Men’s Rights Activists and manosphere misogynists love to complain that I “cherry pick” quotes in an attempt to make them look bad. Which makes it especially ironic that all too often when I call them out on some particular bit of bullshit, they more or less double down on that bullshit, reiterating and in many cases amplifying the terrible things they originally said.
Several days ago, I wrote about a Spearhead post from W.F. Price with the priceless title “After 25, Women Are Just Wasting Time.” It was appalling even by Spearhead standards. Price used the untimely death of a talented young writer named Marina Keegan as an opportunity to rehash the belief, widely held in the manosphere, that women over the age of 25 who haven’t managed to snag themselves a “good husband” are “just wasting time,” growing older and uglier and less appealing to men. (Evidently, women’s appeal to men is the only thing that really matters about them.)
Price’s article inspired numerous comments from Spearheaders that were even more grotesquely misogynistic and cruel than his own post; Price at least pretended to care about the dead girl, even though his post was a crass and opportunistic insult to her memory.
And it inspired one regular Man Boobz commenter, a 26-year-old woman, to wade into the muck that is the Spearhead’s comments section to point out that Price’s grand narrative of female decline after age 25 has no relation whatsoever to her own life story:
I’m 26 years old. 27 terrifyingly soon. I am nothing like the person I was when I graduated college.
After originally getting a film degree, I’ve just started nursing school.
I’m living on the other side of the country and loving the different culture here.
I’m dating a wonderful guy who mysteriously didn’t dump me on my 25th birthday.
I’m doing difficult, not always fun, but ultimately socially useful work, work I couldn’t imagine myself doing when I graduated college.Since I graduated college, I’ve read more books, worked on more movies, learned more skills, lifted more weight, traveled more places, marched in more protests, gotten published more times, saved more lives than I thought I ever would.
And I’m still only 26.
You think I’m going to stop protesting and writing and working the wild Saturday midnight shift in the ER before I’m 30? Before I’m 60?
Or do you think it doesn’t matter because I might not be as fuckable then?
Well then fuck you. I’m 26 and I got miles to go.
–
(Oh, and I’m way better at sex now. Guys who thought I hit my “expiration date” just around the time I was first learning what a Kegel was, you are missing out.)
The Spearheaders responded, predictably enough, with downvotes and insults and a lot of mainsplainy comments suggesting that she’s regret it forever if she doesn’t get married ASAP and start popping out children.
The strangest comment of the bunch came from a Spearhead “Shieldmaiden” (that’s what they call female commenters on The Spearhead, for reals) by the name of Andie, who launched into a barely coherent tirade that somehow revolved around, er, SCENTED CANDLES!
Price, after seeing Andie’s rant mocked by the commenters here, decided to feature it today as the Spearhead “Comment of the Week.” So without further ado, here is what Price considers to be the Spearhead community at its best:
@26 year old woman
Let’s see how you feel when you’re 29 and the end of everything possible is right at your doorstep. Hell, lots of women are infertile at 26. Done. You won’t do everything. You won’t be a mother.
And if that doesn’t bother you, darlin’, you ain’t a woman.
And if your plans are to actually BE a mother (as in do the damn work), you are already in very deep water.
Your resume will never put his chubby little arms around you and tell you he loves you, like a child will. Your resume will never give you grandchildren, like your children might. Your resume will never share in all your joys, all your sorrows, all your triumphs, all your tragedies, like your husband will.
But you WILL be able to rape that resume of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS over your lifetime. Yay!
The fastest growing consumer product category: scented candles. SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES.
Yes, 26 year old woman, all your education and opportunity and rights have resulted in millions of children raised without fathers, the total destruction of the family, the rise of GIANT ASS government to give all those wymyns a place to work (doing utterly useless shit) and what was it for? What did we gain?
SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES!!
Nicely done, ladies. Really good job.
Fuck you, bitch. My daughters are coming for you. And millions of daughters just like mine. We see you, you superficial piece of trash. You have cost us our lives. For patchouli candles.
You will pay.
Go back and read @26 year old woman’s comment, then read Andie’s again. Quite a contrast, wouldn’t you say?
I should note that when Price first posted the quote, he evidently left out the last few paragraphs; perhaps even he realized they were a tad over the line as a response to a woman whose only real “crime” was telling the Spearheaders that her life was interesting and fulfilling to her, and that she wasn’t planning on having any babies in the foreseeable future. (And if they didn’t approve of her life, too fucking bad for them.)
In the comments to Price’s “Comment of the Week” post, HL offers this thought:
Every time something like this comes up, it becomes ever more apparent that the ignorance, hate mongering, bigotry and fallacies rests so much more heavily on the side of the feminists.
To paraphrase Rick James, lack of self-awareness is a hell of a drug.
