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!
To clarify, an actual instance of stifling disagreement would be saying something like “X is the case, and that’s final – because I say so and everything you say is wrong.”
I am 30.
Oh… I shouldn’t be having fun then, right? Damm….My bad…. I will seat down and knit now. Sorry about that.
So what? People’s misconception are their own problem, inherently, unless you’re proposing mind control.
No, that’s not the case. If most well educated feminists are aware that women are not inherently peaceful creatures, then “New-age type of feminism” can’t be the answer. Most educated feminists knows its not.
So the new-age stuff would be the blathering of uneducated people pretending to know something about a subject they don’t.
… Like this sweeping attempt at sociological explanations for entire generations. How many thousands of women have you quizzed to get the answer you have?
That’s a fairly common idea of nominal truth. They’re not trying to “stifle” disagreement. If 2 + 2 = 4, you’re not “disagreeing” if you say “No! 6!”, you are being wrong. The preconceptions of feminism and masculinism and men’s power advocates and socialists and anarchists and capitalists rely on this entire fact.
It’s not a surprise.
It’s… the point of an overarching metaphysical framework for the entirety of existence.
You can try to use it as a criticisms of the philosophy, because you are attempting to insinuate that because they are trying to “stifle disagreement”, then disagreement exists, so the ideology cannot be entire overarching and complete. You are trying to paint them as lying liars who need to quash dissent to remain in power.
But that’s not how that works when you talk about belief systems, because a pre-requisite of having a belief system is is believing in it
So point out specific instances of a structural belief being mistaken, or keep quiet. Because if you do anything else, everyone knows you’re just trying to besmirch the ideology and paint those who think like that as fools.
In this case, because we’re feminists, we’re also deluded dogamatists unwilling to allow disagreement without our talking points.
Neatly done, that, without mentioning any specific talking points…
————
Sorry if that seems unduly harsh, but there’s been a surprisingly volume of the “Feminists and Men’s Rigthers are both just extremist ideologies trying to stiffle dissent and they’re both wrong because I say so!” lately.
B-b-but knitting is fun!
(Which just proves I’m really old.)
😛
Well, clearly none of us have ever met other feminists (much less regular ole women!) in the courses of our lives and we all just found out about feminism through the internet (which we know cannot be trusted; after all, we’re all using it to communicate with each other right now).
Also, feminism is not a defined political theory or a way of understanding power dynamics in the world. It’s all just a bunch of crackpots mumbling “arglebargle?” and getting book deals. You don’t actually need to know anything about feminism to call yourself a feminist, either.* In fact, none of us here know the first thing about it — we all just noticed last week that our besties were tagging random Tumblr posts with #totesfeministuguise #grrlpowrrr! and jumped on the bandwagon because we figured that was what the cool kids were doing these days.
*This is actually true in many cases (witness: things like Beyonce and “fierce feminism”, though ymmv and it’s not necessarily all bad, just maybe not … totally informed). However, the opposite — someone proclaiming “I’m not a feminist, but [feminist statement]” — seems to happen a lot more often, because feminism still has a bad rap. Partially thanks to misinformation spread by men’s rights wankers and their ilk. Thanks, guys!
Yes, definitely the problem with feminists is that they just don’t know real women, and feminists are certainly never actually women themselves.
(Mainstream feminism does have real problems with universalizing the experiences of upper middle class straight cis white able-bodied women and erasing everyone else, but this is still a fucking hilarious criticism coming from Mr. Feminists-Are-Just-As-Bad-As-MRAs.)
My favorite pasttime: putting assfax citations in their appropriate format.
“It’s all just a bunch of crackpots mumbling “arglebargle?” and getting book deals. ”
WHERE IS MY BOOK DEAL I HAZ BEEN ROBBED
“Beware the Penguins, my son!
The jaws that flap, the claws that grab!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stoodthe Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,whores penguins through the tulgey wood hardchairs is my name
And burbled as it came! Screaming gods hold court in vain, despair marks corridors and men walk silent
full of shame
down midnight alleys beyond worlds
One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! I don’t know how long I can hold all the hatred back
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
News brought fast forward of penguins, whores and alphadom. Maybe screaming angels watched his approach, bade him come.
