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Cloudiah found this amazingly awful rant — from a prolific manosphere commenter and Spearhead supporter by the name of Jacob Ian Stalk — in the comments section to a piece on feminism in The Tab Oxford, a student paper. She posted it in the comments here on Man Boobz, where itās already generated a good deal of discussion (see comments here, here, here, and here for starters). But I thought it deserved a post of its own.
So without further ado, I present Jacob Ian Stalkās ā12-Step Program for Recovering Feminists.ā
Equality is equality. Feminism is about the unbridled pursuit of power for women. Got that?
Uh, no, actually, because itās not true, but please continue.
The age of feminism is over, thankfully. The comments here that support feminism are from the rats that refuse to leave the sinking ship, thinking thereās sustenance still to be found there somewhere. Sorry to disappoint, but there is nothing nutritious left.
So the ship is sinking at the very moment itās run out of food that rats can eat. Thatās quite a coincidence! Or is it sinking because it ran out of food? Were the dudes on the ship using rat food to plug holes in the hull?
Men the world over are waking up to the damage wrought by rampant feminism and theyāre shocked to realise it all happened while they were asleep. Well, theyāre asleep no more. Bleat all you like about feminism being about this or that, but the truth of itās evil is written all over the once noble institutions of the world and the wishful bleatings of solipsistic girl-children canāt erase it. It is done. The cailphate is establishing its power base once more and Sharia law is spreading.
Huh? Because of feminism? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Feminists have destroyed the family and have eschewed child-bearing in favour of credentialism and the illusion of success, killing their unborn children and robbing men of their will to be fathers and husbands. The laugh is on you, Western feminists, as Western birth rates have at last fallen below their replenishment rate and the Muslims are laughing all the way to the maternity wards.
Oh, dear, you got some racism in your misogyny. Two terrible tastes that taste worse together!
The best you can hope for, Western women, is to abandon feminism entirely. Abandon that idiotic notion of āequalityā, as it will never happen. Ā All it has earned you is the disrespect of men and an increasing number of women the world over. Feminism doesnāt make you strong. It doesnāt make you powerful. It doesnāt make you free. And it sure as hell doesnāt make you equal. It just makes you despicable.
Wait, werenāt you just complaining that feminism is about female supremacy? Now youāre admitting that itās actually about equality ā and youāre preaching male supremacy in its place?
Abandon feminism. Hereās a 12-step program for recovering feminists. There are others.
Ok, here we go.
1. Donāt be narcissistic. Never think youāre more important than men or children. Marketing departments delight in exploiting the feminist fallacy that you are. They promote āwomenās onlyā this and that, and women have bought into it. This appears sexist but it is really a marketing ploy that works because most women are narcissistic. Companies know they can charge more for goods and services by using the words āwomen onlyā. Narcissistic women are easily exploitable women. Be neither.
Huh. Isnāt the Menās Rights Movement all about exploiting the narcissism of men who think theyāre more important than women? (And children ā at least in the case of the MRAs who whine endlessly about how unfair it is they canāt financially abandon their kids.)
2. Donāt let others make choices for you. This should be self-evident but for most of your life youāve allowed yourself to be told what to wear, what to buy, what to eat, how to dress, where to go, how to think ā in clubs, gyms, magazines, websites, books, stores and by TV talk show hosts. Youāve āneededā a step-by-step guide through life, which youāve followed with your sisters like sheep. Companies have exploited this need. Behave like a sheep if you must but obey the sheepdog, not the wolf. Better yet, be a woman who can think for herself.
ā¦ so long as āthinking for yourselfā means āthinking youāre inferior to men and generally thinking the way men who hate women want you to.ā
3. Get rid of the self-induced schizophrenia. Donāt insist youāre strong, confident, capable and independent one minute, then weak, frightened and vulnerable the next, especially when youāve been caught doing something wrong. Donāt chop and change whenever it suits you ā learn about who you are and be true. Admit when youāve done something wrong. Donāt suddenly remember that you suffered abuse in the past or have some kind of mental illness or other instability, then use it to get yourself off. If you never sought help for these problems before you were caught, donāt use them as an excuse afterwards. Accept responsibility for yourself.
And for everything bad that men do as well, as manospherians repeatedly insist. If men are violent, itās because women (allegedly) like dating violent men. If men brutalize the women in their life, itās because the women provoke them. If a man arms himself with high-powered weapons and massacres children, his mom is to the real villain. For manospherians and MRAs generally, “responsiblity” means “a woman is always to blame.”
4. Donāt let the law take responsibility for crimes women commit. Speak out against women routinely receiving shorter sentences than men for the same crimes. If the law punishes women as it does children, treat them like children and encourage others to do so too. Donāt call these women āvictimsā and say ātheyāve suffered enoughā because theyāre women. Believe in, and stand up for, equal justice on the basis of gender.
