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The Men’s Rights subreddit: Fighting imaginary enemies, since 2008

To arms, Men’s Rights Redditors! Evil feminists are running riot on Wikipedia, deleting pages devoted to books by MRA hero Warren Farrell!

 

Oops. False alarm! Turns out WillToHave doesn’t quite understand how Wikipedia works. As one commenter pointed out several hours after the post went up, no pages about Farrell’s books have actually been deleted. The reason there are no pages about most of his books is … that no one has bothered to put any up yet.

D’oh! MRAs aren’t being oppressed by feminists; they’re being oppressed by their own laziness.

Of course, the only ones who know this are those who’ve bothered to actually read the comments. 15 hours after being totally debunked, the post, with its misleading headline, remains near the top of the Men’s Rights subreddit, with 142 net upvotes.

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katz
12 years ago

So tell me, Kuis, are you actually dating a foreign woman?

Or are you just hanging about here to tell us how you totally could if you wanted to?

Amused
12 years ago

As someone who grew up in Russia, I’ve known a number of mail-order brides, at least from that part of the world. No educated, cultured woman is going to put up a picture of herself in a two-piece for angry Western dudes to examine, and she sure as hell isn’t gonna drop everything to marry some dude who decided she represents the right combination of subservience and hotness. Most women who go that route are either very naive (and mostly provincial) or very cynical. As for culture, it is more often than not limited to knowing how to make borscht, alleged familiarity with “European cinema” based on having seen a couple of dubbed Pierre Richard comedies, and the ability to bang out a couple of sonatinas on the piano without too many errors.

Argenti Aertheri
12 years ago

“I can tell you that as a well educated man with plenty of resources, i have little to no interest in hooking up or marrying a Western woman. And since i make well over half a million dollars a year, i have plenty of options, in addition to being respectable looking.”

Congrats? No one here is taking notes from your boner. (Hilarious you call yourself well educated mere words before failing to capitalize I, and that that’s a stylistic option, not a typo.)

hellkell
hellkell
12 years ago

I can tell you that as a well educated man with plenty of resources, i have little to no interest in hooking up or marrying a Western woman. And since i make well over half a million dollars a year, i have plenty of options, in addition to being respectable looking.

Oh, honey. Of course you’re all that.

But if you are, why come hassle us lowlives?

Paul
Paul
12 years ago

So explain why there is no reference to “Thomas James Ball” in Wikipedia when I saw one immediately after he killed himself??

Cliff Pervocracy
12 years ago

Notability.

…And probably not helped by MRAs filling up the article with completely un-encyclopedic rants, if I were to guess.

Cliff Pervocracy
12 years ago

…There’s no way I’m going to convince you that Wiki articles are deleted by community consensus, not by a shadow conspiracy guided by the disembodied spirit of Andrea Dworkin, is there.

Bostonian
12 years ago

As a parent of daughters, I have this to say to asswipes like Kuis. Stay the hell away from my girls, who are better people than you could ever dream of being.

Cliff Pervocracy
12 years ago

Women my age(33) in the country i live in(Australia) are no more intellectually and emotionally mature than the average 20 year old that i met while living in Ukraine many years ago,

Now taking over/under bets on the odds of this guy actually speaking Ukrainian.

I think half the time MRAs think women from Foreign are so super meek and respectful, it’s because they can’t tell what those women are saying to them.

Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

So explain why there is no reference to “Thomas James Ball” in Wikipedia when I saw one immediately after he killed himself??

Because of the feminist cabal who control wikipedia! 😀 …oh wait that’s actually what you really think.

Cliff Pervocracy
12 years ago

I think MRAs misunderstand patriarchal cultures, too.

There are cultures where the ideal is “wife obeys the husband, husband is responsible for leading and supporting the family.” (Although not nearly as much of Foreign as MRAs think.)

There are not a whole lot of places where the ideal is “wife obeys the husband, husband does whatever the hell he likes.” (Obviously it happens lots of places, including the US, but I don’t know anywhere it’s something people want for their daughters.)

