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.
@Fembot
I made it clear that I hate specific men, namely MRA shit like himself. Hating the individual men who clearly hate women does not misandry make. He knows this but might twist it around like the dishonest douche that he is.
But I’m sick of defending myself quite honestly. No matter what we do or say they will call us manhaters. It is pretty much their biggest shaming tactic and they expect feminists and women to grovel and prove them wrong. But who are the ones calling women sluts, cunts and useless if they don’t have babies? who tell women they are worthless after 30 and laugh at our perceived loneliness? it’s not feminists who say this. It’s MRAs.
They seriously need to win “biggest award for projecting” one of these days.
Ack…you ninja’d me. Yeah I know what you mean. They will twist it around either way. I know myself and that I don’t hate men so meh
What does ninja’d mean?
I looked it up. Guess that wasn’t too hard instead of asking. he he he
Ninja’d means, while zie was typing zir post, you posted the same thing.
If Texas’ population density was as high as the Netherlands, it would damn near fit most of the US’ population in it.
Mind, Texas has a lot of desert, so it legitimately couldn’t be as dense, but there’s a lot of room for improvement on these matters.
Seriously, that was a thing that marvelled my girlfriend; just how friggin *WIDE* the DFW area is, for its population. There was a ton of driving to get anywhere too.
as a uga alum i am NOT fucking moving to jacksonville. no.
(Also, a more reasonable Germany’s density still comes out to pretty close to a third of the US Population in Texas; again, Texas has desert, so it legit couldn’t reach this, but…)
I don’t quite get the correlation between 26 year old’s failure to produce human resources in her teen years and children being raised without a father.
The thing about not being a woman if you fail to successfully produce human resources is seriously creepy, but the other bit seems like one of these things would help prevent the other even in the mind of the perennially confused spears and shields.
I lit a scented candle last night in honor of Andie and the daughters that she’s apparently training to kill me, since I’m just nice that way. It was (fucking?) vanilla, and my house still smells nice today.
Also, my mother had me at 29, and my sister in law had her daughter in her late thirties, so I think the theory that women must have kids by 25 OR ELSE may need some revision.
Will you remember where you were when The Scented Candle War of 2012 begun? Light a candle. Never forget.
(sketchy MRA types: that was a joke)
Rutee: and it’s one of those things where just because we all COULD conceivably fit in those areas, why the hell you’d WANT to is another matter. There’s jack shit in W. TX for a reason.
I have not yet been to DFW yet, but I’ve heard it’s huge. I’m in ATX, where it’s smaller and traffic is probably shittier.
Also, how effing dumb do you have to be to think scented candles are a new thing? Srsly! They didn’t use flashlights two thousand years ago when the power went out, yanno?
I like Crella’s comment, which someone linked to earlier:
Actually, as someone who has been a professional writer for two decades, I’m sort of good at writing things “on my own.”
But the point of this blog is, wait for it, mocking the terrible things that misogynists say. Naturally, this involves quoting them.
“Jay Leno’s funny headlines segments would not exist if all the newspapers blocked him from headline mining!”
Also, how do you “block” someone from quoting something you said in a public forum or on a public blog?
MRAs get so angry that I quote what they actually say.
Quoting people accurately and giving links to the original quotes in context is MISANDRY!
Speaking of links, here’s crella’s comment:
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2012/06/01/comment-of-the-week-scented-candles/#comment-152626
I think I just worked out the logic by which directly quoting MRAs is misandry. OK, follow along with me here…most of the stuff that Dave quotes does in fact make the specific men saying it look like horrible people, which could be seen as contributing to the more general cultural view of men in a negative way. Also! Often the men being quoted themselves depict men in a very negative light (eg when they suggest that if they don’t get what they want then there will be mass violence towards women in retribution, as so shallow that they regard any woman they don’t want to fuck as worthless, etc.). Which is certainly a hateful way to think of men, even if it’s being expressed by an MRA, and repeating it may again make readers more likely to view men in a negative way (if they were to somehow believe that MRAs are examples of normal, average men, which they are not). Thus, quote mining is misandry.
I got something different from the comments. If you read her other posts, it’s clear that Andie was on a career track and then decided that it would be really hard to combine mothering with working. There’s nothing really controversial about that. It IS hard. That’s probably why most developed nations offer paid maternity leave.
She is angry about the fact that she had to figure that out for herself. The idea that you can have it all is really hard to put into practice. Most of the working mothers I know are really struggling. It’s not easy. The whole scented candles thing is just a way of saying that we have embraced some pretty superficial values at the expense of taking care of our families.
I don’t see what’s controversial about that either.
I think Andie means that she is teaching her daughters that it will be really tough to combine mothering and working and that they should go into it with their eyes open. Having it all is very, very hard.
Then again, I’ve never bought a scented candle in my life.
You’re entirely missing the point. The point isn’t to build in shitty land, it’s to build more efficiently. Efficient city design in the US would reduce a lot of costs, and make public transport easier to build and maintain, as well as more effective (which is even more costs).
I’m not at all sure as to how you get this:
from this:
Ah, fucking scented candles! How many ways do I love thee?
Oh the unholy motherfucking glee as I light my candles since I read that post.
Also, Quakers, that was one gawdaweful post. Too bad I hadn’t seen it, I would cheerily have ripped him a new one and definately given better suggestions than “buy flowers”.
And yeah MRA’s if you want more women to consider becoming mothers, you need to deal with that little problem of seeing women as parasites when they have children, even when they are married.
And now I’m off to light more FUCKING SCENTED CANDLES! As a soothing brain bleach to that post written by a fucking asswipe of a boyfriend who ought to be disowned by every female member of his family.
Did an MRA just accuse feminists of projecting when someone says the MRA projects?
It’s about to get meta.
Fuck off, that’s what you can do.
Actually, I do have to give him credit for acknowledging his error and feeling remorseful about it. Nevertheless, his girlfriend confided in him something tragic that happened to her and he automatically assumed she was lying. ‘Cause, y’know, women only lie about being raped; it never actually happens. Therefore, he should still fuck off.
Oh shit, I actually read his whole post (I knew I shouldn’t have done that). I change my mind; I don’t give him credit for anything except being a gigantic prick. He even took a restraining order out on his girlfriend because she kept trying to contact him after he threw her out. Yep, this person should definitely fuck off. And by “fuck off,” I mean die in the most horrendous way possible.
“Andie means that she is teaching her daughters that it will be really tough to combine mothering and working and that they should go into it with their eyes open. Having it all is very, very hard.”
Duh.
Some mothers dont have the luxury of quitting their jobs. Some get divorced and get screwed out of child support. Some married men with low paying jobs because they (GASP) loved him anyways.
If Andie had to figure this out, she must not be very observant. Like I said, duh.