Women do tend to receive shorter sentences than men for the same crimes. But this isnāt the fault of feminism. Indeed, female judges are slightly more likely to give women harsher sentence than male judges, possibly reflecting paternalistic attitudes on the part of male judges.
5. Donāt believe everything women and feminised men in the media tell you. Many serve up slop by the bucket ā celebrity gossip, slimming tips, sex tips, man-shaming tips, rape and abuse lies, etc. TV shows like Oprah and Dr Phil are filled with advice on how women can transform themselves into victims and blame everything on men, while constantly ridiculing them. Partake of more nutritious fare than this. Get your infotainment from equitable programs. Be aware of the cultural status quo from both perspectives.
I have no idea what Jacob here would consider an āequitableā program, but, really, no one of any gender should be getting life advice from Dr. Phil.
6. Donāt fake solidarity with other women, especially in public. Donāt pretend that all women are your best friends when everyone knows nothing could be further from the truth. Openly acknowledge the reality that women despise each other unless thereās personal advantage in not doing so. Most good men can see through these attempts at deception, so lies wonāt travel far. Donāt be a liar, especially not an obvious one.
I have no idea what the fuck heās going on about here. āDonāt fake solidarity with other women, especially in public??ā Do women who hate each other march around Jacobās neighborhood arm-in-arm, pretending to be BFFs and singing the Lady Internationale? (āArise, you prisoners of menstruation ā¦ Ā .ā)
7. Donāt seek equality with men. Masculinity and femininity are inherently different. They are neither equals nor opposites, but different parts of the sexual continuum that canāt be defined from each other. Actively separate masculinity from femininity, and separate both from the sexual politics that keep them in healthy tension. Donāt claim women can do anything men can do until you start producing your own sperm.
Um, what? Is Kate Bush not a brilliant musician because she doesnāt have balls? Is Joan Didion not a brilliant writer because she canāt jizz into a sock?
Not every sperm producer is sacred.
8. Donāt demonize male sexuality or the male sex. Both sexes can be evil, both can be virtuous. Empathy, wisdom, grace, mercy, compassion and love are all as masculine as they are feminine. Donāt invaginate our boys by shaming or medicating the masculinity out of them before it matures and donāt impregnate them with the corrosive lie that being a woman is like being a man only better. Male sexuality is a pearl to be cultured. Suffuse your sons egos with promise if you want your daughters to have good men to love.
Uh, āinvaginate?ā Invaginate means to ābe turned inside out or folded back on itself to form a cavity or pouch.ā Iām pretty sure that teaching boys not to rape their dates does not in any way, literally or figuratively, turn them into a pouch.
9. Respect the sanctuaries of men. Men are judged much more harshly than women so they need their safe retreat. They donāt have the same opportunities for emotional support as women so they need a place where they can express themselves free of judgment and ridicule. This place must be respected. Take care if you venture there as your feminine narcissism is the enemy. Donāt draw attention to yourself and donāt expect protection if you do. If you must speak donāt attempt to control the dialogue or steer it towards you. Donāt censor language to suit your sensitivities. Male sanctuary is sacred ā treat it as you would a cathedral.
Dudes, if you want to start your own little clubhouses where you can call women ācuntsā in peace and quiet, go ahead and do it. Just donāt pretend theyāre about anything more than misogyny. And if you put these allegedly sacred sanctuaries on the internet, donāt be surprised if some people take offence. Oh, and donāt claim that, say, video games, or STEM fields, or atheism, or whatever male-heavy thing you’re into, is a āmale sanctuaryā that need to be protected from evil girl germs.
Some male spaces can be totally awesome:
Others, not so awesome.
10. Donāt use shaming tactics. Donāt accuse men of having anger management issues when theyāre angry at injustice. Donāt accuse them of being a threat when they call you out for being a bigot or a tyrant. Donāt accuse them of having a fear of commitment when theyāre merely making a choice between bravery and stupidity. Donāt assess the merit of their arguments on the basis of their attractiveness to you. Donāt attribute their views about women to past disappointments when it is merely an objective assessment of your sex. Shaming tactics are remnants of childhood so leave them in the nursery if you want to be taken seriously.
I think this one just broke the irony meter. Itās not like manosphere dudes ever use shaming language aimed at anyone.
A word of warning here. The next paragraph is the worst one in the whole manifesto, and, honestly, one of the worst things I’ve run across in my more than two years of doing this blog. TRIGGER WARNING for rape apologia.