Traditional patriarchy is not friendly to deadbeathood. If you’re the boss of your wife, then you’re responsible for her and the kids, or people from just about any culture will think you’re an asshole.

Traditional sexism is “men and women have different spheres,” and MRAs might not be up for the contents of that “men’s sphere.”

Dracula
Dracula
12 years ago

I can tell you that as a well educated man with plenty of resources, i have little to no interest in hooking up or marrying a Western woman. And since i make well over half a million dollars a year, i have plenty of options, in addition to being respectable looking.

Ahahahahahahahahaaahaaahaaa! Heh heh. *cough* Ahem. Uh, I mean; Oh dear! I’m sure “Western” women everywhere are positively weeping at the loss of a gem such as yourself.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
12 years ago

Sorry, buddy. “Respectable looking” plus money just doesn’t cut it with some ladies. That’s what irks you, isn’t it? That Western women have enough options that they can easily reject you if you’re not of interest to them (this is what you mean by them being “rude”). But if you go to a country where the average income is much lower, well, then not-hideous plus a decent salary goes a lot further.

It is indeed a “better deal”, if you view finding a life partner as being a lot like buying a car. For those of us who think there’s a bit more to the whole love and romance thing, though, you just sound kind of pathetic.

PS I am from Foreign. Grew up on 4 different continents, actually. I have yet to meet a woman anywhere in Foreign who’d put up with you if she didn’t have stong financial incentives to do so.

ozymandias42
12 years ago

I have a crush on four guys at the moment. Not one of them makes more than the median income for Americans: two live off scholarships, one is supported by his parents, and one has a job he loves that pays shit. It’s very odd. It’s almost as if being a kind and decent person is more attractive than hundreds of thousands of dollars.

…Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Argenti Aertheri
12 years ago

“So explain why there is no reference to “Thomas James Ball” in Wikipedia when I saw one immediately after he killed himself??”

Please learn to work wiki before coming here to complain about it, if you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_James_Ball you will find the criteria for deletion and a link to the discussion. Cliff is correct, it was deleted for not being notable. You may want to pay particular attention to this comment —

Delete per WP:BIO1E, WP:NOTNEWS etc. Wikipedia is not a platform for the promotion of ‘men’s rights’, or for any other political cause – and doubly so when the apparent suicide of a disturbed person is being exploited for that cause. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:53, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Namely that last part about not exploiting his suicide. (Argh MRAs, if you can manage to comment here, you can manage to figure out wiki, stop bothering us with shit you could solve yourself.)

Cliff Pervocracy
12 years ago

Why is he bragging about how much money he makes, when a big part of the MRA deal is all about how men should never have to give women so much as five bucks for a sandwich? It’s not like I’d see any of that if I married him. He’d be one of those guys who makes a half million but gives his wife an “allowance” of like 20 bucks a week.

Paul
Paul
12 years ago

Oh, a disturbed individual,, You mean like Andrea Yates??

Funny she’s in there.

Oh, I forget, she had that postpartum depression thing going for her.

Funny, when men kill women it’s murder but when women kill it’s either self defense or some other thing that only women can use as a defense.

Paul
Paul
12 years ago

Women Who Kill Too Much and the Courts That Free Them:

The Twelve ‘Female-Only’ Defenses

1) THE INNOCENT WOMAN DEFENSE

I am starting with the innocent woman defense because it underlies all twelve defenses. At first I had called this the “Female Credibility Principle” because of the tendency to see women as more credible than men because of being thought more innocent. However, even when women admitted making false allegations that they were raped or that their husbands abused them, for example, their admission that they lied was often NOT believed.Therefore the belief in the innocent woman ran even deeper than the tendency to believe women.

2.) THE PMS DEFENSE (“MY BODY, NO CHOICE”)

In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism. But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and after killing a co-worker, Sandie Smith was put on probation – with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS. By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses.

Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6 month old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help. No feminist protested.

