Many of those in the manosphere wear their misogyny like a badge of honor. Others like to present themselves as fierce opponents of bigotry, and angrily deny the charges of misogyny thrown their way. When the Southern Poverty Law Center ran an article noting the misogyny often found on A Voice for Men, for example, site founder Paul Elam responded with great indignation in an open letter to the group:
Yesterday I received the unfortunate news that your organization … listed my website, avoiceformen.com, among others, as misogynistic, or “woman-hating. … Contrary to what readers of your site may be led to believe, the goals of SPLC and AVfM are quite similar: We both work to identify groups who seek to oppress others, and inform the public of the inequities they would perpetuate.
This seems a strange argument for the man whose handle on YouTube is “The Happy Misogynist,” and who regularly writes posts filled with hair-curling hatred of women. It seems even stranger when you consider AVFM’s support of a site that frankly peddles hate – against women, “manginas,” gay men, lesbian, and trans folk.
I’m talking about the misleadingly named Artistry Against Misandry site. AAM and AVFM seem almost joined at the hip. AAM’s founder, musician Jade Michael, wrote and performed the theme song currently used on AVFM’s internet “radio show.” AVFM has returned the favor, promoting the site and helping raise money for it. Indeed, several days ago Elam himself proudly announced that he’d sent along $100 of his own money to help Michael fund an upcoming event.
The site describes itself as follows:
Welcome to the first pro-male artist activist network. Within these pages you will find music, poetry, prose, graphics, cartoons and additional links, all of which are here to bring attention to and counter misandry in Western society.
In practice, this means saying the worst shit about women you can possibly imagine. Oh, the “artists” also say terrible things about men who don’t hate women with fervor — you may recall the ridiculous caricature of me as a self-flagellating, woman-worshipping “mangina” at the end of this post from a couple of days ago.
But the “artists” whose work is featured on the site focus most of their venom on women. Let’s take a look at several graphics from Reality, one of the site’s most prolific contributors.
Yep, that’s right: “western women” are “the new tapeworm parasites.” Here are a couple more.
There are (literally) forty more where those came from, and they’re pretty much all as nasty and hateful as the ones I’ve featured here. I suggest you visit AAM’s graphic art page and scroll through the rest of Reality’s wares.
If you don’t have the patience for that, and since the app they use on AAM to display Reality’s artwork is a piece of crap, I’m just going to highlight some more of his clever anti-misandry slogans here in text form:
Women actually expect you to act like a traditional male. While they live like psychotic whores. Keep dreaming, bitch!
Guys, do you really want to know what she’s thinking? 100% pure shit.
[Picture of women pointing at the camera.] We get everything and do nothing for it. Now get back to work slave.. we can put you in jail or bankrupt you with just a pointed finger.
Remember, when a woman tells you she’s tired it’s the only time she’s actually telling you the truth because…being a raging petty psychotic bitch…while being virtually retarded…while having endless banal thoughts she considers “genius…” while making insane and constant ultimatums…IS absolutely EXHAUSTING!!
Meanwhile, an artist calling himself “Andy Man” declares in a graphic of his own:
This is the sort of “artistry” that A Voice for Men is actively supporting.
And they wonder why some might consider them part of a hate movement?
Artistry Against Misandry also features music, videos, and even poetry, all of it awful, in every sense of the word. I will take a look at some of this in future posts.
EDIT: I added one more Reality graphic and a bunch of his slogans in text form.
MollyRen — depends if we’re looking for art by conservatives, or art promoting conservative values — both your examples are the former, I think, but both seemed to more depict everyday life (as they saw it) than be directly promoting how things should be. Rockwell in particular did a lot of those paintings as commissioned art, and produced things like The Problem We All Live With — so I’m not sure he was personally a conservative even. Idk on Grandma Moses though, she might be an example of a conservative producing everyday art.