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11. Be honest about sexual harassment. If you assert that you have the right to dress as you please and that men should be able to control their sexuality, honour their right to be shielded from yours. If you donāt want men to control themselves but instead want to control their loss of control for your own enjoyment, be prepared for the consequences when things go awry. If āharassmentā ā the stares, sexual innuendos, sly touches, and even rape ā magically cease to be harassment and become the foundations of a passionate new romance occasionally, admit that you donāt really want men to control themselves. Donāt expect men to know when itās right to āharassā you and when itās not. Donāt treat Man one minute as an exciting and courageous hero and the next a monster intent on tyranny and abuse if youāre inconsistent in your sexual intentions and desires.
Woah. Letās take another look at that especially terrible comment in the middle of that mess:
If āharassmentā ā the stares, sexual innuendos, sly touches, and even rape ā magically cease to be harassment and become the foundations of a passionate new romance occasionally, admit that you donāt really want men to control themselves.
Iāve got no jokes for this one. You honestly think that RAPE can be āthe foundation of a passionate new romance?ā What the fuck is wrong with you?
12. Speak out against misandry. The main reason for its proliferation is that women have remained silent. Silence in the face of injustice is cowardly. It has allowed loud, obnoxious women to preach hatred with impunity, which has reflected badly on all women. When you speak out against misandry you do all women a favour. Donāt be a misandrist, donāt be a coward and donāt be silent.
At this point, I really donāt think I need to bother to point out the hypocrisy here.
True, emilygoddess, true. My bad. The recognition of half the species as being human is trivia compared with things like whether teh menz get to fuck them (as well as fuck them over) or not. /snark
… funny how they never admit they’re into bestiality. I mean, if men are human and women some sort of animals, that’s what it must be, mustn’t it?
I think you all just proved my point. Trolls target people they know they can get a rise out of and no one takes the bait more than feminists. I’m not having a go, just pointing out the obvious, but you immediately assumed I was trolling.
Ah, it thinks it did a “gotcha”. How cute.
It’s adorable.
When someone can’t even get cliches right, that’s kind of sad.
It’s as plain as a fleshy protuberance filled with cartilage & used for smelling that sits in the center of a prominent part of the human anatomy that houses our means of seeing and eating/talking.
I think you all just proved my point. Trolls target people they know they can get a rise out of and no one takes the bait more than feminists. Iām not having a go, just pointing out the obvious, but you immediately assumed I was trolling.
Lessee… trolls make comments to for the express purpose of getting a rise out of people.
You just “proved a point” by making a statement to “get a rise” out of us.
QED you have admitted to be a troll.
Go back to your bridge little one, and wait for the billy-goats.
OK, since sarcasm didn’t work, let me try saying it directly: if feminists are easy to rile up, it’s because we’re talking about stuff that is painful, is important to us, and/or that affects our everyday lives. Yes, you can upset feminists by pretending to believe things that hurt us. You can also upset someone who’s been in a car accident by poking their wounds, but that doesn’t mean you should, or that the wounded person is doing something wrong by reacting to you.
I’ll try again in simple English you can understand. I mad an observation about the world we lived in. Nothing more than that – the observation that people all over the world who like to get a rise out of people like to target feminists because they get exactly what they want. If the feminists just ignored them the trolls would give up an go elsewhere. Now all I’ve done is point out this simple fact and yet look at how you all responded. You really need to take a good hard look at yourselves. Stop being so precious.
But that’s a lie. The trolls never give up, unless women simply stop existing in public with opinions and shit. You are terminally dumb.
Oh, it’s the sort of troll who shows up and tells you not to reply. Yeah, these are pretty boring.
Oh and since he’s necroing an old post, everyone should scroll up and watch the video in the post of the men dancing. One of my favorites of all time, always makes me smile.
LOL yeah, because misogyny and feminism have only existed since the internet came along. Try harder, failtroll.
Also, I think it’s both amusing and sad that nowadays on the internet anyone that doesn’t follow the party line of whatever site they are posting on is immediately labelled a troll. I understand the tactic but it’s incredibly lazy.
Categorical labeling is a tool that humans use to resolve the impossible complexity of the environments we grapple to perceive. Like so many human faculties, it’s adaptive and miraculous, but it also contributes to some of the deepest problems that face our species.
Researchers began to study the cognitive effects of labeling in the 1930s, when linguist Benjamin Whorf proposed the linguistic relativity hypothesis. According to his hypothesis, the words we use to describe what we see aren’t just idle placeholders–they actually determine what we see. According to one apocryphal tale, the Inuit can distinguish between dozens of different types of snow that the rest of us perceive, simply, as “snow,” because they have a different label for each type. The story isn’t true (the Inuit have the same number of words for snow as we do), but research by Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive psychologist, and several of her colleagues suggests that it holds a kernel of truth. Boroditsky and her colleagues asked English and Russian speakers to distinguish between two very similar but subtly different shades of blue. In English, we have a single word for the color blue, but Russians divide the spectrum of blue into lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). Where we use a single label for the color, they use two different labels. When the two shades of blue straddled the goluboy/siniy divide, the Russian speakers were much quicker to distinguish between them, because they had readily available labels for the two colors that the English speakers lumped together as “blue.”
