Today is an auspicious day. For the Men’s Rights Subreddit, which we often write about here on Man Boobz, has won the prestigious World’s Greatest Shitlord Award. Oh, sorry, I mean it won the Subreddit of the Day award on Reddit. Which is, in this case, pretty much the same thing.
Here are some highlights from the official announcement , which I am totally not making up. No, really, you can go look. Someone – that being XavierMendel, one of the mods of r/subredditoftheday — actually wrote these things. And meant them. I AM NOT BEING SARCASTIC THIS IS REAL HOLY SHIT.
The topic at hand today takes a generous turn from our amusing and lighthearted articles of the month. On this, the last day of January, we look at something a bit more worthy to be called an article. /r/MensRights comes up a lot across reddit and, indeed, across the world as being one of the few centers for men’s help. It’s often attacked, and is always the center of one controversy or the other. My questions reflect that. MensRights is, undoubtedly, the home of great activists.
Again. I am not making this up.
There were some people close to me that suggested I not run this article. That the repercussions of doing so would be unreasonably bad. Well, here you go, people. This is my way of saying that a good reporter doesn’t care. A good reporter reports. It’s not in my job to care about consequences.
I’m not sure that Mr. Mendel quite understands the difference between “reporting” and “asskissing.”
/r/MensRights. Never in our society could the uninitiated imagine such a place. A place where feminism is questioned, and our culture is deconstructed to find what it’s really up to.
Hahaha, what? I was not aware that feminism wasn’t ever questioned on the internet, or anywhere else in “our society.” I mean, it’s not like I run a blog that features nearly 500 posts detailing people attacking feminism on the internet, most of them nastily and ignorantly and sometimes using the word “cunt,” and the vast majority of them not on Reddit. And it’s not like this only barely scratches the surface of the subject.
/r/MensRights is one of the last fortifications of free thought to exist on Reddit.
Yeah, that’s why I was banned – not for trolling or harassing or calling anyone names, but for politely if persistently disagreeing with the denizens until then-moderator ignatiusloyola threw a fit.
“Surely you jest,” one might tell me, “when you mean they’re alone in this regard?” No, hypothetical 19th century British gentleman, I do not. I truly mean it when I say that. What other subreddit openly questions feminism? None spring to mind, and I make it my duty to catalog various subreddits. Most end up banned or run down within a month. Only /r/MensRights remains.
Reddit: Bastion of Internet Feminism.
Nobody can say for sure whether or not they’re correct in any single regard. It’s certain that, due to the laws of probability, they’re not correct in every regard. However, it’s also certain that they’re correct in most of them. Occasionally a wackjob or two will suggest that feminism is behind Cinnamon Toast Crunch (The taste you can see!™). The accuser latches onto those wackjobs to denounce the whole movement.
Yeah, it’s not as if comments suggesting that a man allegedly wronged in divorce court should turn to murder got literally dozens of upvotes in r/mensrights, or anything.
Oh wait, they did.
Yeah, it’s not as if Men’s Rights Redditors gave literally hundreds of upvotes to a post about a t-shirt suggesting that men could be convicted of rape simply for being in a room alone with a woman.
Oh wait, they did.
It’s not as if Men’s Rights Redditors regularly give dozens if not hundreds of upvotes to posts from unhinged hate sites like A Voice for Men or Angry Harry,or fall all over themselves praising an internet-famous female MRA who thinks that many abused women “demand” their abuse.
It’s not as if they think “spermjacking” is a real thing in the world that should make all men think twice about ejaculating in the general vicinity of women.
It’s not like … oh, you can find many, many more examples for yourself.
After claiming that “people have died” after being called misogynists, while “nobody ever dies after being called a misandrist,” Mr. Mendel winds up his speech with this stirring conclusion:
I support the struggles of people who are in bad positions. I respect it, in a way, for I have also seen great struggle. My struggle is not over, nor will it end until my death. For I struggle with something that will not go away through legislation or social change. The Men’s Rights Movement, however, struggles with something very changeable. Very malleable, able to be fixed within a generation if so desired. So I will support them, for they have a fighting chance. …
/r/MensRights is controversial for a reason. In the same sense as Jews of the 1890s, Irish of the 1850s, Hispanics of the 1350s, and many more. Each generation has their controversial improvement in society. We’ve gotten off easy so far, but we have to make it happen eventually. As far back as anyone living can remember, the table has been imbalanced in one way or another, favoring men or women. It’s time the table stays level for once. We need equality.
And that’s what /r/MensRights is trying to do.
Oy yoy yoy. There’s so much ridiculousness to unpack there that it makes me tired. I think I’ll go take a nap.
Mr. Mendel followed his stirring introduction with some questions for the denizens of r/mensrights. And there was some discussion. I can’t even. Not right now. I’ll get to all that in a future post.
In the meantime, Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson – who has been on the receiving end of r/menrights’ heroic activism more than once — has her own reaction to the Men’s Rights is the Subreddit of the Day announcement.
In n Out uses standard burger buns iirc. In terms of the brioche bun I have no idea where he got the idea of that being a standard West Coast thing.