My artist self feels the need to defend that commissioned works do not reflect the views of the artists though (will I paint you fighting a lion? idk, will you pay me? — he wouldn’t, so I didn’t, it’s truly that simple unfortunately)
@Sharculese and also Argenti Aertheri:
what there isn’t any of is good art by 20th century american conservatives, because theyve constructed a movement thats openly hostile to art.
Disclaimer: I so don’t do aesthetics theory, and am very nervous and terms like “good” and “bad” in relation to any art; ditto music and visual arts, just texts.
I’d say that in the U.S. the mainstream conservative movement is not openly hostile to all art–it s openly hostile to the majority of contemporary art, to non-realistic types of art, to art they perceive as having a “political” message (meaning “not conservative message”!), and especially art by marginalized groups, and, finally, art with any (as far as they perceive) explicit sexuality, especially alternative sexualities.
*whew* Plus Tax dollars should never be spent to support the arts.
They also tend to vote to cut arts training of any sort in public schools.
Romney would cut ‘cultural’ spending in half
They are also hostile to the idea that the dead white male canon might be read/expressed in any way that doesn’t support their idea of the status quo. In the recent debacle in Arizonia (Tucson, Mexican American studies program under attack), Shakepeare’s TEMPEST was on the list of banned books because of how it’s often taught these days (reflecting the current scholarship on how the play deals with European colonization of the “new world,” and how Caliban can be read as representing indigenous populations.
Additionally, I’d say the hostility isn’t only to the arts, broadly speaking, but critical engagement with the arts — i.e. teaching students to question and analyze, not accept the ‘right answer,’ which is of course the answer on the standardized exam students must pass before receiving their high school diplomas.
@Argenti: My artist self feels the need to defend that commissioned works do not reflect the views of the artists though
I’d go even further in my postmodern way and say that I feel no need to claim that any work of art “reflects the views of the artists” –and that if, say, the ‘views’ of the artist are crystal clear and smacking one over the head (as with the examples above), then it’s not art but propaganda.
And I like to avoid the idea that there is some pure art (i.e. not commissioned? not sold for profit? the artist not wanting some form of public recognition, if not actual money) that is inherently different from/better than commissioned/for profit art.
Yeah, I looked at that picture with the war memorial and the homeless man. I gotta say, at least the artist put some effort into it, rather than collage up some clip art or photos. Probably the art will turn out to have been traced, but I never said it was a whole lot of effort.
I’m leaning towards “looked up a war memorial on line and cribbed from it.” Whoever did it either isn’t from the US or doesn’t know or care enough to get the dates of our involvement in the World Wars right.
But the thing that bugs me is there is absolutely nothing about the guy that says, “veteran.” Okay, he’s leaning against a war memorial so the identity is kind of impossible not to infer, but if someone didn’t know that a lot of veterans are homeless the veteran angle is lost. The image still works without it, though.
The argument itself is bunk. Just because some men are at the bottom of the social ladder doesn’t mean male privilege is an illusion.
@ithiliana
i don’t think we really disagree, and youre right, the term ‘good art’ is problematic, but i felt like it was the best descriptor i had for this situation
like yeah, i don’t mean conservatives are hostile to art in and of itself, but their relationship to it is a lot like jto’s relationship to gay men in david’s latest post- they recognize the utility and maybe even the value of art, but they don’t really get the things that go into making art. this:
movement conservatism is about self-evident truths. if you have to do any sort of analysis to get there, you’re doing it wrong. john mcnaughton is a really good example of this. http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/ he does these detailed, highly technical oil paintings where everything is symbolic, but the symbols don’t work together, it’s just a bunch of different metaphors gathered on one canvas. and then he helpfully provides explanations of each one, even when it’s really obvious shit like ‘jesus represents the fact that jesus will come to rid us of the kenyan muslim usurper’
where this really comes out is movement conservative film-making. they assume movies like ‘an american carol’ or ‘atlas shrugged’ will succeed because the message is so OBVIOUS to them that they can’t get how it comes off to someone who isn’t already part of the tribe. and because the message is both obvious and good, the movie must be good, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
and movement conservatism is heavy on identity politics, so identification ends up being part of the rubric by which they judge art. take thomas kincade: he must be good because a) he knew how to talk like one of them and b.) ‘liberals’ by their broad definition, don’t like him. i guarantee you david mamet’s next play could be a phoned-in, apolitical mess and the national review would give it five stars because he’s one of them now.