Labels shape more than our perception of color; they also change how we perceive more complex targets, like people. Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford, and her colleagues showed white college students a pictures of a man who was racially ambiguous–he could have plausibly fallen into the “white” category or the “black” category. For half the students, the face was described as belonging to a white man, and for the other half it was described as belonging to a black man. In one task, the experimenter asked the students to spend four minutes drawing the face as it sat on the screen in front of them. Although all the students were looking at the same face, those who tended to believe that race is an entrenched human characteristic drew faces that matched the stereotype associated with the label (see a sample below). The racial labels formed a lens through with the students saw the man, and they were incapable of perceiving him independently of that label.
Race isn’t the only label that shapes perception, and a classic study by John Darley and Paget Gross showed similar effects when they varied whether a young girl, Hannah, seemed poor or wealthy. College students watched a video of Hannah playing in her neighborhood, and read a brief fact sheet that described her background. Some of the students watched Hannah playing in a low-income housing estate, and her parents were described as high school graduates with blue collar jobs; the remaining students watched Hannah behaving similarly, but this time she was filmed playing in a tree-lined middle-class neighborhood, and her parents were described as college-educated professionals. The students were asked to assess Hannah’s academic ability after watching her respond to a series of achievement-test questions. In the video, Hannah responded inconsistently sometimes answering difficult questions correctly and sometimes answering simpler questions incorrectly. Hannah’s academic ability remained difficult to discern, but that didn’t stop the students from using her socioeconomic status as a proxy for academic ability. When Hannah was labeled “middle-class,” the students believed she performed close to a fifth-grade level, but when she was labeled “poor,” they believed she performed below a fourth-grade level.
The long-term consequences of labeling a child like Hannah “smart” or “slow” are profound. In another classic study, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers at an elementary school that some of their students had scored in the top 20% of a test designed to identify “academic bloomers”–students who were expected to enter a period of intense intellectual development over the following year. In fact, the students were selected randomly, and they performed no differently from their unselected peers on a genuine academic test. A year after convincing the teachers that some of their students were due to bloom, Rosenthal and Jacobson returned to the school and administered the same test. The results were astonishing among the younger children: the “bloomers,” who were no different from their peers a year ago, now outperformed their unselected peers by 10-15 IQ points. The teachers fostered the intellectual development of the “bloomers,” producing a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the students who were baselessly expected to bloom actually outperformed their peers.
Labeling isn’t always a cause for concern, and it’s often very useful. It would be impossible to catalogue the information we process during our lives without the aid of labels like “friendly,” “deceitful,” “tasty,” and “harmful.” But it’s important to recognize that the people we label as “black,” “white,” “rich,” poor,” smart,” and “simple,” seem blacker, whiter, richer, poorer, smarter, and simpler merely because we’ve labeled them so.
Referenced articles:
Carroll, J. B. (ed.) (1997) [1956]. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Darley, J.M., Gross, P.H. (1983). A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 20-33.
Eberhardt, J. L., Dasgupta, N., & Banaszynski, T. L. (2003). Believing is seeing: The effects of racial labels and implicit beliefs on face perception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 360-370.
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1992). Pygmalion in the classroom: Expanded edition. New York: Irvington
Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). The Russian blues: Effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 7780-7785.
I also love how you talk about someone in the third person as if you are having a conversation above their heads. Do you think that’s rude? Or do you think you are being witty and clever?
Did David change the text on the sidebar to read “long, boring comments about shit nobody was talking about – we welcome them”?
cloudiah, you’re right, that video’s delightful!
I envy those guys their working knees, too. š
Misogynists, racists and so on get labelled trolls here, moron. Nor do I give a shit if you think we’re being rude. Hint: this is a mockery site. Also, not interested in your long boring screeds. Inadvervtently drawing attention to the dancing guys video is the most important contribution you’ve made.
How long does he have to hang around to personally disprove the “trolls will go away” premise?
Why are so you angry? There’s no need to call anyone names.
Why is this little fart still around?
Do you use Ad Hominems frequently in debates?
I think it has been quite long enough.
Where was the ad hom? Me calling you a fart is a straight up insult. Would you prefer dipshit?
A debate troll, how very novel.
I sense a certain familiar ouvre in the trolls presentation. What are the odds?