To make a mockery of a solid, stolid hypocrisy so easily remarked
it must be said that the Jabberwocky still holds the greatest randomisity most stark
yet even a poem crafted from nonsense spawned from the mind of a man
who tried to make up mirrorverses and hold them in his hand
apparently has less garbled eldritch arcane profane depravity
makes more sense than most MRA blip-blap-blappity
you set me an impossible task far to easy to ask
that I rewrite words that make no sense to fit words hewn from hatred, ignorance
and nonsense makes a poorer craft
than all the rapt malice of every MRA manifesto draft
I can’t swing a vorpal sword half as deftly as the unknown son did to cleft
from random head the monstrous tip
and no wit nor thesaurus into which I can dip
can give me words to express
the confounding fires wroth from wrath
that surely holds the hearth and heart of every gamma-beta-alpha-bandersnatch
So finishing this simple statement must make do
that everything one says to do
cannot rightly, truly threw
the wicked manner of one side raging wrath, sour grapes, to hold in their contempt
a man who calls penguins whores and hard chairs conspirators in a plot
to compound the misery man has begot
not said nor sain, cleft, deft slain, grasping at straws to infer intent when words
imply an event in which people pretend that men are not people, cannot relent
into vast gulfs of misery their words sent
So MRA, and PUA and Men Going Their Own Never Away:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
needs must make more sense than any statement cropped from, crafted by, men who like to make their bed built from hatred, ego, the foulest lie
Answer then simply, every query thus:
When speaking of penguins and in our hands entrust
some wild eyed high browed low liver motion of commotion and clever guile
that women are monsters most banal, most vile;
“All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
Fibinachi wins a solid gold hard chair and all the internets!
“Real” women? As opposed to what – Life Model Decoys? Alien shapeshifters? Cats with opposable thumbs?
Oh wait – is this Inception?
Please show me where women are completely enslaving men. I’d like to visit this place. Perhaps I can bring back a magical lasso of truth and a pair of bullet deflecting bracelets.
Fibinachi wins all the scented misandrist candles. Every single one.
Cats with opposable thumbs fer sure!
@kittenserf
Sorry for the delayed response.
Apparently, the quote is from Allan G. Johnson who is an author.
Thanks, melody! 🙂
“ProPatria Truthteller” (wow, self-important pseudonym much?)
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Since Factcheckme is of the gender essentialist, genocidal exterminationist school of radfem your admission of liking her take on trans issues sorta puts you in the transphobic bigot part of the commentariat.
Just sayin’. 😉
YES OH MY DREAMS DID COME TRUE!
Thank you Fibinachi, I knew we could count on you …
So long as you don’t let the people who think $SHOW_RUNNER is teh absolutist worst EVAR omigod ze’s destroying the show know that anybody else is in charge, too.
“I’ll sign up for a Who-riarchy, so long as Captain Jack, Vastra, Jenny, and Strax all have cabinet positions.”
And we’ll pray for the return of our creator goddess the Bad Wolf? (Not Rose, the Bad Wolf, because holy shit do I love that scene)
Falconer — $show_runner at least managed to wrap up SOME loose ends in the season finale. I mean, I’m still not fond of the representation of women, but Vasta and Jenny (and Vasta and Jenny) helps.
Re: finale, sometimes you just need a Sontarin!
I’ve only just caught up with the nym change to guffaw-ferrets!
::dies laughing in delayed response::
For a proper Who-riarchy to make MRAs’ heads explode*, we need to combine with kitties. Because unpossibly cute.
*Since MRAs’ heads are so firmly lodged up their arses, is this the origin of the word assplode?
Considering the godawful train wreck that was Torchwood: Miracle Day, any extreme antipathy to Moffat kind of boggles my mind.
I started with old Who, though, which was wonderfully cheesy and wonderfully wonderful. The watchword for Doctor Who is, and always has been, “change”. I really feel that people who don’t accept that don’t really appreciate the show. And that appreciation and acceptance of change and difference would be a great fundamental tenet of a successful world peace.
Hence my support of the Who-riarchy.
*will not comment on the horror of Miracle Day*
Cats…10 wasn’t a cat person. Once you get attacked by one in a habit… (everyone, watch New Earth to get that, but first watch SE01EP02 for who the fuck Cassandra is [not our Cassandra, clearly])
Fun with language time! What would “endoctrinated” mean, if it was a real word?
Also ProTrolling is demonstrating one of the key elements that makes up the misogynist worldview – the assumption that anything written about women that isn’t overtly misogynist must have been written by a feminist. Which is how he came to the conclusion that a bunch of New Age crap was produced by feminists.
Endoctrinated …let’s see … some sort of evil influence that gets you via your endocrine glands?
Or could the significance be endoctrinated?
Hmmm …