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!
Yes, short guys do have to deal with issues taller men don’t but that is a problem with our entire culture not just women who want to date guys who are taller than them. In fact of the issues short men have to deal with (make less money, more likely to be bullied, etc) not finding a female partner is actually lower on the list of difficulties since the average height for men is 5 inches taller than the average height for women (meaning that if a man is 5’4″ that half of all women are still shorter than him).
“Dude, we’re basing wtf we know about you on what you’ve said in this thread.”
False. Several have made assumptions about my desire to gender-police. I have no such desire. People can do whatever they like. I know what worked, and what didn’t, and your kind tends to like to lie about it in the pursuit of a certain political agenda which I happen to disagree with in the strongest possible terms.
“So are you against feminism because of what Simone de Bouvier said?”
Partially. That’s more my wife’s pet peeve. In my case, I’m against feminism because as a young person, I felt my potential was always being overshadowed by a compulsive need to push girl-power. To make a special place in history for women’s achievements, for example. I’m of the opinion that women shouldn’t need to be singled-out. If a woman did something great in history, then that’s worthy of just as much consideration and attention as any other achievement. I don’t believe that women deserve special treatment, simply by virtue of being women. Yet, special treatment under the law, in our schools, on American college campuses, in government budgets abounds. Perhaps misandry is the wrong word, perhaps the word should be overcompensation.
Who pushes for this? I see feminists pushing for increasing special treatment.
“I think it’s great that you have a SAHW, assuming that she likes being one. I myself am a SAHW. It is possible to be one and a feminist at the same time. We aren’t all the same. The point is that women and men should be free to pursue their own individual desires, not pigeonholed into constrictive gender norms. People try to turn the whole working mother issue into a wedge, and it’s really kind of a moot point, since most women can’t afford to stay home. It’s classist to assume that being a SAHW is an attainable goal for most women.”
Well, for the most part, women can’t afford to stay at home yes. My wife is one of them. And she blames feminism for forcing her into a work-force that she doesn’t want anything to do with. By shifting the west to a dual-income model, it’s made it effectively impossible for women to choose to stay at home, and raise the children. Moreover, it doesn’t seem like she’s alone in thinking this. Who else pushed to get women into the workforce as a part of an equality program? Increasingly we see divorced baby-boomers, and young thirty-something women worried that they aren’t going to find the man that they want to settle-down and start a family. I ask, did women really want to enter the work-force and abandon motherhood as slavery? Or did feminists TELL women that this is what they wanted? I believe that it’s the latter, and Simone de Beauvoir is exhibit A.
“You realize that this woman could have…”
Bedside lamp or water glass upside the head; perfume, bengay, pen/pencil, fingers to the eyes; knee or hand to the groin, everything else pillowinhell said. I’m partial to the fingers into eyes approach myself, but the bengay sitting not 2′ away would probably be more effective (though, the iron under the table would probably be most effective, an iron upside the head sounds quite painful).
I’m one more in the “I actually like not having to stand on tiptoes and strain my neck backwards just to kiss my partner” club. (My current partner, who is of average height, is the tallest man I’ve ever dated, and I’ve teased him that he needs to figure out a way to shrink so he’s easier to reach.) My hypothetical physically-ideal man would be about 5’7”.
It’s almost like women are (gasp!) individuals, with individual preferences! WHO KNEW.
Women, particularly poor women (and the poor have always outnumbered everyone else left) have always been in the workforce. The thing is, it always been part of the very seriously underpaid jobs, the dirty or dangerous jobs other people didn’t want. Or they worked for free but were given the most minimal of food and shelter.
So nice try, your wife wasn’t forced into working by feminism.
“False. Several have made assumptions about my desire to gender-police. I have no such desire.”
“…and your kind tends…”
You keep making these broad sweeping statements while failing to realize that people are individuals — that’s the gender policing people are calling you on.
“Perhaps misandry is the wrong word, perhaps the word should be overcompensation.”
