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!
jesus, manboobz is so lame.
Actually on topic —
“They take fluff majors but don’t realize anyone with less than half a brain could pass classes in the humanities and social sciences.”
…those are curved too guys, meaning you get a C or worse if you aren’t in the top half — or do they think curving grades makes everyone’s grade better than it really is?
ACLAF: I’ve always WANTED to be masculin, manly, powerful, strong, smart, fast etc. Thanks to feminism, I turned against that impulse, and stayed that way, thinking quite naively that I’d be okay. That was a colossal mistake, and has cost me maybe five years of life that I can never get back.
You poor dear. I’m all those things, and a feminist. Feminism has made me better at them.
I think the problem isn’t actually feminism. It’s you.
And I guess what bugs me, what gets to me, is that you don’t seem to want to understand this David. For a guy who spends all his time ragging on the MRM, you don’t seem to know what it’s like to feel hated, and reviled every time you turn on the television, for your whole life. And worse, it seems like you don’t care, or worse, you don’t WANT to care.
You’re right, I don’t care, because it hasn’t happened to me.
Howard: I can’t speak to the soldiers and policemen. I’m not one of them, and have no firsthand knowledge there.
I do have knowledge of female soldiers. They are just as good as male soldiers. If I had to build an infantry platoon, I can’t imagine doing it without some of the female soldiers I’ve known.
I’m not sure if anyone has pointed this out to ACLAF, but feminists didn’t just lobby extra hard for gun control because they are mean, mean, man-hating bitches.
They lobbied extra hard for gun control because of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre.
Oh and FUCK YOU that’s an issue that concerns women.
While I don’t buy and use guns, I am in favor of gun rights. I am in favor of Missouri’s conceal carry laws. My dad and brother both have several rifles and pistols. My husband’s grandma used to have a mounted shotgun above her front door for shooting rabbits (rabbit meat is tasty). I used to shoot Mt. Dew cans as a teenager. So anyway, ACLAF, you shouldn’t generalize about feminists being all for gun control.
Am I the only one who thinks of the AFLAC duck when I read his name?
Furthermore, by ridiculing firearms owners as “gun-totting toothless rednecks,”
This is Canada, where if one is a legal owner of firerarms, ammunition can be mailed to one’s home.
Yes, pistol permits are harder to get, but a rifle permit is pretty much pro-forma.
As evidenced by the fact that our failed flounce is complaining not that he can’t own guns, but that he can’t pack heat in the streets.
I’ve been to Canada. I’ve been in the “seedy” parts of Ontario and Toronto. Let’s just say that I wasn’t nervous.
Bear in mind, Canada allows anyone to carry a knife that goes from elbow to fingertip.
But this moron is worried that he can’t protect himself.
Shade: Blockquote fails strike again? I’m still wondering why WordPress doesn’t have a preview function, or at the very least an edit button.
Do you really want the MRAs who post here to be able to go back and edit?
I don’t.
Ruby: The video game industry would be just fine without damsels in distress and female characters with obnoxiously large breasts. And good for Anita for raising $130,000. More power to her.
And prison would be better if there was less rape.
But you need to get your jollies, so it’s ok if that doesn’t get any better.
I also understand arguments in favor of gun control, too. It’s true that abusers use guns to kill their exes, and they should not have access to them. That’s why in the US, abusers lose their carry permits under the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban. I’m not like one of the NRA radicals that want dangerous people to have access to any and all type of weapons.
Yeah limiting the gaslighting attempts is good, but WP does have preview option (or WP2 did, I still have to poke WP3)
Nope, that’s why I’ve written it that way. It’s not like he’s here in good faith.
Ironic, because I’d fail Young Guy’s rant in any freshman comp class I’ve ever taught. And I ought to point out that I’ve only ever taught remedial freshman comp – one kid actually stormed out on me because he didn’t know what the words “noun” and “verb” meant and thought I was making fun of him. (Once we cleared that up, he made astonishing progress and is now a nuclear medicine tech, IIRC.)
