So apparently I’m way off base with this “misogyny” thing. For example, I have been under the impression that I have been finding misogynistic stuff in the Men’s Rights subreddit, like, all the time. With upvotes, and everything. But evidently I’m wrong.
Because now ignatiusloyola, one of the subreddit mods, has done a very scientific study that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that, well, whatever misogyny is there is officially not a big damn deal.
Ig explains his protocol:
I did a quick scan of the first 400 comments on the list (100/page, 4 pages in). I scanned for words like “cunt” and “whore”, and read the context of these. I looked for the words “woman” and “women”, and read the context of these. I looked for “suffrage” and “vote” also.
I found two comments that used the word “cunt”, one of them was used to describe men, the other to describe a specific woman. The only instances of “whore” were “attention whore”.
There were two comments involving the word “woman” that generalized women with negative stereotypes.
“Suffrage” and “vote” instances did not involve any context that suggested that women did not deserve the right to vote.
How a person defines “hatred of women”, either loosely (suggestive from context, rather than explicit) or strictly (explicit statements), it is pretty clear that out of 400 comments, very few are misogynistic.
Does misogyny exist? Yes. But it does not seem to be a significant contribution to r/MensRights. At best, people are seeing a few comments and focusing on their existence while ignoring the rest.
It’s a lot like that time Michael Richards did that standup routine, and everyone focused on that one word he said, totally ignoring all the other words he used that were totally not racist slurs. I mean, yeah, he said that word a bunch of times, but it still made up a very small percentage of all the words he used that evening.
So that’s that, then. Misogyny, officially not a problem!
Or that would have been that, had Ig not actually posted about his experiment to the subreddit he had just proved was, like, totally non-misogynistic:
Because it turned out that a couple of the fellas had an issue with Ig’s methodology. In particular, that stuff about female suffrage. Because, apparently, you can totally be against women having the right to vote and still not be a misogynist. As zyk0s put it (garnering upvotes in the process):
[T]here’s the matter of female suffrage. I really don’t see how suggesting women should not have been granted the right to vote is misogyny. It might be motivated by it, but not necessarily so, and treating it as such is akin to criminalizing holocaust denial: it’s censorship, pure and simple, and if [1] /r/MR wants to keep calling itself an open space where ideas are not silenced, that attitude has to change.
Our friend Demonspawn went even further(and got a few upvotes himself):
Suggesting that the government works better without the women’s vote is not misogyny. It’s an analysis of the facts and the consequences of allowing women’s suffrage.
Suggesting that women retain the right to vote without the corresponding responsibilities that men face is misandry.
So there you have it. The Men’s Rights subreddit doesn’t have a misogyny problem; if anything, it’s a hotbed of misandry.
I also love how a specific criticism about his premise being vague and containing no actual jokes translates to single sentence (It’s not funny!) the minute it hits Tommy’s brain.
You’re not just unable to take criticism, dude. You seem to be unable to process it.
@Tom
It doesn’t work that way, people don’t have to be funny to point out that you don’t have a funny bone in your body.
The scenario you posted is lacking in anything that could potentially be considered a joke. The ending is completely predictable and can be seen from a mile away, there is no unpredictability, no contradicting expectations, no snappy timing, not even a humorous observation on something that happens in real life. It’s a pointless and artificial scenario constructed to illustrate your own prejudices with no regards to anything that resembles humour.
Also, the “two sides of the brain” thing? It’s a myth, it’s not true. There is no evidence that one side of the brain has more to do with certain processes than the other. Brain processing is split pretty much evenly between both hemispheres.
If it makes you feel any better, I think a suitable punchline to that little boat-Aesop would have been someone, floating with all the miserable survivors in their lifejackets, saying what a shame it is that the water pump went down with the boat.
The funnier a person is, the harder it is to make them laugh, therefore, it is easier to make women laugh.
Actually, Tom, I think that people with more developed senses of humor laugh more easily than those without, because there is so much more that they find funny. The MRAs I’ve seen around here, however, take themselves very, very seriously and generally fail at being funny.
