Is there something about being an MRA that makes you want to monologue like a cartoon supervillain?
Over on In Mala Fide, our dear friend Ferdinand Bardamu has responded in an amusingly monologuey manner to Arthur Goldwag’s followup to his earlier article for the Southern Poverty Law Center on the Men’s Rights movement. Bardamu whips himself into a bit of a lather, describing “Snerdling and his compadres” – for some reason he’s decided to call Goldwag “Snerdling” – as the
vanguards of a dying institution, desperately jamming their thumbs in the dike to keep the truth from drowning them. They’re on the losing side of history. Their shrieks are the shrieks of the dying and damned.
Their shrieks?
Oh, but there’s more. This earlier comment in Bardamu’s post is sort of a classic in the “implied threat” genre so beloved by MRAs like Paul Elam and his gang:
You’ve bitten off far more than you can chew here. You’ve antagonized the fastest-growing and most relevant movement/entity in America and the Western world. With every sling and arrow, the manosphere swells in size, a voice for the most powerful and deadliest force on Earth — the disenfranchised young man.
Emphasis mine.
Amazingly, in the very next paragraph, Bardamu waxes indignant that Goldwag had the gall to refer to “threat[s], overt or implicit, of violence” from MRAs. Bardamu responds with a big, insincere “who, me?”
I’ve made threats of violence? Leftists always pull this game — they never give specific examples … .
You want a specific example? LOOK AT WHAT YOU JUST WROTE IN YOUR LAST FUCKING PARAGRAPH. That bit about Goldwag allegedly antagonizing “the most powerful and deadliest force on Earth — the disenfranchised young man?” That is an implicit threat of violence. It’s kind of hard to miss.
You want to see more specific examples of threats from MRAs? I’ve got post after post full of them.
Heck, he doesn’t even need to look at Man Boobz. All he needs to do is to look at the comments on his own post, starting with the very first one:
SPLC: Thanks for kicking the sleeping dog,that dog needed to learn to bite rather than sleep.
Then he can scroll down the page for this more explicit threat from Brigadon:
I prefer practicing real, unmistakable violence.
Further down the page, in response to a feminist who has stopped by to call the IMF regulars on some of their bullshit, Brigadon elaborates further:
I have called it a ‘war’ before, and I will again. It is not a cold war, it is a hot war, with constant and socially-approved violence against men. The only way to fight a hot war is with violence. …
So, maybe it sounds like a call for violence, but at this point any woman that calls herself a ‘feminist’, regardless of their protests that they are ‘not like those other ones’ Is a criminal, a traitor to their species, their culture, their honor, their family, their nation, their gender, and their world. There is only one punishment that fits a traitor.
How dare Goldwag suggest that MRAs ever threaten violence!
Apollo, meanwhile, somehow manages to overlook the threatening language in Bardamu’s post and suggests that the real threatmongers are … you and me:
[T]he Internet is full of people making violent threats. … Yet in the Manosphere, where I think real injustices are being brought to light, and people surely have a right to anger, you will NOT see the threats of violence that are so very common in so many other places of the Internet. When such a violent comment does pop up in the Manosphere, it is usually very quickly squashed by mods. And any such comments stand out simply because of how rare they are.
Yet one visit to Manboob, or any other Feminist site, and you will be able to quickly be able to find threats of violence. The blatant hypocrisy here is just sickening
[Citation Needed]
Also, though this is a whole other kettle of beans, the fact that Goldwag is Jewish seems to have inspired a number of the anti-Semites in the In Mala Fide crowd to crawl out from under their rocks – one of them being our old pal JeremiahMRA, who weighs in with a comment calling Goldwag a “creepy Jew,” in two words combining anti-Semitism with “creep shaming,” which in the weird world of the manosphere is the most hateful kind of hate ever perpetrated upon any mortal soul. (Goldwag offers a brief but pointed response to Bardamu’s post, and to the anti-Semitism, on his own blog.)
Is any of this really surprising on a blog whose name means “In Bad Faith?”
Someone posted this in the comments a while ago, and I couldn’t help but think of it as I wrote this post:
Yes, MRAs, you ARE the baddies.
Rush Limbagh though.
nobody cares, factfinder
@ArgentiAertheri
I should have put a trigger warning in my post, sorry.
Quackers — it’s fine, the one you picked is no worse than the usual trolls, I just wanted to note that that comment was an oddity, the rest are much worse.
I guess that it goes to show that when they don’t think of women as people, the violence towards women becomes as blase as violence towards a cardboard box that happened to trip you up when you were trying to walk down the street.
When these men say that they are not “violent”- what they really are saying is that they are not violent toward those who they see as “fellow humans” (other males). Everyone else is fair game.
Is anyone else getting a massively sociopathic vibe here?
@Argenti
like this one?