wrt movies, i think there’s also a thing where conservatives have been conditioned to expect a certain level of shittiness in their movies. there are plenty of specialty houses that have realized you can go super low budget and still make a profit as long as you market the movie as explicitly conservative, and theyve gotten used to that. i remember when atlas shrugged, part 1 came out dave weigel had a post where he was like (to liberally paraphrase) ‘people who are pointing to the terrible acting and hackneyed design are missing the point, you can’t compare this to mainstream movies, but to the limited release christian films the intended audience is used to seeing, and compared to that, this movie, while horribly bland, exhibits a technical competence that in their eyes is indistinguishable from citizen kane.’
I was going to say, my granddad fought in WW2, and if he was alive today he’d be…85 or so? I think adding all the bits together we once again have “we hunted the mammoth for you”, ie. anything that a man ever did that was admirable means that any MRA now essentially did the same thing. Don’t think granddad would appreciate his sacrifice being appropriated in the service of a bunch of dudes who want to take away the right of women (including his wife and daughters) to vote.
My grandmother served in WWII. Therefore, I beat Hitler.
(Admittedly, she didn’t see combat, but neither did either of my grandfathers.)
Ithiliana — “And I like to avoid the idea that there is some pure art (i.e. not commissioned? not sold for profit? the artist not wanting some form of public recognition, if not actual money) that is inherently different from/better than commissioned/for profit art.”
I was trying to separate out art done for someone who’d requested something specific from art the artist thought up, not by whether there’s money involved. The point was more that commissioned art may express views directly contrary to what the artist actually thinks, because starving artist isn’t just a phrase.
And idk on “the ‘views’ of the artist are crystal clear and smacking one over the head (as with the examples above), then it’s not art but propaganda.” — I didn’t necessarily mean only political views, eg Emilie Autumn’s book talks about her abortion as being the right choice, for her, does that make the whole book not art? (This is a very small section of a rather long autobiographical book)
Otherwise I agreed with what you and Sharculese have said.
NWO, the 1 in 4 statistic comes from a study finding that one in four female college students reported having been raped in their lifetimes. It doesn’t mean they all got raped there on campus (although campus rape is a serious problem).
And later studies have found that the number is closer to 1 in 5. So that’s something.
And, some MRAs seem unaware (on this Memorial day) that any military women have served in dangeous conditions or died.
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2012/05/28/rite-of-passage/
“Traveller May 28, 2012 at 12:34
From Google News front page:
“Memorial Day to remember the men AND THE WOMEN [uppercase mine] died in wars.”
What women? Of course even the communist Wikipedia adds “and the women”. Everyone knows the truth instead.”
Uh …
http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/lives.html
http://www.nooniefortin.com/iraq.htm
http://askville.amazon.com/female-soldiers-died-Iraq-War/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=39411395
http://www.cmrlink.org/WomenInCombat.asp?docID=335
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/debate/index.asp?article=0905
Shaenon — I’m curious if you have a citation on that 1 in 4 is in their lifetimes, I’ve always seen it as before graduation, but maybe I’ve seen the study misquoted. The statistics geek in me would like to see wtf it actually says now though. I would imagine you’re reading it correctly, but then I’m curious on the methodology that produced 1 in 4 versus 1 in 5 — gotta get my math right when explaining this in detail to NWO after all.
NWO —
“If you really didn’t care that much, you’d have let it drop. Wouldn’t you? Another excuse it appears.”