3.) THE HUSBAND DEFENSE

The film “I Love You to Death” was based on a true story of a woman who tried to kill her husband when she discovered he had been unfaithful. She and her mom tried to poison him, then hired mugger to beat him and shoot him through the head. A fluke led to their being caught and sent to jail. Miraculously, the husband survived. The husband’s first response? Soon after he recovered he informed authorities that he would not press charges. His second response? He defended his wife’s attempts to kill him. He felt so guilty being sexually unfaithful that he thanked his wife! He then re-proposed to her. She verbally abused him, then accepted.

4.) THE “BATTERED WOMAN SYNDROME” DEFENSE, AKA LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

Until 1982, anyone who called premeditated murder self-defense would have been laughed out of court. But in 1982, Lenore Walker won the first legal victory for her women-only theory of learned helplessness, which suggests that a woman whose husband or boyfriend batters her becomes fearful for her life and helplessness to leave him so if she kills him, it is really self-defense – even if she has premeditated his murder. The woman is said to be a victim of the Battered Woman Syndrome. Is it possible a woman could kill, let’s say, for insurance money? Lenore Walker says no: she claims, “Women don’t kill men unless they’ve been pushed to a point of desperation.” Ironically feminists had often said, “There’s never an excuse for violence against a woman.” Now they were saying, “But there’s always an excuse for violence against a man… if a woman does it.” That sexism is now called the law in 15 states.

5.) “THE DEPRESSED MOTHER” DEFENSE: BABY BLUES AND TERRIBLE TWOS

Remember Sheryl Lynn Massip, a mother in her mid-twenties who murdered he 6-month old son by crushing its head under the wheel of the family car? Massip systematically covered up the murder until she was discovered. Then she testified that she suffered from post-partum depression – or “baby blues.” Her sentence?? Treatment. Mothers do, get the baby blues. As do dads. Were the husband to kill his baby, as Sheryl Lynn did, it is unlikely that we would just treat him for baby blues or Save the Marriage Syndrome. Why does her version of baby blues allow her to receive treatment for child murder, when he would receive life in prison for child murder, with or without baby blues?

The Terrible Twos

Josephine Mesa beat her 2-year-old son to death with the wooden handle of a toilet plunger. She buried the battered baby in a trash bin. When scavengers found the baby outside her Oceanside, California apartment, she denied she new him. When the evidence became overwhelming, she confessed. The excuse? She was depressed. The child was going through terrible twos. The punishment? Counseling, probation and anti-depressants. She never spent a day behind bars.

6. THE “MOTHERS DON’T KILL” DEFENSE

ITEM. Illinois. Paula Sims reported that her first daughter, Loralei, was abducted by a masked gunman. In fact she murdered Loralei. But she got away with it. So when her next daughter, Heather Lee, disappointed her, she suffocated her, threw her in the trash barrel, and said another masked gunman had abducted her daughter. It wasn’t until the second “masked gunman” abduction that a serious search was conducted. Only the serious search led to evidence. Might Heather Lee be alive today if mothers did not have a special immunity from serious investigation?

7. THE “CHILDREN NEED THEIR MOTHER” DEFENSE

ITEM. Colorado. Lory Foster’s husband had returned from Vietnam and was going through mood-swings both from post traumatic stress syndrome and diabetes. They had gotten into a fight and he had abused her. So she killed him. Yet, even the prosecutor did not ask for a jail term. Why not? So Lory could care for the children… Lory was given counseling and vocational training at state expense.The most frequent justification for freeing mothers who kill their children is that their children need them. Moreover, if mothers were freed because “children are the first priority,” then fathers would be freed just as often. But they are not. Even when no mother is available.

8. THE “BLAME THE FATHER, UNDERSTAND THE MOTHER” DEFENSE

ITEM. Ramiro Rodriguez was driving back from the supermarket. His daughter was sitting on his wife’s lap. As Ramiro made a left turn, a van crashed into the car and his daughter was killed. Ramiro was charged with homicide. The reason? His daughter was not placed in a safety seat. Ramiro explained that his daughter was sick and wanted to be held so HIS WIFE DECIDED to hold her. Yet only Ramiro was charged. The mother was charged with nothing. Ramiro was eventually acquitted after protests over the racism. No one saw the sexism.

