I realize that I may be the only one who’s really all that interested in sectarian infighting amongst the MRAs, but an old friend of ours has weighed in on the recent battles over the A Voice for Men satellite group MRA London, and I’ve learned some interesting things as a result.
The old friend? Tom Martin, the British MRA who famously lost an anti-male discrimination lawsuit against the London School of Economics and who is well known around these parts for his beliefs that 97% of female humans are whores, 100% of female penguins are whores, hard chairs are misandry, and that [TRIGGER WARNING FOR CHILD RAPE APOLOGIA] “pedophiles who pay children for sex are not really rapists, because the child consents, then performs the act, indicating they understand the nature of the contract.”
Martin used to be a regular troll around these parts, making himself (and the Men’s Rights movement that supported him in his crusade against the LSE) look worse and worse with each comment he posted, until he became too repetitively obnoxious and I banned him.
Apparently he went on to have a bit of a run as a commenter at A Voice for Men, the self-described men’s human rights site that hosts an open call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its activism section. But he was banned there too. Not for his misogyny. Not for justifying child rape. But for being … too feminist???
No, really. All this happened some time ago, apparently. But AVFM’s Dean Esmay recently unbanned him to let him post his thoughts about the MRA London fracas, and this exchange happened.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Tom was able to figure out pretty quickly that we hated him, and it wasn’t so much because of the whole “male wanting to be treated as a human being” thing so much as his “inability to treat females as human beings” thing. But as we know, the inhabitants of AVFM don’t really live in what most of us on planet earth recognize as reality.
In any case, if you want to wrap up your Memorial Day with some utterly surreal reading (non-USians can ignore this bit), I suggest you take a look at the rest of the AVFM thread from that point on. You will see DriverSuz describe Martin as a “male enabler” of feminism. And you will see Martin himself describe himself as a “feminist MRA,” and offer this strange semi-endorsement of feminists as potential dates:
[W]hen you’ve dated and screened thousands of women for potential dates, you get to realize, its the ones identifying as feminists who are the ones least likely to be gold-digging whores looking for an early retirement off the man’s toil. …
I follow the money, which is why I am a feminist MRA.
The money the state disproportionately allots to over-screechy victim-feminist wheels is wrong, and needs to be fixed, but pales into insignificance compared to the over-screechiness an anti-feminist traditionalist woman has lined up for any man unlucky enough to cohabit with her. A feckless housewife wannabe is far more a financial burden than an ill-informed egalitarian identifying as feminist who can be corrected on which sex owes the other money.
Tom Martin, such a romantic!
“Whoriarchy?” I really, really hope that this term doesn’t gain popularity among MRAs.
@Kim
Responding to what I wrote in a previous comment,
————————————————————————————————————–
“So Basically Tom Martin was banned from a Vioce for Men for not being sexist enough. That’s like someone being kicked off of Storm Front for not hating blacks and Jews enough, or someone being kicked of off Jihad Watch for not hating Muslims enough.”
————————————————————————————————————–
You wrote,
————————————————————————————————————–
“I think it’s like getting kicked off stormfront for saying that black people make better servants than white people instead of thinking they shouldn’t exist at all.”
————————————————————————————————————–
Thanks. You just said exactly what I meant to say, only better than I did.
@Aaliyah
You wrote,
—————————————————————————————————————
“Whoriarchy?” I really, really hope that this term doesn’t gain popularity among MRAs.
—————————————————————————————————————
Well, at least if it does, its not likely to help their movement. Like David Futrelle pointed out earlier, Tom Martin isn’t exactly making “Mens Rights Activists” look good to anyone outside the movement. The only exception maybe people who are sexist pigs like he is.
True. I’m just sick of hearing MRAs repeat their god-awful ideological terms. Like “creep-shaming” and “mangina.”
Did you miss the Tom Martin threads where he was banging on about women in Saudi Arabia being the most misandrist penguin whore women of all? I think that was the point where he transitioned from horrible but standard MRA rhetoric into stuff that even other MRAs side-eye.
Cassandra — yeah it some time between “female penguins are whores” and “johns of child sex workers are the real victims”. And it’s over this way — http://manboobz.com/2012/03/16/tom-martins-anti-male-discrimination-case-against-the-london-school-of-economics-dismissed-he-responds-by-calling-his-critics-whores/comment-page-9/#comment-136490
CriticalDragon1177 — you may need dragon slaying skills to use it successfully, but blockquotes can be formed…
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
@Tooimpure – “I accidentally sat on a kitteh once. NEVAR AGAIN!”
Ow … have the wounds healed yet?
@cloudiah, that sounds just like what my aunts did when my grandmother died. They swooped on the house and cleared out all the stuff, binning it or selling it to junk shops for the most part. Mum had no chance to get up there (it’s about six hours’ drive from Melbourne) and get any mementoes at all. Goodbye family history.
My uncle just stole the money out of my grandfather’s wallet, and the big new TV. Didn’t care about the sentimental stuff fortunately. I have a flatcap like I mentioned before. My grandfather bought it for himself just before he died and was showing it to me the last time I saw him. So that’s what I asked for.
@criticalDragon
I like that way of quoting. It’s lovely and clear. The blockquote style in this theme is so pale. Are you able to make style changes to the theme, David?
