Over on The Spearhead, W.F. Price celebrates the harassment directed at Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes Against Women video project as a sign of a powerful new backlash against the evils of feminism, a backlash he’s proud to be a part of. Dudes being obnoxious to a woman on the internet: Men’s Rights at its finest.
Oh, sure, Price acknowledges, some of the attacks on her were “juvenile” – and thus not as effective as they might otherwise have been — and the controversy did enable Sarkeesian to raise more than $130,000 for her project, but Price even sees this as a victory of sorts:
As for Sarkeesian’s success, we should be happy about it, because I can’t think of a more worthless way to spend over a hundred thousand dollars than in finger-wagging over video games. For one thing, it’s sure to piss even more guys off, and the game industry is very competitive, so her documentary (now expanded to 12 parts!) will likely have zero effect on production and consumption of this form of entertainment. The feminists are simply pissing all the money away, and that’s fine, because this time they’re paying for it themselves.
No question about it: those grapes were definitely sour.
Naturally, the Spearhead regulars were overjoyed by these new signs of, er, progress. Here are some highlights from the discussion that followed; lest I be accused once again of cherry-picking outliers, each and every one of the comments I quote below got literally dozens of net upvotes. This is what these guys really think.
Mojo offers a sort of backlash manifesto:
Feminists will never understand that it is -they- who are the oppressors. They cling to their delusion that they are the ‘underdog’ against the system, even as they control the system.
Revolution requires an enemy class to attack … this is seen as justified when the enemy class controls the system. But feminism is perpetual revolution. So what happens when they gain control over the system? They continue to attack the enemy class, i.e. men, thinking they are striking the next blow against the patriarchy, when what they are doing is more like a pogrom.
Yep, he went there.
Now -they- are the system, they are able and more than willing to intimidate, humiliate, expropriate. It will get indefinitely worse if they have their way. Liberal feminism leads -necessarily- to radical feminism.
Still, we don’t need feminists to ‘understand’ that they are the persecutors (I imagine some of them know this full well and are just misandrist sadists, little Eichmanns). It doesn’t matter what they think or know or understand. What matters is what -we- think, know and understand, and how we are going to act on it.
So … like the swivel-eyed feminist lunatics progressing from attempted assassinations to laying the foundations for institutional and legal abuse … I ask you – what are we going to DO with this knowledge and awareness beyond changing online discourse? …
Thinking like a leftist, though: why not attach ourselves to the GOP in order to subvert its gender politics and radicalize it in the MRA direction? That kind of approach has worked wonders for leftists and their infiltrations into public institutions …
Huh. Reactionary anti-feminists attaching themselves to the Republican Party? No one’s ever thought of that before.
Keyster offers some equally, er, innovative thinking:
Feminism has failed because women as a group adopted the notion of “equality” with men, while stubbornly clinging to their sexual/reproductive power over men. Had feminism truly helped women “realize their greatness”, there’d be far more great women. Instead there’s just more feminists. It’s run it’s course over 3 generations and it’s out of time to prove itself righteous.
The original “male chauvanist pigs” of the early 70′s, were right all along. Women are biologically and chemically ill-equipped to be men. If the Creator had meant women to be more like men, he wouldn’t have given them the ability to bring forth life from their bodies.
Ryu not only embraces the backlash, but seems perfectly fine with the notion that the Men’s Rights movement is a hate movement:
Good. Hatred and anger are power. Whenever you hear someone say “stop the hate”, it is a call to throw down your greatest weapons.
Young Guy purports to speak for all young guys (manginas presumably excepted):
If feminists think men, especially young men, are angry, they don’t know the half of it. As a 26 year-old male, I have seen this society bend over backwards to accommodate women all the time.
The school curriculums are geared toward female success. Schools have countless women’s programs. Female teachers can be as hateful as they want towards male students without facing consequences. People cheer when girls succeed in school, but jeer when boys succeed in school. Even though females have every advantage in the education system, they somehow still have the audacity to complain. They take fluff majors but don’t realize anyone with less than half a brain could pass classes in the humanities and social sciences.
What makes so many MRAs such proud yahoos?.
Oh, and just look at the workplace. Sexual harassment laws give women freedom to dress slutty and still have the nerve to complain when men sneak a peek. If you are a man who has a female co-worker, you have to walk on eggshells everyday or else you can get fired because the twat in the other room got her panties in a bunch over something minor you said. You can be a man who has busted his ass everyday to succeed in your chosen profession, only to see it mean nothing because some woman who was nothing more than an affirmative action hire. If this isn’t bad enough, you get these useless women who are subpar, yet they still never shut up about breaking through the mythical glass-ceiling that they didn’t break and didn’t exist in the first place.