9.) THE “MY CHILD, MY RIGHT TO ABUSE IT” DEFENSE

A million crack-addicted children since 1987, but only sixty of the mothers have faced criminal charges. One was convicted. That conviction was reversed by the Michigan Supreme Court. 3 percent of infants in Washington D.C. die from cocaine addiction, but no mothers go to prison. The right to choose means the right to kill – not a fetus but a child. Should the mother who addicts her child to crack have any more rights another child abuser or drug dealer. How can we give a normal drug dealer a life sentence but claim that a mother that deals drugs to her own child should not so much as stand trial? If we feel compassion for the circumstances that drove her to drugs, where is our compassion for the circumstances that drove the drug dealer to drugs, the child abuser to abuse, the murderer…

10. THE PLEA BARGAIN DEFENSE

Once a woman is seen as more innocent, her testimony is more valued, which leads to prosecutors offering the woman a plea bargain in crimes committed jointly by a woman and a man. And if a District Attorney is up for reelection, the Chivalry Factor allows him to look like a hero when his office prosecutes a man or a bully if he should put a woman behind bars.

11.) THE SVENGALI DEFENSE

A beautiful woman dubbed “The Miss America Bandit” conducted an armed robbery of a bank. Federal Sentencing guidelines called for a minimum of four and a half to five years in federal prison. The federal judge gave her two years because she told the judge that she was in love with her hairdresser and he had wanted her to rob the bank. The judge concluded, “Men have always exercised malevolent influence over women, and women seem to be soft-touches for it, particularly if sex is involved….It seems to me the Svengali-Trilby relationship is the motivating force behind this lady….the main thing is sex.” [Svengali is a fictional character said to have hypnotic qualities of persuasion over the innocent Trilby.]

12.) THE CONTRACT KILLING DEFENSE… DEFEND SELF BY HIRING SOMEONE ELSE

When I did the first review of my files in preparation for this section on contract killing, I was struck by some fascinating patterns. First, all of these women hired boys or men. Second, their targets were usually husbands, ex-husbands, or fathers – men they had once loved. Third, the targeted man usually had an insurance policy significantly larger than the man’s next few years income. Fourth, the women often were never serious suspects until some coincidence exposed their plot. Fifth, the women usually chose one of three methods by which to kill: she (1) persuaded her boyfriend to do the killing (in reverse Svengali style); (2) hired some young boys from a disadvantaged background to do it for a small amount of money; or (3) hired a professional killer, thus usually using the money her husband earned to kill her husband. Dixie Dyson tucked in her husband for his last night’s sleep. She had arranged to have a lifelong friend and a boyfriend pretend to “break and enter,”, then rape her, kill her husband, then “escape.” She would collect the insurance money.

At the last moment, the lifelong friend backed out, but the boyfriend and Dixie managed to kill Dixie’s husband after 27 stabbings. They were caught. Dixie “cut a deal” to reduce her sentence by reporting the boyfriend and his friend. The friend who backed out got 25 years for conspiracy.

Deborah Ann Werner was due one third of her dad’s estate. She asked her daughter to find some boys to murder him by plunging a knife through his neck.

Diana Bogadanoff hired two young men to kill her husband on an isolated nudist beach, while she watched. After he was shot through the head, she reported the killers but produced no motive for the murder – no money was stolen and she was not sexually molested. Diana did not become a suspect until an anonymous caller contacted a nationwide crime hotline. The caller coincidentally heard about the murder on the radio and remembered a friend describing just such a murder he had refused to do… on an isolated nudist beach while a woman named Diana watched. Without this tip, Diana would never have become even a suspect.