You asked for me to respond to it, so I did, you can’t now claim I shouldn’t have responded.
“A blow to me ego? Another dig at my inferiority? My ego needs to be stroked apparently.”
More like a bit sensitive for anyone online, and particularly anyone commenting here. And if I didn’t think that was acceptable, would I have said I’d stop correcting your typos/grammar errors? No, I’d just keep right on pointing them out, probably getting joy out of hurting you, but I much prefer to mock bad ideas than hurt people, so I’ve ceased pointing out any typing or grammar errors, except for when your point is lost because of them (and even then, I’ll stick to asking wtf you meant) — I don’t think you need your ego stroked, just that you take having your errors pointed out a bit too personally (I’m a complete stranger online, wtf does it matter what I think of you?)
“That could be the only reason. … “You can do better than just playing spot-the-typo though!” Which could only be interpreted as me being childish.”
*sigh* I already explained myself on that, for one, and for two, are you psychic now? You know your reasons, you cannot know anyone else’s reasons, best you can do is trust that their explanations are truthful. (And I only lie if my physical safety is in danger, seeing how you’re also a stranger on the internet, there’s no need to lie to you as long as I don’t give you enough information to risk my safety)
It was a bit childish, but so are your long ass posts, we can’t all be pinnacles of maturity all the time.
“You’ve manipulated the situation brilliantly from start to finish.”
Over multiple days and sometimes while commenting half asleep? You give me too much credit, I just got snippy back at your snippy response to a fucking one line comment fixing a single grammar error — are we ever going to let this drop?
As I’m truly past sick of discussing how I point out a single typo in a one line statement, I’m only going to respond to #4 — “4th) My comments lend themselves to being torn apart,” — because that’s not just my opinion, that everyone else tears them apart proves that (and it’s not your grammar, typing, or sentence structure, it’s the underlying points you are making, eg the conversation on the voice for men thread currently)
I am not trying to manipulate you NWO, and never was, I pointed out one mistake and you made a big deal out of it instead of just ignoring it and replying to the rest of my comment, and specifically asked I reply to that comment, so I did — yes that reply was a bit snippy, but wtf more do you want? The subtitle here is “misogyny, we mock it” you might want to adjust to people being snippy. (And this is why I said you were taking it as a bruise to your ego, most people would’ve just not replied to my one line note at all, or gone “whoops, my bad” or something, I only included “thank you” as an option because it’s wtf I had said to you)
Now, are we done discussing your one word typo and my one line note about it? Because the sheer length of the resulting discussion is getting absurd.
Regarding false rape accusations, and that study in particular, one small community is not generalizable, for starters, the size of the town/city isn’t so much relevant as the number of rape complaints, 7 out of 10 sounds less impressive than 70% though, and for goddamned good reason, 10 is a really tiny sample size. Their sample size is sorely lacking, the methodology of only looking at forcible rape highly questionable and results for one police department are not generalizable to all police departments (no matter what the methodology, it could be that midwest women are particularly likely to make false reports). You are correct that forcible rape is much rarer than rapes using drugs or alcohol though, except that’s a major reason why just looking at forcible rapes tells very little about false reporting over all.
Also, I am highly wary of calling the lack of police discretion a good thing in finding generalizable data, considering that in most places the police can, and do, simply not take reports they don’t think are founded. It’s entirely likely that taking away that discretion raises the number of false reports, but the total number of rape reports in this study is very, very small.
“As far as sexual harrassment goes, if you take the monetary reward out of victimhood, you’d see that nonsense of accusations disappear.” — so if you worked somewhere that was nearly all female employees, at all levels, and they regularly made a point of openly commenting on your appearance, and not just commenting, but the one’s in positions of power above you making lewd comments, or requests even, you wouldn’t want some legal recourse? Sexual harassment isn’t “nice earrings” or “you look great in that sweater” — it’s making comments of a more sexual nature (“woohoo check out the ass on that one!”) with frequency (eg every time you bend over). Sexual harassment is, by very definition:
I’m fairly sure if your boss told you it was perform oral sex or get fired, you’d want legal recourse, and I’m damned sure that’d be the case if it was a male boss.
meh: Do they really think women want men like them? I mean, so a dedicated misogynist doesn’t want to marry me… is that supposed to be bad news to me?
