaphor, and diction.
O feminism, thou slithy deer
who walkest thro the walky
woods and channels
the bombs of misandry,
when thou seest shadows but doth not hear
the roaring waterfall-
I shall be nowhere near, but well
endowed with wife, VR and all.
@princessbonbon
“Hey NWO-how many decades does this lady have to say “thank you” to be sufficiently grateful for something ordinary people do every day.”
How about a simple thank you without the standard grrrrl power sermon? “Thanks, but men are still shit and women are divine” doesn’t really float my boat. I’m funny that way. But go right on defending her. Pat yourself on the back for once again being on the side of any woman.
NWO stave said…
You are a nut. – Me.
Ok… now my name calling quota has been met…sorry. Done.
Sounds like NWO’s jealous he doesn’t have a five minutes of fame. Well, Slavey, that’s what you get for being a pathetic excuse for a human being leaving nothing but a legacy of hatred behind you. Enjoy having no one attend your funeral.
@lauralot89
“Enjoy having no one attend your funeral.”
If only a woman would attend my funeral, I’d know my life was meaningful and complete.