Working men, forever cursed by subpar women.
Also, I have really had enough of women dragging this country down with their dead-weight. Female soldiers, police officers, and firefighters are liabilities. No, all you ladies in these jobs, you aren’t heroes. I am going to go insane if I hear one more female soldier, police officer, or firefighter cry about not getting the respect she thinks she deserves. She doesn’t get respect because she doesn’t deserve respect. The military, law enforcement, and firefighters would be A LOT better off if women stopped lowering the bar to astronomical proportions.
“Lowering the bar to astronomical proportions?” Young Guy here has clearly not yet mastered the fine art of metaphor.
He blabs on a bit longer before wrapping up with:
The backlash is not only real, but it is well-deserved. Apologies won’t erase the damage which has been done. Acting like what happened because of feminism either didn’t happen or was minor is a slap in the face. Saying women have suffered from feminism just as much as men is like spitting in the faces of all the men who have suffered ten lifetimes of pain because of feminism.
Not one, not two, not five, but ten lifetimes of pain? MRAs really are the world’s greatest drama kings.
Andrew S., meanwhile, seems a little confused as to what feminists would like to see happening in the video game industry:
It will be interesting to see if feminists can ruin the gaming industry like they ruin pretty much everything else. There is a lot of money being made off “gamers,” and even guys like me who play the occasional game but aren’t hardcore contribute a lot of money to the industry.
I doubt there are a lot of young guys and men out there who are going to want to play games that involve a bunch of screaming feminists, and where the object of the game is to destroy the “evil patriarchy.” The truth is guys who play games want their female characters to be either hot, large breasted, ass kicking types, or sexy non-feminist types that you save. If the gaming industry changes this dynamic to much due to Feminist/liberal pressure they will destroy a cash cow. And feminism will have yet another “victory.”
Unrestricted and uncriticized access to giant tittied video game ladies: a sacred men’s right!
Kevin evidently speaks for many when he says he wants video games to remain a boys club:
Video games are pretty much the only place that feminism can’t invade unless the principle consumers of them want it. You don’t have to play with girls, or listen to girls, or do other pansy shit. You probably can’t leave a football team and join a different one that has no women, you sure as hell can do that online. Don’t like all the teamwork talk? Play by yourself.
Feminists don’t like video games because; they can’t make them, they can’t force you to buy them or play them even if they did, they couldn’t ruin the experience for you unless you wanted them to.
You can do anything feminists don’t want you to do, and best of all you’re rewarded for it.
Anonymous Age 70 doesn’t even play video games, but he was pleased to learn that you can shoot ladies in them:
Speaking of video games, I am reminded of my son 8 or 10 years ago. I visited him, and he had some kind of shoot-em-up video game. He was partnered with a dearie, and the instant the game started, he always put a bullet in the middle of her forehead. Then, he’d laugh as if it were the funniest thing ever.
I told him he was a sick man, but I was also laughing as if it were the funniest thing ever.
Seriously, he told me he performed better with her dead than needing to be protected.
A great analogy for marriage 2.0, yes?
Women, can’t live them, can’t shoot them in the head. Except in video games!
Criticizing video games is misandry!
“Concerning aboriginals, it’s a matter of law. I don’t like unequal treatment under the law.”
Your laws do not apply to them because you fucking invaded their land and tried to genocide them completely out of existence, but sure, you keep on complaining about how unfair it is that they get to apply their our laws, that’ll really help your “feminism is evil” cause.
Shorter version — they aren’t the same fucking laws.
Look, dumb ass, this thing that you’re doing where you pretend that we have some problem with your wife being a stay at home wife and mother, or working on a farm, or whatever the fuck it is she wants to do? It’s tiresome and as stupid as everything else you’ve been spouting on this thread.
Nobody here has claimed that women should be forced to work outside the home, regardless of how many times you quote Simone de Beauvoir. And the only people who insist that women in the past “didn’t have to work” are other dumb asses who have ignored and/or devalued all the domestic work that women have done for centuries.
Prove it. (or, in other words, citation needed).
*sigh* http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100150671/ann-romneys-stay-at-home-feminism-has-done-her-husband-a-big-political-favour/
http://www.scragged.com/articles/ann-romney-and-the-feminist-movement
According to feminists, Ann Romney, a SAHM never worked a day in her life. Lovely.
*their own laws
I should maybe go to bed at some point…
AFLAC, everything you think you know about feminists is wrong. How does it feel to be fractally wrong?
I just realised something – GunTroll is Magdelyn’s ideal man, or at least he’s striving to be. Shame he’s already married, they’d be perfect for each other – he could diligently perform his pantomime of gender and she could worship him for it.