They seem to think the only reason women don’t want them is that feminism has, “ruined” them for, “real men”.
They, of course, see themselves as “real men™”
NWO: Don’t kill a pretty simple concept
So you refuse to eat meat, and campaign for the outlawing of omnivorism.
No? Then shut your lying† yap.
The issue isn’t killing, it’s murder. The fetus isn’t a person, ergo it’s not murder and Q.E.D. the mother can do what she wants to it.
† You’ve said that killing adult women is a perfectly reasonable thing for men to do, so you pretending that, “do not kill” is some inviolable rule is a lie. You don’t believe it. That, or you don’t think women are people, in which case you are a reprehensible excuse for a human being, and a pathetic excuse for the Christian you claim to be, since Jesus thought women who sinned ought not be killed, even though The Law demanded it.
That makes you a hypocrite, as well as showing why I think you evil. You do the Devil’s work in the name of Jesus.
@Argenti: By views, I mean something a bit more general than your example; i.e. a piece of “art” that makes a universal claim about abortion being wrong/evil/bad in all cases, as opposed to a work that focuses on an individual case like the one you mention.
Autobiography also has different goals than fiction (or should!). Example of BAD fiction on all levels, technical and thematic, is THE LEFT BEHIND series (which I’ve never read, but I’ve read a bunch of the excellent take down of it at Slacktavist).
An example of what I’m thinking of: Gwendylyn Brooks wrote a brilliant poem about abortion (and lo and behold, it is here. I have taught that numerous times, and I would be hard pressed even so to make any claim about the poem being pro or anti-abortion; about whether or not the speaker is based on the poet or not (ALL my students in begnning classes want to read every first person as autobiographical),
In my own experience (and this applies to written works primarily, I don’t ‘work’ with art or music), I can come back to a text at different times and with different lenses and find very different meanings.
Pecunium — just FTR, militant vegans are about as annoying as NWO. A completely different sort of annoying, but annoying all the same (I mean the sort who would see my fish as akin to keeping slaves here) — I get rather annoyed at the pro-life meat eaters myself though, that bacon was once more intelligent that any fetus >.<
But enjoy your bacon, just don't claim a fetus has the rights of an actual born person, and that works for me.
"You do the Devil’s work in the name of Jesus." — I find that frighteningly common, but as I said, I'm biased here. Though, I'm always amused at the people who insist Obama is both a Muslim and the anti-christ, they should maybe consult everything else ever said about the anti-christ (like, idk, how he'll come from within Christianity? *cough*the pope*cough*)
Shit, I'm doing it again…I'm going to be up for 24 hours straight before I realize it yet again and this, oh stupid drug-psych, is why I need a sleeping pill that isn’t the drowsiness side effects of a fucking antihistamine (this is such a joke it’s nearly funny)
@Sharculese: I think we do all broadly agree!
I’d put Thomas Kinkade now you mentioned him in the conservative area.
And oh, yes, I’d forgotten the ATLAS SHRUGGED film (also, in my comment above, I noted the LEFT BEHIND series–hell that goes straight out of conservatism info fundamental evangelical art!.)
I also like your point about identity politics which the US. conservatives accuse the “liberals” of being based on–but their politics certainly has a strong identity element to it.
Ithiliana — ok, I think I understand what you’re getting at, though I’m not sure how you’d classify The Asylum (Emilie Autumn’s book) if you read all of it — it’s autobiographical, for about half? the other half is fiction of a parallel Victorian world, basically? It does have an actual “view” in a sense though — nothing much has changed in 150 years of psych, wtf happens to crazies in the psych ward/asylum has changed frighteningly little. That’s one layer of at least 4 though, so idk, and she doesn’t just say it, she spends nearly 300 pages illustrating it (sometimes literally, I’m amazed that she’s an excellent musician, writer, and graphic artist, she’s got to fail somewhere right?!)