@Dani
Yeah… no. I’ve seen quite a bit of really awful writing and analysis, and I go to a prestigious liberal arts college and am not even the professors. Writing coherently is hard, and being able to critically analyze history, anthropology, etc. is hard, too. Yeah, it doesn’t involve as much studying as the hard and natural sciences (though I did study pretty hard for my last sociology test) but what it requires is harder to pull out at the last minute.
Actually, the lowest grade I’ve pulled in a college class so far has been in a 100 level English course (on poetry) and I’ve taken calculus-based physics, cell biology, organic chemistry, and several 300-level math classes. In the humanities and social sciences, it may be harder to outright flunk (though still possible) but it is also harder to get stellar grades.
And seriously, while most people won’t study literature for a job, being able to critically analyze writing and to write clearly and accurately will help whatever you end up doing, and I’m sure all the other profs would prefer if the English profs and high-school English teachers taught that so they didn’t.
(True story: my developmental prof and I had to explain active vs passive voice to one of my classmates. She had mixed it up with present tense, but picked the correct definition up pretty quickly. I can’t help but feel like someone along the line assumed she knew what active voice was and didn’t bother to check.)
Aflac dude, I sure as hell hope you aren’t actually Canadian, because what you’re spouting off here about guns is full of shit. Also, we don’t live in Canuckistan, land of the women strong and free, so no, feminism doesn’t run everything.
Yes guns are harder to get than in the US. But a) we don’t have a constitonal right to them like in the states and b) the attitudes towards guns are changing as Canada becomes more urbaninized.
You’re really upset that traditional manly protector is losing sway? Are you eager to die son? Ready to pull that trigger on a moments notice to save your family, even though the aggressor already has the drop on you? You know what strikes me? Your more likely to escalate a bad situation then come out as a gun blazing hero.
WordSpinner: Yeah, it doesn’t involve as much studying as the hard and natural sciences (though I did study pretty hard for my last sociology test) but what it requires is harder to pull out at the last minute.
I don’t know that I agree. It requires skills that aren’t what people think of as “hard” (e.g. calculus), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t as hard. I have a friend who is was a philosophy major and she is appallingly dismissive of anything which has to do with the social sciences.
I think it’s because she things the rigor of symbolic logic can’t be as easily applied, and so the arguments are shit.
She’s wrong, but there’s no point in going on about it with her.
pillowinhell: Speaking as someone who has spent his entire life with guns (really, I started shooting at five, I have memories from before that, but they are pretty scattered; hell from here anything before 8 is starting to get fuzzy), you have the right of more than not.
From 25 on I was a soldier. Trained to use guns to kill people, and not just reactively but proactively. If I have the drop on someone, the last thing they want to do is reach for something inside their clothes (unless I tell them to). I’ll drill them; all it takes is 6.5 lbs of pressure on the trigger. I’m already thinking about it.
Same’s true if I have knife, actually. Minimum safe distance for an external holster is 27 feet.
For a concealed it’s more like 35. Ten fucking meters.
Good luck, by the time you realise I have a knife I’m well inside your safe distance. The only reason so many people manage to use a concealed weapon to protect themselves is the people they face are as amateur as they are.
@ Pecunium–I meant “hard sciences” as a catch all for physics and chemistry, etc, and didn’t mean to imply that the social sciences weren’t as difficult to do, though I do think the skills are different. I was actually arguing that it is harder to get away with just studying up on facts at the last minute, and therefore requires quite a bit of effort put into being able to synthesize information and back up arguments. I think we agree, and I just had some issues expressing myself :).
(Frankly, I think science teachers are usually exasperated by students inability to apply what they learn in class too, but it isn’t a skill practiced enough in science classes, especially in lower levels.)
HE’S NOT A BEEFCAKE AS WELL THOUGH.
DO YOU SEE NOW HOW OUR MISANDRIST CULTURE DEGRADES MEN?
The great thing is, if you have a beefcake hero, you get the other group of MRAs, like the guys putting together the revenge video project about “misandry” in video games, complaining that muscular male characters make them feel inadequate.
@Shaenon – I don’t want Astrid to be weaker, I would want to see Hiccup as stronger, or at least not have Stoic be quite so wrong about everything. You know, less clumsy maybe…
“Weren’t strong men being reviled by the feminist majority just a page or so ago?”