HOW INDIVIDUAL WOMEN ARE GIVEN MORE POWER TO KILL THAN THE ENTIRE U.S. GOVERNMENT

Taken together, the twelve female-only defenses allow almost any woman to take it upon herself to “exercise the death penalty.” The government is not allowed to take it upon itself to kill someone first and declare him or her an abuser later – only a woman can do that to a man.

DO MEN KILL WOMEN MORE THAN WOMEN KILL MEN?

THE SIX BLINDERS

1. A woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident. [This will skew the figures]

2. Contract killing is also less detectable because it is premeditated and often hired out to a professional. When it is discovered the Department of Justice registers it as a “multiple offender killing” – it never gets recorded as a woman killing a man. [This will skew the figures]

3. The money factor. Women who murder husbands or boyfriends usually come from middle class backgrounds The money allows the best lawyers, more acquittals, therefore fewer female murderers to become Justice Department Statistics.

4. and 5. The Chivalry Factor, the Innocent Woman Factor prevent many women from becoming serious suspects to begin with.

6. The Plea Bargain Defense sometimes leads to the dismissal of charges.

When the six blinders are combined, we can see how we have consciously and unconsciously kept ourselves blind to women who murder men. A distortion of statistics is created by the Six Blinders. But a distortion of perception is created by the media’s tendency to make it international news when men murder women (the University of Montreal Murderer, the Hillside and Boston stranglers) and, unless the man is famous, to make it local news when a woman murders only a man.

In brief, it is impossible to know the degree to which the sexes kill each other. The only thing we know for certain is that both sexes kill more men than they kill women.

Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

Paul, what the hell are you talking about? Did you miss this right here?

Delete per WP:BIO1E, WP:NOTNEWS etc. Wikipedia is not a platform for the promotion of ‘men’s rights’, or for any other political cause – and doubly so when the apparent suicide of a disturbed person is being exploited for that cause. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:53, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Please show me the feminists who consider Andrea Yates a hero the way MRAs consider Thomas Ball a hero. Because I can’t seem to find them.

Snowy
Snowy
12 years ago

Also, what’s with the entire blog post you just copy and pasted? There are these things called links, dude. Please use them.

katz
12 years ago

Seriously, Paul, wtf?

My favorite bit from the Wikipedia discussion:

Tom was very active in Father’s Right’s Movements and as much as I regret his action I feel that it is historically significant and a classic example of non-violent protest in support of a lost cause. What is the standard for inclusion? If he had killed ten, or twenty, people in addition to himself would it then warrant an entry? Let’s be careful what incentives we set up here!

Yes, Thomas Ball set himself on fire so that he could get a Wikipedia page. And we’d better give everyone Wikipedia pages or they’ll kill people so that they can meet notability.

Sharculese
12 years ago

andrea yates gets a wikipedia page because her trial became a national flashpoint for discussion of the mental incapacity defense, that is to say: people both for and against it were discussing her case.

nothing similar happened with thomas ball, because there isn’t that much to say- he’s just another name on the long list of angry, self-righteous advocates of terrorism. his spiritual comrade anders breivik, on the other hand, does get a wikipedia page because his actions were more noteworthy. so terrorism in defense of misogyny is totally represented on wikipedia. im not sure what you have to complain about?

Dracula
Dracula
12 years ago

…a classic example of non-violent protest…

Wait, what? He set himself on fire in an effort to encourage others to basically set more people on fire.

How’s anyone gonna claim that’s non-violent?

Dracula
Dracula
12 years ago

He gave instructions for fuck’s sake. Is there no lie too outrageous for these people?

Argenti Aertheri
12 years ago

“Oh, a disturbed individual,, You mean like Andrea Yates??”

Someone clearly does not understand the difference between wiki discussion pages, and wiki pages. Experiment for you Paul, ask random people in the grocery store or whatever if they’ve heard of Yates, then ask about Ball, guess which one is a household name? He’s not news and thus not notable and thus not a candidate for a wiki page.

Also, what Snowny said — links, use them.