Oh right, she’s not interested in men, so that’s a fatal flaw by the MRM at least >.<
My brother read the left behind series btw, they're truly horrible, the whole series is basically TRUFAX (from our asses). I can't guess whether that poem would be pro or anti abortion either, seems more personal than political (and yeah, the personal is political, but person still have emotions) — more about how abortion isn't an easy decision than which decision is the right one.
"In my own experience (and this applies to written works primarily, I don’t ‘work’ with art or music), I can come back to a text at different times and with different lenses and find very different meanings."
Graphic artist here, and the best friend is a musician in his spare time (not that law school allows much of that) — but I think that applies to art and music as well, maybe less so with some types of art, I'm a dadaism fan and it just has no point, good luck making it have a point (ditto for abstract or post-modern art a lot/some of the time) but art with that has meaning to interpret can usually be taken more than one way.
I saw one that truly pissed me off at first — goldfish in a blender, with a button to make fish puree — and the more I thought about it the less pissed I got, I've seen nothing that says the button was wired to the blender, the point may've been to see if anyone would dare do it, and how they'd react when the fish weren’t blended — I’m sure you can read different things into it, but fish are pets to me and I want to think those fish were never in any danger.
And I think I’m taking lessons from EA in how to write epic run on sentences, sorry about that!
Argenti: CassandraSays — the youngest WWII veterans will be 83 this year, most are closer to 90. The ones turning 83 are the ones who turned 16 the last year of the war, so there are a lot less of them than veterans slightly older than them.
The youngest, official, veterans of the war will be 78; since the Volksturm Hilter required for the defense of Berlin included boys as young as 11, though there is, IIRC, strong evidence for children as young as nine being put into uniforms, and sent to the front, so the actual age might be as low as 75.
“but person still have emotions” people* *sigh* >.<
We died for our country is how it best translates; and it’s contextual meaning is, usually, France.
An interesting parallel is “La Legion est ma patrie”. which is the motto of the French Foreign Legion.
I think they are intentionally invoking WW1 because of the way it’s seen in the iconography of modern war, “The Lost Generation”, the folly of repeating the same tactics of failure, year after year; just because one needed to keep the Germans aware that there was a war on.
So WW1 is a “needles war”, and the dead who died in it were killed for no good reason, and so it was just because, “women wanted men to go to war” (see complaints about the white feather); and by extension any war which isn’t direct defense against invasion is a war of desire, as opposed to one of need, and so it’s the fault of women; because women won’t serve in combat units (despite it being something feminists disagree with).
Pecunium — interesting, and horrible. My math was based on what my American grandfather uses, which I should’ve stated initially.
“because women won’t serve in combat units” — oh that must be why women are suing to be allowed to do exactly that >.<
"(despite it being something feminists disagree with)" — not sure what you mean there, the rest I agree with // find an interesting history lesson.
that’s why i always jump on it when people say there’s no great conservative art/artists. not only because i don’t think it’s true, but because it feeds the myth that ‘liberals’ only like art when it reflects their ideals.
but yeah, remember how outraged we were supposed to be when vargas llosa won the nobel prize?
Argenti: I agree about militant vegetarians (and vegans). I feel the same about militant anti-vegetarians.
But NWO is lying when he says he holds life sacred. He holds the life of people who agree with him as being valuable. Everyone else is as nothing to him, and women, in particular are to be, “escalated” against. If they assert themselves one needs to be more assertive than they are.
If they talk back, hit them,
If they hit back, knife them.
If they have a knife, shoot them.
He’s said this, more than once.
Argenti: Feminists disagree with 1: the draft (in toto) and limiting combat roles to men only.