Kyrie – he wrote to them and they didn’t reply, so technically they didn’t say “no” …
So, if I wrote to the Queen and tell her I’m the new Queen of Australia, by the sovereign citizen law I am the Queen?
Because I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t answer me.
Re the Queen, PM, etc — from the transcript:
his note on that:
Why he thought the Queen herself would answer him is beyond me though (guess that’s what we get for the whole revolution thing?)
Kyrie, I reckon you should try it. Write to a whole heap of kings and queens, you could be queen of everywhere!
What about places that don’t have royalty though? Who should Kyrie write to to become Queen of the USA? (*shudders a bit* ok even in utter jest I’m not sure that’s really funny)
Nah, it’s doubly funny to be queen of a republic 😉
Write to the US President and say you’re taking away his sovereign rights? Make sure to use bastardised legalese, though.
I’ve been known to use caps for emphasis quite a bit in my day but this guy makes me kinda want to never use them again. He looks ridiculous.
And between this ebook and the scented candles, I really want to record some dramatic reading really bad.
And I would love to see Dwight Schrute as an MRA. That would be hilarious.
TBQH, it doesn’t seem like he understands much. He seems hell bent on wanting people to think he’s intelligent yet I don’t think he really tries to educate himself. He just kind of whines in all caps. This ebook is absurd. Just a bunch of litter clogging up the internets. He claims he sank all this time and money into writing it, but he should’ve spent that time and money actually figuring out what the hell he was talking about. Or maybe tried to talk someone coherant into putting his thoughts on paper.
And what of the fathers who alienate themselves? Guys who are this quick to rally around sexism and misogyny during or after their divorces don’t really seem like good role models to me. I get that some mothers talk trash about their exes to their kids, but some fathers do it too.
Like my dad. He was a good dad and he and my mother were civil, friendly even, for at least ten years after their divorce. Then when my father met his new wife he started bashing her, I think in an attempt to make her feel more comfortable like, there is no way he’s going to go back with my mom or something (though she was remarried already so it was pretty stupid anyways). He wouldn’t just bash her to his new wife, but right in front of me and my brother. He would also talk about how when they had a kid together they were gonna “do it right this time,” criticising my mom’s job raising us (she had us the most, this was uncontested when they got a divorce, he didn’t fight to gain custody at all). So not only did he insult her in front of us, making us uncomfortable for no good reason, but also inadvertantly made us feel like we had come out bad, even though we were good kids who never got in trouble. He then took his new family way more seriously than he took the kids he already had. He barely concerned himself with us after that. This was HIS choice to act this way. We eventually stopped going to see him because his behavior hurt us too much. But I’m sure MRAs would just blame this all on his new wife or some bullshit like that, relieve him of all personal respsonsibility.
So forgive me when my heart doesn’t break when kids are alienated from their fathers because it goes both ways. This has nothing to do with men’s rights, but everything to do with people just being decent to each other. People should treat each other the way they want to be treated. Half the MRA complaints are just examples of people being assholes to other people. This isn’t worth a goddamn movement.
Oh gods…did you read the transcript? This isn’t a matter of missing a deadline he didn’t understand or something, he’s annotated the transcript with notes meant to prove how the courtroom isn’t the court because the court is a pirate ship. And no, it’s not performance art, or doesn’t seem like it anyways.
I had to see that quote again before it clicked wtf she was even talking about he makes so little sense >.<
@Sharculese: Wow, poor Australia. Does this mean their “family law” is governed entirely by 2-207? If so, I’m starting to understand why peter-andrew: nolan(c) is so vehemently opposed to it. XD
I have an itching desire to understand these women who are MRAs. What do they gain from this?
Well, there are several possibilities: they like feeling like “one of the guys”, deeply rooted misogyny (that’s not just for men!), validation for being one of the few good ones,… which all come down to either “woman are bad – except me -” or “women are inferior”.
In the case of magdelyn, she answered your question by a panegyric of manhood (courage, resilience, strength of character, heroism, etc)
“In the case of magdelyn, she answered your question by a panegyric of manhood (courage, resilience, strength of character, heroism, etc)”
And over on r/mr, she has the chutzpah to claim Futrelle puts women on pedestals.
“People should treat each other the way they want to be treated. Half the MRA complaints are just examples of people being assholes to other people. This isn’t worth a goddamn movement.”
Quoted for truth.
Calling Peter Nolan! Changes to Family Law in Australia:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-03/new-domestic-violence-laws-target-emotional-abuse/4049150
Oh god, I read that whole transcript, I don’t need to see the video if it’s just him being all ARGELBARGLE.
That is a very patient magistrate. If [s]p-a:n(c) tried his schtick in a certain court of my acquaintance, he’d get slapped with contempt so fast it would make his head spin. Especially the calling of the judge or magistrate by his personal name.