Fembot said,
… I could tell the funniest joke in the world, and you wouldn’t find it funny because I’m a woman.
Fembot, genuine laughter is involuntary. A bog standard victim-feminist mindset will not help you be funny for sure.
There have been comments on these threads where manboobzers have admitted they’ve laughed hard at the humour in my comments, despite not wanting to show me any support.
I admit, that the instances where this has happened have usually been where I have pulled some canned material out at a relevant time – so if someone says “Do you hate women?”, I’m ready with “Not normally.”
It may be a canned answer, but I wrote it and canned it, so it is always genuine and funny in the heat of the moment.
Seemingly effortlessly funny people just have more canned material, but also may be able to adapt it faster to fit whatever situation.
I was speaking to a supremely funny university friend once, saying to him “I think I’ve figured out why you’re so funny. You are a very attentive listener” and he said “What was that?”
I asked him where he got that joke from, and he just said “standard procedure”.
Likewise in class, a lecturer asked him what rules he had in the creative process with his writing partner for one of his films, and he replied “No biting.” I asked him again, where he got it from, and he said “standard procedure”. He’d thought it through. Situations repeat themselves.
I was chatting with a nurse, about the importance of women paying their own way, after she’s been going on about the importance of men buying her shit.
I convinced her she was being a baby, and eventually she cracked, saying “Alright! I will buy you a beer.” I congratulated her for the change of attitude, and said something about how nice it would be to have a beer, and she lost interest – so I ruminated on it, and realized, that when she said “Alright! I’ll buy you a beer.” I should have kept it going by saying “Can I just have the money instead?”
A couple of weeks later, a virtually identical scenario arose, so I was ready with the seemingly quickfire response – and the woman wouldn’t leave me alone all night.
Comedy is about amassing your own material, then calling on it.
I have not historically felt the need to do that, but want to focus more on it in the future.
This thread needs more farts.
“This thread needs more farts.”
Why would we want more of Tom Martin’s comments?
Xtra: Don’t you mean Tom Fartin’? Hurr hurr hurr.
(Apologies if anyone’s already made that pun, too lazy to check. And also for the shittyness of it. 😛 ).
@ Tom Martin
“There have been comments on these threads where manboobzers have admitted they’ve laughed hard at the humour in my comments, despite not wanting to show me any support.”
If you remove “the humour in”, then you’ve got it spot on.
I actually think Tom Martin might be a troll on an epic scale – he is, even for an MRA, so ridiculously far out that it might be a massive hoax.
I’ll just point out again that Tom Martin originally planned to sue the LSE as a ‘comedy’ stunt. He then just seemed to really get into playing a delusional victim.
Now here’s a funny joke:
How many MRAs does it take to change a lightbulb?
None, they just sit in the dark screaming at women to do it for them.
Something just occured to me…
Tom Martin is so ridiculous that he doesn’t even get a proper audience within the Manosphere… The only place that he gets any proper interaction is on a blog that’s primary purpose is to mock the manosphere.
Tom, what are your *real* political views?
You’re the Kenneth Tong of gender politics, aren’t you?
@Happy
Here’s some stuff from before he got ‘known’. It’s pretty much the same except now he’s a lot whinier, creepier and ridiculous.
I can’t believe LSE let him in. Did he have someone else write his entrance material?
“He’s so ridiculous, but I can’t quite explain why.”
“He can’t get an audience”
UCL’s Women’s Union usually get about 5 people showing up for their debates according to them, but when they invited me, 200 showed up, according to the local press, along with three documentary crews.
My youtube video has 28,000 views and 1256 comments – with 5 other youtubers copying it.
My Guardian article got 1000 comments in 12 hours before they shut it down.
“He can’t get an audience”
Ask Douchetrail about how his comments section does when I show up in it.
“He’s such an idiot, which is why I can’t stop commenting on him.”
Tom, I watched a video of an owl yesterday that over 2 million hits. Top that, you rank amateur.
That owl had it all over you smarts and personality-wise. Cuter too.
Ask Douchetrail about how his comments section does when I show up in it.