/)_<
That entire Romney thing was about classism as much as gender, but feel free to keep overlooking that. (Nobinayamu, this is who else says women never worked — people who think nobility = all women, so classists)
*Ceremonially offers TheCatFromOuterSpace one tuna-plated internet garnished with heavy cream*
**bows low in respect to Feline Genius**
Because no-one’s put it in these specific words yet:
The “No gun, no chance” is a false equivalence. A gun is a means to defend oneself. It is not the only such thing.
I’d feel a lot happier with a wooden stick of between two and six feet in length than a gun if someone was attacking me, for a multitude of reasons- the major point here being that if I had such a thing, I reckon I’d be in with a decent chance of avoiding a lot of the risks of life.
Loosen gun control, and my assailants may have guns. That makes everything go wrong for me.
(Context: UK, tight gun control.)
No, dumb ass, not according to feminists. That statement was made by Hilary Rosen who is a political pundit. Hilary Rosen may indeed identify as a feminist but she doesn’t represent all of feminism. She certainly doesn’t represent me.
I don’t think Ann Romney has never “worked a day in her life.” I think that being a stay at home wife and mother is a lot of work. And I’m a feminist. Why doesn’t my opinion count?
Oh wait, I want a shot at the “why do PUA’s techniques work?”
The same reason that advertising works.
Also you need to understand that some of the PUA tactics indicate that the ladies like more time with the gentleman before panties are drawn. One of their tactics is to move locations during one evening so that the other person feels like they have experienced more
things with that person.
PUA tactics like these are for a pump and dump, and they indicate that the female
likes more time with a person, so the goal is to play a psychological trick and cheat them out of that. Another fact I need to throw in is that PUA line of thinking does NOT indicate that women are all alike. They are clearly aimed at what they deem “alpha women”
because there are plenty of women to have sex with for a night when one goes out.
These tactics are to get the “hot one” and the hard to get one.
Advertisement agencies involve themselves in the most base of influence because
that works, but it works for a certain end, and that’s so people buy their products
whether they want or need them or not.
PUA advice “works” not at explaining women at all, or getting to know the alpha monolith at all. They advise on how NOT to get to know them and get what you want out of the transaction.
Someone falling for a sales tactic tells you nothing about them, so to assert that PUAs are instructing the gentlemen on anything meaningful about the ladies is false.
On a sidenote, the moving locations thing is really really bad for multiple reasons, one being safety. The levels of objectifying the person there are multiple. If there are aspects of PUA that work with the ladies’ psychologies’ that can also be a sign of the times and club culture, and they are not in positions to write an scientific papers just yet.
MorkaisChosen: Better prepare yourself for ye olde “but, but, but tight gun control means good people can’t get guns but criminals still can!” argument.
*Returns to chasing a fly around the room*
Argenti, I think that as far as classism goes an argument can be made that Ann Romney has never worked to earn a living. Certainly the work that Ann Romney did as a stay at home wife and mother was probably a lot different than the work that my great grandmother did as the wife and stay at home mother of a share-croppier in Alabama during the Great Depression.
Apparently, it’s just fine for women to work as long as their work is: 1) domestically centered and 2) unpaid.
Interesting. According to this http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/publish/height-chart.shtml/ I’m just barely above average height, here in in Australia. But if I were to go to Canada I’d be a solid two inches above average. I’d be waist* deep in hot** Canadian women!
Seriously though: not all women want tall, broad-shouldered men. How do I know? I am a frikkin’ tall, broad shouldered man, and not all women want me. Or if they do, most of them are doing a damn good job of hiding it. By contrast, the most successful ladies man I ever knew was tall, yes, but skinny, hairy, looked like Frank Zappa got caught in a transporter accident with Sideshow Bob, and smelled like a tobacco brewery. C’est la vie.
* Actually a Canadian woman of average height would come up to my nose.
** By “hot” I mean “attractive”, rather than “high in temperature”, because of the Canadan weather.
From a British point of view the idea that everyone being allowed to carry concealed guns makes people safer really does sound absurd. I don’t know quite how to communicate across the cultural divide just how wacky it does sound to us, and I’ve lived in the US for a long time.
I don’t know what that chick said about Ms. Romney, but I do know that some people say “work” when they are discussing, pull in a pay check, in the secular world, outside the home, etc, and to pull that out of context is CHEATING.
Don’t cheat the context. I doubt the discussion was about performing laborious tasks, which we all do unless right now you are sitting in a dump filled to the ceiling with fast food wrappers and a dirty washroom.