Now there’s a particularly Golden example of how unstable the Men’s Rights Movement really is.
Argh, that’s horrible. My father nearly tried “just toss it all” but since my brother and I did much of the work, we have boxes upon boxes of photos to sort through, see what’s worth bringing up to the nursing home, what’s of living people // people important to them // etc. Hell, I returned some decade old report cards to a couple of cousins earlier, had tossed them in a pile to at least ask if they wanted them, they were here, said to bring ’em down, so hey look! I did! Not being an asshole really isn’t hard. I would think being an asshole is harder, assuming you give a shit about anyone that isn’t you.
This popped up on my tumblr and I thought this was a good place to share:
That’s a good one, melody – where’d it come from originally, do you know?
Argenti – yeah, there were old photos and all sorts of things we’ll never get hold of now emptied from the family house. Pissed Mum off no end.
Mind you one of said aunts was a bit, um, stupid. She also said that Mum shouldn’t get Grandmother’s piano ‘cos my father would play Protestant hymns on it. (Yeah, we were that sort of Irish Catholic family.)
It’s always interesting to me that feminists like Cloudiah often tell stories about women who have done them wrong. And the feminist movement has lots of bizarre feuds just like the Men’s Rights movement does. Hopefully we’ll soon stop hearing the feminist narrative that women would bring peace to the earth if they had a chance to rule.
As for Tom Martin, his commentary about liking to date feminists shows how the radical feminist movement and the manosphere (especially the pick-up artist/game community) are two sides of the same coin. Both like to use ridiculous ideological terms (mangina, patriarchy, matriarchy, gender binary, power structure, bla bla bla) and complain that most people are brainwashed for not excepting the world as they see it. When a woman criticizes feminism, or a man critizes MRA, they get treated like garbage by the radicals in their gender.
Kitteh — funny, about the hymns. EA’s song Liar starts with the devil’s chord. Should’ve told he’d just play some nice tritones, no hymns [insert evil grin…oh, my gravatar covers that, right]
The only thing I can remember him playing on it was Old Man River! 😀
Here’s a video of Tom Martin being interviewed by a student for a university project:
I may be projecting, but she doesn’t look too comfortable.
I’m late for the party, but in Deasmay’s world…
-Tom Martin is a feminist (he shouldn’t have given the pussy pass to 3% of women by calling them not-whores)
-JV, the troll atheist who harasses women online and follows them at conferences in the name of gender equality, is a ‘brave hero.’
(Deasm’ donated for Vacula to go to Dublin to show those feminists what unbiased harassment is like. And how free speech necessarily obligates all women to listen to him explain why ‘cunt’ is not a sexist slur, why harassment of women atheists is not actual harassment, how the way for women to avoid harassment is to quit writing stuff (writing while female is provocation!) and why AVfM is not a hate site.)
Yippee! Shout out for the human right to target specific people based on their identity! MHRM! (Cough, cough) MHRMgrblllhh! (I owe the cough joke to a manboobzer, I can’t remember who! But since that joke, I can’t help to imagine people coughing when I read MHRM! MHRMGRBLLLHH! It’s too good.
They will never figure out that the LSE lawsuit was in fact a feminist plot to divert attention from our evil plan to spermjack every male specimen in the world, to finally have our betas build the giant sperm fountain of alimony. Go, manboobz minion Martin! *secret gynocratic handshake, and bowing to penguins, Afghan women and children sex slaves, the trifecta of world power.*
Or silly as a wheel like my mum is on this topic. We were furious when she threw out/ donated a whole heap of stuff from my grandmother’s house. Why’d she do that? Well, there are two of us, and you can’t cut a piano or a leather suitcase or list-of-twenty-other-things in half, can you? She also believes that “the younger generation” are not interested in that old stuff. Sis and I still have trouble convincing her that we can sort such things out. And the grandchildren damn near raised the roof with rage when she proposed sending some of the military stuff to the National Memorial instead of to them.
She seems to find the idea easier now that there are *more* of us – two daughters, four grandchildren, four great-grandchildren so far. She even laughs about us maybe fighting over various heirlooms once she’s gone. And the grandkids are seriously interested in “that old stuff” – she hasn’t entirely abandoned the notion of younger people not caring, but she doesn’t now throw it in the face of people who *are* interested.
@Graham
That video is awesome, but it’s missing whorehood and penguins!
I like the “MRAs are entrepreneurs” part.
So feministastic!
Pro Patria “Truthteller”, if you had even a modicum of critical thinking skills you would realize how absurd your comparison between “mangina” and “power structure” are. Please take your false equivalences and fuck right off, because it’s clear as day that you’ve been spending plenty of time drinking from the same cesspool as cretins like Tom Martin.
@kittehserf
LOL, I still have scars but they’re healed!
Because… feminists should love all women, even those who are cruel? Because feminists believe women can’t do anything bad? Because… Paris is the capitol of France?
I just don’t follow.
Also, “radical feminist” means something. Most feminists are not radical feminists.
I should never have told you that story about my aunt, since it proves that feminism is wrong.
In upside-down, backwards world anyway.
Well, this Tom Penguinwhores Martin debacle is rather like watching someone try to fight Hellfire with lamp oil.
I think I shall make home made carmel corn in honor of what is sure to be a very enteraining thread.