Nope, unless stated otherwise, butter is made from pasteurised inputs. Not sure, but there could be a chemical alternative as pasteurisation is a heat/pressure process. The reason for this is listeria.
The whole thing is very Pratchett-esque, really. Apparently this guy went to a burger joint/a couple of them that had the brioche/generic orange cheese combination and decided that since he was on the West Coast and the burgers were tasty that must be how burgers are supposed to be done on the West Coast. And now he’s running around London blogging furiously about how various restaurants are Getting It Wrong by, for example, using cheese that doesn’t come in pre-cut slices.
Aussie food used to be pretty bland, but hasn’t been for a long time. It’s very much international since immigration opened up in the 70s. You’ll see pretty much every sort of Asian food here, or Middle Eastern, various African sorts, lots of European food, heaps of Jewish varieties, you name it.
I think the thing for me with US food is the sheer size of the portions and some of the combinations, especially sweet and savoury, but that’s my particular taste, nothing else. I enjoyed the food there, though finding not-hot food in LA could get tricky, lol. But I was very much at home trying Midwest food. OMG that chicken and cheddar soup was to die for …
Isn’t Sydney just as much of a hub for the whole Pacific rim cuisine idea as the West Coast of the US is? I’ve also heard that Chinese food is great in Sydney due to lots of immigration.
The Thai craze of the ’70s certainly didn’t die out there. Newtown’s King Street has three different restaurants named Newton Thai, two unaffliated ones called Thai La Ong, and the rest of the street that isn’t secondhand clothing or cocktail bars or bookshops or what-have-you is Thai cuisine at various price points and with various approaches.
katz — old recipes from the “let’s make this easier (by fucking it up)” era. I’m got a cookbook that suggests wrapping a turkey in tin foil before microwaving it, I don’t even know whee to begin on that wrongness!
Bad cookbooks in other words. Very, very bad cookbooks!
My Dad has good things to say about the food in Sydney, and he’s picky as hell.
Tinfoil in a microwave – genius, pure genius! 😀
Oh and yes to specific gravity, you need it to (properly, in the most strict definition imaginable) convert volume to mass…but butter’s marked in volume (tablespoons) and Phil’s measured in the same units…I mean, I guess you could use it to figure out how volumes relate to each other, but there are conversion charts for that pair!
*has done way too much chemistry this week and can’t wait for that fish dewormer to arrive already*
…and I’m terribly sorry to mention worms and food in the same comment, pretend I meant gummi worms?
I just told Mum about that tinfoil-in-microwave cookbook.
“Maybe it was written by a microwave salesman,” she said.
I’ve actually done the tinfoil thing…not for very long, obviously, but nobody had warned me and it was my first time living alone.
On a turkey! I don’t think I’ve ever seen one under 15 lbs, that shit isn’t fitting in a microwave!
Best part? My brother started to say that a little tin foil is actually fine, before the TURKEY part dawned on him, and that I wasn’t talking about a few flecks you failed to properly remove.
@Argenti
What’s Phil? Sorry, no real chemistry knowledge at all and very little cooking knowledge here.
Kitteh — maybe!
Cassandra — I don’t even know what to say to that. On one hand, no one told you, so how we’re you to know; on the other, no one told you?!
That probably makes no sense outside my head >.<
Phil is autocorrect’s version of oil, I already smacked it around once, clearly it didn’t help any! Sorry!
Phil – Philadelphia cream cheese?
Oh, OK. Yeah, there was the whole mid-20th-century obsession with convenience foods, where everything was microwave cooking and molded Jello. (Oddly, these foods are not even that simple. A friend once shared her family’s midwestern hamburger microwave casserole recipe and damn, despite being made of ketchup and stuff, it still had about a billion ingredients.)
But American cooking hasn’t been like that for 30 years. (And was that really a purely American phenomenon?)
Shoulda guessed it was
Basement Catautocorrect at it again!Looks like we’re all out of touch with each other’s cuisines! 😀
@ Argenti
Yeah, I blame the fact that my mother was a bit territorial about the kitchen and so I learned to cook on my own initially rather than with her. She would shoo me away if she caught me trying to cook anything at home.
The noise that happens if you do put tinfoil in the microwave and the flashes of fire are rather alarming.
The Jet Age Microwaves Are New And Exciting era of cuisine is possibly the most endearing thing ever, though. Not usually into US optimism/happy suburban families bullshit, me, but I’ll eat that shit (and ads for electric organs of the time) up like nothing else.
brb putting tinfoil in the microwave
Idk if it was purely an American thing, but my crappy cookbooks are all second hand post-WWII “bliss” shit — I tried a rainbow layered jello mold once, took forever and was terrible, I really don’t get the fad.
To be fair to microwave cooking, my mother was amazed to learn that he mother’s veggie pasta is mostly done in the microwave (with butter, go figure)
Cassandra — try a marshmallow sometime if you want to see fun things microwaves can do (do not try this without at least googling it first) At least you were close enough to hear it, and presumably stop it before starting an actual fire.