Yeah overcompensating for all those centuries women got no notice…that’s not overcompensation…it’s attempting to finally achieve — “If a woman did something great in history, then that’s worthy of just as much consideration and attention as any other achievement.”
“And she blames feminism for forcing her into a work-force that she doesn’t want anything to do with.”
And another MRA who says that asking for women to be allowed to work is why wages haven’t increased much in decades (hold on, I have a citation on that one).
Your fuckin’ words dude. I shouldn’t need to remind you of them. I think you don’t see them as real men because that’s what you fucking said.
No you haven’t. See above. Not swearing doesn’t make you polite.
All I can say is the dude wouldn’t like a fight with me. I’ve been in plenty of dirty scraps and in my house, there’s a quarter staff I know how to use. If I can sweep him off his feet, I know a hold that can break a leg in three places without much effort.
But I like working. I’m good at my job. I’m not especially good at homemaking (except for cooking, at which I am excellent). It would be silly to tell me to stop working at the job I do well and switch to a job I don’t do well because I’m a woman and all women are supposed to do the same job.
I think your wife is a little silly.
Well then don’t. It’s not just guns that aren’t fucking magic, intent isn’t either.
“What is it with men and height?”
“Have you practiced quick-firing drills? Do you know how to double-tap up to target? Are you practiced as shooting under stress to cope with the tendency to shoot high? If you have a failure to feed are you practiced in clearing, rechambering and reacquiring the target? How much time have you spent practicing the act of loading (not firing, just loading. Empty well/cylinder, to a round in battery)? Are you situationally aware of the potential threats in your AO (pop quiz, the last five constables you saw… were the right handed or left? Did they have batons? What level (1/2/3) of body army were they wearing?).”
No. But PLEASE, try to understand this. Not because I don’t WANT to, because, OHMIGOD, I know that guns take PRACTICE.
REALIZE THAT I’M NOT ALLOWED to. I can OWN a gun, but I’m not exactly allowed to TRAIN. There are ways around that, yes, and I’m WORKING ON THAT. But as far as it goes, I’m not SPECIAL enough, according to the government, to warrant the kind of permission that would allow me to make USE of that training and practice. And neither are most people in this country. Thanks be to feminists.
You know, there’s a third option here. I know it’s going to sound super crazy and confusing to you, but let me try to spell it out for you anyway:
Different women…want different things.
Some women really like working full-time! Some women really like being stay-at-home parents! Some women like being the primary breadwinner for their family. Some women don’t even want a family. Some women want to have 14 kids, and some want to have 2 kids, and some want to have no kids. Some women want to be CEOs, and some women want to be elementary school teachers, and some want to be doctors, and some want to be artists, and some want to write novels, and some want to be accountants, and some want to be astronauts, and some want to be Olympic athletes, and some want to be dog trainers, and some want to be chefs, and some want to be porn stars, and some want to be plumbers. Women want different things, because women are individual human beings!
Your wife can love being a stay-at-home-mom and have no desire to get a job outside the home – and another woman can HATE being a stay-at-home mom and LOVE having a job outside the home! Both of these things can be true! It’s almost as if women are not actually the Borg!
“You keep making these broad sweeping statements while failing to realize that people are individuals — that’s the gender policing people are calling you on.”
Except that I wasn’t referring to GENDER. I was referring to FEMINISTS. Are feminists a gender now? Or is every poster here female?
Re: the gap between productive and pay — that’s US data, but you’ll readily see that the problem here is that wages haven’t increased much since 1970. Note that median does not mean average, the difference between median male and female compensation is likely due to women entering the workforce in larger numbers (decreasing the number of women with 0 income, versus a relatively stable number of men with 0 income).
Feminism has fuck all to do with the loss of the middle class in other words.
“Some women really like being stay-at-home parents!”
Except of course for the trend among feminists to want to take that option OFF of the table.
Dude, we do have firing ranges, hunting clubs and gun clubs here…also, you want to learn all that stuff join the reserves. AND they’ll let you practice and use the training. My guess is that Pecunium honed many of those skills from his military service.