It depends on what they were talking about. If this Romney woman was giving advice to women in the workplace, then it’s fair to bring it up.
If you want to KNOW if someone considers family work, “work” then ASK THEM instead of playing cheap context cheating games because you think it makes you clever.
Some people do actually think that’s a clever way to communicate, it gets on my fucking nerves. All sides do this.
Nobinayamu — yeah that’s what I had taken from what Hilary Rosen said — that Ann Romney has never worked for pay and thus does not understand the economic realities of working for pay. Sorry if I wasn’t clear, it’s way past my bedtime.
“Apparently, it’s just fine for women to work as long as their work is: 1) domestically centered and 2) unpaid.”
And feminism wants to change that (true) by forcing all women to work (false).
@ ACLAUGH – So you seriously. genuinely advise this as a course of action? Wow. I thought that it was just a stupid rhetorical flourish, but that’s fucked up.”
Serious question? No, I don’t generally advise that people have extremely painful surgery to make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex. Given that this is a hypothetical situation, involving purely hypothetical actors, I was hoping that it needn’t be taken quite so literally.
I wasn’t taking it literally, at first. Hence my mocking of it as something that doesn’t make sense if taken literally. Then you posted that video, implying that I should – or at least could – take it literally. Now you say I shouldn’t, and we’re back to square one.
@Acronym Troll: So, because they’re opinions, they can’t be factual?
*HEADDESK*
Duh, dude.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/opinion
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factual
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/facts
A CLAIM or an INTERPRETATION (“feminists are [solely] responsible for Canada’s gun legislation”) needs to be supported with FACTS, i.e. evidence.
Editorials in popular media rarely provide sufficient evidence to persuade anybody who does not already agree with the assumptions, prejudices, and perspectives of editorial writer.
And I don’t know enough about Canada, but Jim Brady is not a feminist, as far as I know, though after he was shot in an assassination attempt (Reagan), he certainly became a major advocate for gun control.
You know, seconding the if you’re so fucking unhappy with feminist run Canada, why don’t you move to Texas (where I’ve lived for 19 years without ever needing a gun)? You and your wife would fit right in, I can guarantee it.
indifferentsky — “this Romney woman” may become the next first lady of the US and neither she nor her husband has a damned clue what the lives of the non-rich are like…the idiocy is kind of astonishing. And he’s definitely got another round of Spot That Fallacy!! there —
*False attribution – an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument
**Fallacy of quoting out of context (contextomy) – refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning.
AFLAC — you are sure you aren’t Swedish right? You’re really reminding me of the last PUA troll we had.
Note to new MRA would-be-commenters: If, in your very first comment, you refer to a specific commenter here as a “bitch,” I will not let that comment through. Also I will ban you.
ACFLAC:
But then again, I don’t know dirtyhippiefeet’s age. They didn’t specify that particular fact.
And how old are you? Age isn’t really material, unless you are saying that she must be so old that no present understanding of the situation is possible.
And then you do this stupid shit: Dirtyhippiefeet may ALSO be an aboriginal person – i don’t know.
And… whut?
You might be a convicted person, or otherwise reasonably denied the permit you so desperately want. We don’t know. See how easy that is? And what bullshit.
You (I think it was) said that you had your biases confirmed. I’m not surprised, if the level of intellectual impervium on display here is the normal mode of operations.
It would take a couple of clue by fours to set the charges to open enough of your skull to let an argument in, much less to let a fact contrary to the little dramas and excuses you are keep in your head penetrate.
No. No. Arm gets tired. What you want is friends. And shovels. And rebar. And land. Dig trenches, with scarp and counterscarp. At the bottom put spikes (see the above mentioned rebar). Make fougasse.
Burn the fuckers while they are spitted like a suckling pig.
Shoot the smaller groups, and take the larger ones with the semi-passive defenses.
ShadetheDruid: I have a feeling that would rapidly burn through my reserves of Care and cause me to flounce the thread.
Nanasha is right about knives. First thing to be aware of in knife fight, you are going to get cut.
Second thing is, not all knives are good for fighting.
Third thing about knife fights; they are far more likely to lead to jail time (issues of escalation, reasonable force, pursuit mindset, difficulty in realising the threat is abated).
Violence is a tricky thing, unless you are fond of bars where no one ever looks up from their drinks, or travel in circles where no one calls the police, better to have, “improvised”, or non-lethal weapons.
Because a knife, or a gun, shows a predisposition to lethal force, which will be considered when the decision to prosecute (or not) is made.
It’s a lot easier to plead “I was in fear of my life,” when you don’t have a hand-cannon, or a pigsticker, on your person.