“He’s such an idiot, which is why I can’t stop commenting on him.”
I think if one of the MRAs or trolls ever showed they understood the point of this site, I think I might die of shock.
Shorter Tom Martin: “‘I knew I should create a great sensation,’ gasped the Rocket, and
he went out.”
Yes, Tom, you do realize that you get lots of people looking at your in the same way that AVfM and various other trolls do? It’s grimly fascinating.
An audience that takes you seriously, that engages you in debate – not just dismiss you with ease like Helen Lewis did.
@ Tom- What on earth does the nursing student story have to do with humour, Tom? Are you including uncomfortable courtesy laughter as a humour response? And laughter might be involuntary (though suppressible- ever had an inappropriate thought at a formal function?), but that doesn’t mean our perceptions and prejudices don’t influence what we find funny. And your focus has got to be a little off when you are chatting with women, since it seems like whenever you see one your brain just starts firing off profanities.
Happy,
Helen Lewis was a smooth debater. She’d done the show once before, and had Jenni Murray on her side too. The whole team of women in the gallery, behind the glass as well. The show was called “Woman’s Hour”, and they are very skilled at deflecting male complaint, because they’ve been doing it for sixty odd years. It is their business.
They know their own show is part of my complaint, because I’d been writing to them intermittently telling them what scumbags they were for the last 5 years.
I don’t recall Helen Lewis “dismissing me with ease” though.
I did, as well as prepare for the interview, have a court case to prepare for, along with all the other media, so I was tired, and felt personally that I didn’t do wonderfully, but if you pay close attention, Helen Lewis is stylish in her delivery, but light on substance – and they both change the subject when I tell them how feminism fakes its statistics, and then she avoids my central point at the end and throws in a red herring about me making money from the fund raising effort. Bare in mind, I was told by the BBC that I couldn’t actually mention the case. They didn’t even mention in the intro that I was suing the gender studies depo, so they were being as vague and unhelpful as they could. LSE and the BBC have very close ties. The BBC lies about paygaps, sex slavery, drinks spiking, patriarchy, honour killings, anorexia etc – never mentions misandry, or men’s rights movements constructively, and is part of the anti-male establishment (although perhaps improving) and I had maybe three minutes to deconstruct their dominant discourse, and state my case without mentioning my case.
And I don’t recall any Douchetrail followers dismissing the veracity of my complaint either, on any points, other than the old “Ha ha you lost. We are morally ambivalent whores” point.
Yep. You’ve got me there.
And where is all the wonderful media work of all you anonymous manboobzers?
Point me to the interviews of Douchetrail going into a hostile men’s rights movement live show broadcast on a major network for instance.
And point me to any one of you doing the same.
Here’s one of a couple of interviews I did with sympathetic interviewers. It’s a lot easier:
http://sexismbusters.org/Mens_Matters_Interview_NEW.html
And here’s another (36 mins 30 in):
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avoiceformen/2011/09/21/what-do-women-want-and-an-interview-with-tom-martin
Cloudiah, you were the one who pointed out Tom had a pattern, right? Is this where he traditionally starts plugging his interviews and websites, or is he a little later than usual? Tom, you do realize you are getting airtime because people find your ideas freakishly ridiculous and sensationalist. To TV, you are an ideological car wreck, and the public slows down to stop a car wreck. But the scary thing is you think that’s something to be proud of. You go on camera or online, present your bigoted delusions, and get absolutely tuned by anyone who’s ever read a magazine article on feminism. You are the dude who keeps getting trounced every boxing match and yet never retires- no one is watching you for your game, they are watching to see you get clobbered yet again. It’s pretty cathartic for people who spend their days negotiating hidden sexism to find a dude who doesn’t mind voicing his absurd ideas. So, ya know, thanks for putting yourself out there like that, Tom! When the time comes and you actually develop a semblance of self awareness, know that you did all those people who are laughing at you a great service.
Anyone else think “Douchetrail” is stupid even for name-based insults? “Douchetrelle” would at least be workable, but “-trail”. Wtf?
Shorter Tommy: I did bad on TV because misandry! WAH!