TW
What a twisted little fuck. It’s all about power, not about equality as MRAs like to pretend. The law says you can’t beat your spouse and that takes away his “power” on top of that, sex appeal is equivalent to physical abuse for this creep. Its classic misogynistic abuser logic. Even Ferdy himself is surprised he hasn’t gotten as much shit for his article. Goes to show just how much the MRM cares about calling out their extremists eh?
@Nanasha:
Yes, but sadly not any more than I get from the rest of the MRM.
although to give credit where credit is due, at least the r/mensrights banned JeremiahMRA
That’s sort of the ones I meant, yeah. Though I was thinking more like how comment #5 spelling out the victim blaming “logic” of domestic murder *shudder* — or the ones not speaking in hypotheticals.
“Is anyone else getting a massively sociopathic vibe here?” — that set does seem particularly fucked up
I don’t think I can check any of these links. It is so much worse than I thought. :/
The guys who did theactual banning aren’t much better though. Isn’t Factory one of their mods?
I’m not sure…AnnArchist is pretty fucked up and he’s a mod :/
I really hate these kind of arguments. It totally ignores the fact for abuse to happen – for their victims to stay – it requires far more emotional manipulation than the victim supposedly uses. That is, abuse isn’t strictly about physical power, it’s got a heavy emotional component as well, in order to keep the victim from leaving. Most people wouldn’t get into a relationship if it started out violent (there are exceptions, of course), so most abusers test the waters with emotional manipulation and escalate from there. That argument is more about an abuser’s justification for the abuse, rather than the reality of abuse, and it pisses me off. What really makes me angry about that statement is the “truce” – there will never really be one, as the abuser will always find a way to abuse, no matter the excuse.
I prefer to think of my relationships not as adversarial combat but of partnership. But then again, I’m not into trying to control people.
The equation of emotional manipulation with physical violence just serves to justify their misogynist, barbarian views and the physical violence they obviously want to commit. Physical violence is re-cast as justified retaliation and its use merely the preservation of a perverted “equality.” Of course, manipulation is nowhere near as dangerous as physical violence, so really it is about controlling what women are allowed to do. Viewing a personal, intimate relationship as merely a stable truce perverts and twists that relationship into something deeply unhealthy. Life behind the eyes of people who believe such things must be horrifying.
I don’t know about you guys, but when I’m in a stable truce with someone, my first thought is usually I don’t want to date this person.
When these men say that they are not “violent”- what they really are saying is that they are not violent toward those who they see as “fellow humans” (other males). Everyone else is fair game.
Exactly.
because the man retains his physical power as a weapon and she retains her sexual and emotional manipulation as a weapon.
I despise this argument too. What they’re saying is that women’s “power” comes from being able to please men–by being attractive, being emotionally accommodating, making themselves desirable to have around.
The thing is, men have that power too. These particular men simply choose not to use it.
The EL DUDE Brothers
It is incredibly gross when people talk about “disciplining” their partners. To discipline someone, you need to have authority over them. There’s also the implication that you would be a better judge of correct behaviour than they are. I can’t imagine ever wanting to have that sort of relationship with another adult human being, either as “discipliner” or “disciplinee”. It sickens me, honestly.
Thing is, if you want to do discipline as part of a kink relationship, and everyone involved is agreed on that? No problem. But these guys a. won’t acknowledge that it’s a kink, b. want to impose it on everyone else, and c. wouldn’t actually enjoy it as part of an openly kinky scenario, because the fact that the woman isn’t going to like it, but isn’t going to have any choice in the matter, is what they want most out of the whole deal.
“…because the fact that the woman isn’t going to like it, but isn’t going to have any choice in the matter, is what they want most out of the whole deal.”
I think deep down they believe women WANT to be disciplined, i.e. hit, by their partner (at least any submissive, feminine, REAL woman). They think that if you don’t want your partner to hit you it is because you are a masculinized, feminist shrew. It goes back to the whole despicable “gina tingles” argument.
That is horrifying.
Oh damn :-$ I totally erased everyone who enjoys discipline consensually. Thanks for checking me on that, Cassandra.
Sorry guys. :-$
The “this is what women really want” stuff reads like rationalization to me, honestly.
I can honestly say AVfM has improved my life. Without it I might never have heard of Goldwag, whose blog I just added to my reader.
Kyrie:
I think the idea is that when they grow tired of their disenfranchisedness, they express unofficially the resentment they are unable to express officially. Since men have no voice in the government — it’s not like the president, mot of the cabinet, most state executives, and most legislators at all levels are men or anything — we have no choice but to rise up in violent rebellion.
Sharc:
Because if he had to look for an example of the system failing resulting in harm to a man as a man at the hands of a woman as a woman he’d have no examples at all.
People constantly conflate discipline with punishment. They really are not the same at all.
Discipline is something we exercise over ourselves. We make choices in accordance with the expected result.
Punishment is commonly used in many societies in an effort to “teach discipline” to others.
But punishment is not discipline.
Beating someone into submission to your will is not discipline. It is abuse. Manipulating them into accepting that they caused you to beat them in to submission is not discipline either. It is also abuse.