Feminism does not equal women. WOMEN like physically strong men. Feminists generally do not as such men are almost always objects of ridicule and scorn. Or is there no difference between feminism, and women?
And yes, I’m fully aware that’s a generalization, some women like this, some women like that. But most like tall, relatively slender men. Try being a short man some time, and see how much female attention you get. Or try being overweight, and a little geeky.
“They lobbied extra hard for gun control because of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre.”
You know, it’s fun getting lectured on how Canada’s gun control laws work, or don’t as the case may be. The Montreal Massacre would not have been prevented by anything that the Liberals or the Progressive Conservatives did afterward. And the feminists of the Liberal Women’s Caucus didn’tt really care about the Montreal Massacre: they cared about making Kim Campbell look soft on guns, and they used the emotions of the massacre to make that happen.
Nice try though.
“So anyway, ACLAF, you shouldn’t generalize about feminists being all for gun control.”
I know that not all self-defined feminists are in favor of gun control. Here, in this country however, it is always marketed as a “women’s issue” regardless of the realities of the situation. SOME feminists are always at the forefront of the debate. And our laws are pretty damned draconian. For example: in one circumstance a woman was raped and beaten to death in Toronto while on the phone with 911. The police arrived too late. If she’d been allowed to own a firearm, then I submit that she might still be alive.
In another example, Ian Thompson of Port Colborne Ontario was asleep when three or four thugs began throwing molotov cocktails at his house. He quickly loaded his revolver, and showing remarkable self-restraint, fired warning shots at them, scared them off, and put the fire out. Getting the police involved was a mistake however: he’s still on trial for unsafe storage, and those charges are criminal, which means he could do time in prison. For defending himself. Against a credible and serious threat on his life. And this being Ontario, he’s being prosecuted by a Liberal government, which we firearms owners see as no accident.
“AFLAC, given that you’re a libertarian, I invite you to write and produce your own TV shows that present men the way you wish they were presented, and if you don’t, I’ll kindly suggest that it’s your own damn fault that there’s nothing on TV that you like.”
Well, I gave up television years ago, but I watched my fair share in my youth, so I’m not familiar with a large number of the characters mentioned. I could deconstruct and show how the male characters of the 90’s aren’t very good examples of masculinity, but that’d just be a waste of time, now wouldn’t it?
Finally, to those who think I’m obsessed with some kind of negative masculinity, and that I don’t see effeminate men as real men… I’ve kept this polite so far, and I’ve seen a number of fuck you’s, but this is starting to get ridiculous. Pretty much everything you assume about me is flat-out wrong when it comes to gender-roles, gender policing, and what I think men ought to be.
Hellkell mentioned straw MRA’s, well, keep building them.
A few days ago, David posted a long, incredibly run on post by MasculistMan, concerning militancy. Guess what? The intended target of that post was ME. He did it to bother ME. Check out his other blog why don’t you – the one with my name in the tittle.
“Well, I gave up television years ago, but I watched my fair share in my youth, so I’m not familiar with a large number of the characters mentioned. I could deconstruct and show how the male characters of the 90′s aren’t very good examples of masculinity, but that’d just be a waste of time, now wouldn’t it?”
So I’ve listened to a bunch of old radio comedies and the Big Dopey Ol’ Man-Boy Dad trope goes way back to like the fifties, and I really don’t think it was feminists in the writers’ room.
At this point I would just like to give everything ACLAF says a big fat “citation needed”.
Or maybe citations are only for fluffy humanities majors?
What the SHIT are you accusing David of?
At least give links instead of cutesy little “wink-nod something’s funny about that know-what-I-mean”s. You’re not Deep frickin’ Throat here.
Also: re the seventy-year old who was watching his grandson play, I can’t help but wonder what game it was where it let you keep going after shooting the person you’re supposed to be escorting in the escort quest? Unless this was just a partner or something, in which case, I can’t think of many games where your partner is a liability (even if they don’t help much, they’re generally good enough now not to actually hinder you; at the very least, they can off-tank for you.)