I think I could only get a more ridiculous courtroom scenario if I imagine (e.g.) a pro se criminal defendant arguing that the cops couldn’t have found his stash of whatever because he’s evaluated them and discovered that their maximum Search check modifier isn’t high enough to have found his actual stash unless they took 20, and they didn’t search the car that long.
(Hands up if you get the joke.)
Hey, if he could find the stash by taking 20, he could find it by rolling a natural 20 too. You don’t know what those dice said behind the screen.
That transcript was so great that I decided to take a look at his book, but it was quite a let-down. It’s absolutely awful, of course, and completely disconnected from reality, but only in nasty misogynistic ways (Oh no, now I’m going to end up in the “IgnorMANus hall of fame”!), not hilarious ways like “courtrooms are ships, which somehow makes normal laws inapplicable in them.”
On the other hand, his “Comnnon Law Copyright Notice” is good for a couple laughs. Leaving aside the fact that you can’t, of course, copyright a name, it also contains a “self-executing contract”, which apparently in “sovereign citizen”-land means that the other party doesn’t actually have to agree to it to be bound by it. It’s extra-funny that with all his super-sekrit copyright knowledge, he claims in the transcript that the court doesn’t have a copyright to said transcript because they didn’t make one of his made-up copyright notices, when you don’t need ANY paperwork at all to claim a copyright (though of course it helps to have it registered if you ever need to go to court over it).
Is it just me, or does P-A:N(C) read as PANIC to anybody else? And feel kind of snarkily appropriate… Oh noes, my chattels aren’t doing what I tell them ARRRGGHHGHGH!
*hand up*
Wow… And I mean wow…
This is fascinating. I can sorta follow the gist of the legalese between the lawyer and the judge, and then I see PANIC’s (hee) take on the situation. Dude. If people are lying in court, and you have evidence, and you have mitigating circumstances to counter the opposition, and you’re representing yourself in court…
*grumblerumblerumbleroooaooaaaaaA” PRESENT THE EVIDENCE!!!
You know why you felt like you were getting screwed over? Because legally you said and presented NOTHING! You did not argue your own case, so the other side set the terms for the case!
I know PANIC’s living in his own little legal world, which is why he was saying and doing nothing yet still felt like he had the judge by the balls (and the other lawyer by the ovaries)… But still.
Gotta say though, I’m finding the whole case absurdly interesting to watch, especially with the transcript so I can understand what they’re saying. I never thought I’d say something like this, but thank you Petter Nolan, for recording your case and releasing copywrited material on the internet.
Another notation from the transcript.
What you can make up is a set of rules that aren’t binding in a courtroom, and conditioning your cooperation on that made up set of rules. You chose not to give any testimoney. You thought you had a valid reason, but you still chose.
… How ever did Nolan do so badly?
Oh poor, naive kirbywarp, don’t you see that “presenting evidence” is just a ruse to get you to board the evil court-ship, where you will lose all your rights and be sold into slavery or something? Keep thinking like that and you can kiss your corporate strawman fiction goodbye.
What I really don’t get is how he thinks that if he does these little dances right the courts/government have no power over him, and at the same time thinks that if he uses the right magic-legalese words, he can bind anyone to a contract without their consent. What’s stopping the government from using the same legal magic on him?
He’s got spell resistance. Duh.
In all seriousness, all this song-and-dance he does really does strike me as a kind of a magic spell. He thinks he knows the words to say to make his desired outcome happen.
Kind of like those Christian sects who dab oil onto things like the Capitol Building and then claim that their God will use it for his purposes (like influencing President Obama).
@PsychoDan:
Oh, but the government does try (eg boarding the pirate ship whilst forfeiting your rights)! Nolan’s just too smart for them, and knows all the little tricks.
I just absolutely love the disconnect between Nolan and the rest of the court. To Nolan, his ultimate victory was assured at the beginning (by not falling for the “lose all your rights thing”) and at the end (by proving that the judge is acting on the behalf of a private company… somehow… by the judge failing to say yes. Does this seem extraordinarily creepy to anyone else, that most of Nolan’s legal magic relies on interpreting people’s non-action to suit his whims? For all his interest in consent, he has a piss-poor understanding of it… anyway.).
Meanwhile, the judge and the prosecutor are wading through laws and precedents in order to see exactly what the judgement should be. And Nolan’s just twiddling his thumbs, laughing internally. I can just imagine the “wait, what? But I won!!!” moment when they finally decide the case against his favor.
“I can just imagine the “wait, what? But I won!!!” moment when they finally decide the case against his favor.” — nawh, that’ll just be another point for when he takes the judge to his “common law court”. I’m trying not to think too hard about how he intends to force a sitting judge into a made up courtroom, because — “For all his interest in consent, he has a piss-poor understanding of it” — yeah he does.
Not just any made up court mind you, but “the single most important trial in Australian history” XD