Also, guns do not make the man. Why are you so fixated on them?
[citation needed]
Dude, you’ve already had posters here tell you that they are stay-at-home parents. Can you point to the bit where anyone told them they should not be stay-at-home parents? Because I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen!
Bullshit. I’m a feminist. A very good friend of mine is a stay at home wife and mother. How is this possible?
“AND they’ll let you practice and use the training.”
False. Have you managed to successfully obtain an Authorization to Carry by virtue of being a reservist? If so, I know something like 10,000 gunnutz who want to know your secret, myself included.
“Also, guns do not make the man. Why are you so fixated on them?”
Because I don’t want to be a victim? Because I want the responsibility for my own protection? Because I want to be allowed to ACT if some tragedy should unfold, rather than die?
Take your pick.
Yeah. No one who has a gun is ever killed.
Excellent logic.
“Except that I wasn’t referring to GENDER. I was referring to FEMINISTS. Are feminists a gender now? Or is every poster here female?”
Oh FFS, see Dracula’s comment — you’re making sweeping generalizations about men, and about what women (and in particular feminists) want.
“WOMEN like physically strong men. Feminists generally do not as such men are almost always objects of ridicule and scorn.”
“My own experience is that women generally like men who engage in this “barbaric,” and “primitive” activities, and this goes completely against what feminists say. That is to say that women in general tend to like, appreciate and prefer overtly masculine men, the same men that I see feminists ridicule, mock and deride.”
I could pull up more examples were you’ve said “most women like X, but fmeinists hate X” but you’ve probably posted 4 more comments while I’m typing.
Spot That Fallacy!!
Shotgun argumentation – the arguer offers such a large number of arguments for their position that the opponent can’t possibly respond to all of them.
“Except of course for the trend among feminists to want to take that option OFF of the table.”
Nope! Feminism wants women to be able to be stay at home mothers if they want to be.
“[citation needed]
Dude, you’ve already had posters here tell you that they are stay-at-home parents. Can you point to the bit where anyone told them they should not be stay-at-home parents? Because I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen!”
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” – Simone de Beauvoir.
“Because I don’t want to be a victim? Because I want the responsibility for my own protection? Because I want to be allowed to ACT if some tragedy should unfold, rather than die?”
*points to the kitchen* I’ve got a few knives that’ll have you tasting your cardioid in no time flat. (And goddamned do they cut a tomato nicely!)
Someone hand me a pitchfork, we got a lot of strawfeminists here…
Look dude, you don’t know shit about feminism. In fact. There a recently written ( a couple actually) article written by suppossedly feministe women who derided stay at home moms and or how much thought women give in bearing children…smacked down for the bullshit it was. Yes, there’s a lot of classim in certain areas of feminism and that’s what fuels the mommy wars. Which is entirely irrelevant to poor women like myself. But I smack down the stoopid anyways, because I believe that the vocation or carrer a woman takes should be her own decision made in her and her familys’ best interest.
ACLAF: “And she blames feminism for forcing her into a work-force that she doesn’t want anything to do with.”
Gee, someone you know doesn’t want to go to work? How unique and totally some movement-you-hate’s fault.
Feminism is about giving women a CHOICE where there previously wasn’t one. If she has to get a job, it’s probably because of, you know, the whole money thing.
ACLAF: “Or did feminists TELL women that this is what they wanted?”
Funny, coming from a man who is telling women that they don’t want what they’ve clearly said they’ve wanted. Last I checked, feminists could very easily be women, so if they’re saying they want something and they happen to be a women, then women are saying they want something.
And yes, sometimes feminism is about earning equality in undesirable things, like boring work and the military. Those things need to be shared among humanity as much as anything else. I will gladly sign up for the draft if it will get whiny-ass bigots to shut the F up. It’s my duty as the human being I want to be treated as.
Also, your wife (if she exists or is even remotely how you say she is) does not = all women. That’s sort of the point of feminism. We’re not all alike or want the same things.