So yesterday I had a strange conversation, of sorts, with blabby FeMRA videoblogger Karen Straughan, aka GirlWritesWhat, via private message on Reddit.
Given that, in the recent WoolyBumblebee controversy, she put herself in the position of defending Men Going Their Own Way against WBB’s mostly accurate attacks on them, I found myself wondering what she might think of my post yesterday on the MGTOWers who felt it was appropriate to let a four-year-old-girl drown because she might grow up to be the next Betty Friedan or even the next — gasp! — Amanda Marcotte.
I was especially interested in what she might have to say about MGTOW elder Zed, the friend and mentor of her A Voice for Men boss, Paul Elam; in the MGTOWforums discussion, you may recall, he was firmly in the “don’t rescue little girls” camp.
So I asked her about that, and asked why she was defending MGTOWers when so many of them don’t even think women should be part of the Men’s Rights movement at all.
Here’s some of what she wrote back:
You seem to be deliberately trying to evoke an outrage in me. First, Zed, “Paul E’s mentor and idol” would not save a child he doesn’t know. Then “MGTOWers…don’t actually think women should be part of the MR movement…”
Do you think I should be expected to die to save a boy I don’t know? Speaking as someone who almost died once to save my son and my nephew, why should I be expected to potentially leave my children orphans to save someone else’s kid? And the truth is, I wouldn’t be expected to do that. In reality, no one would have blamed me if I had chosen not to nearly drown to save my own kid and my sister’s kid. I like your quote mine: Men shouldn’t rescue 4 year old girls… Not what it actually is: Men shouldn’t sacrifice their lives or health to save 4 year old girls they don’t know or have reason to care about…
It’s an interesting way she’s chosen to, well, reframe the issue. Zed didn’t say he was only talking about situations where the rescuers life would be at risk. He said, simply and categorically:
When a female is in trouble, if I don’t know her, I don’t see her.
After demanding that I denounce a random radical feminist who said something terrible, she moved on to my second question, though not without accusing me of “needling” her by pointing out that MGTOWers hate women. Or, as she prefers to look at it, they don’t “trust” women.
Do I have to list every single psychological lever you’ve attempted to apply in this message? Do you really think I’m going to react like a typical woman? “OMG, those MGTOWs don’t trust women!!! And that means they don’t trust me! I am a herd animal! I am incapable of ignoring naysayers! I can’t stand the fact that perhaps somewhere, someone doesn’t appreciate me!!! How dare they express themselves if it will hurt a woman’s feelings???????”
Woah, there. I think that might have been a bit more revealing than you intended it to be.
So your definition of “typical woman” is “herd animal?” I’ll take “internalized misogyny” for $1000, Alex.
Instead of me asking, “Why would I need anyone’s permission to make videos and assist a movement I believe in? Why would I take it as a personal failing that a man would not risk his life to save my child when I would not potentially orphan my kids to save the kids of some random person? Why would David Futrelle think my outrage over what a handful of MGTOW say about women in the movement should outweigh my own principles?”
Uh, you don’t need anyone’s permission to make your videos. Jewish people don’t need anyone’s permission to start making videos glorifying Adolph Hitler. Black people don’t need anyone’s permission to make videos on behalf of the Klan.
The question is why do you want to? Not just: why are you willing to make videos on behalf of a Men’s Rights movement driven by misogyny. But why are you willing to defend and make excuses for MGTOWers who not only hate women in general but hate you personally?
Why are you willing to lie — apparently even to yourself — and pretend that they don’t really hate women — that, really, it’s just that they don’t “trust” women because some awful woman has hurt them, or because some mean feminist said something insulting about their favorite video game, or whatever the excuse is.
And if you have any doubt that most MGTOWers really and truly hate women — hate hate HATE them — I invite you to read through the archives here. I suggest you start with MGTOWer extraordinaire Christopher in Oregon, and then move on to the posts dealing with MGTOWers in general.
And if you doubt that MGTOWers hate you, you personally, just go down to MGTOWforums, the biggest MGTOW hangout around, and take a look at the threads devoted to AVFM. A lot of the guys there hate AVFM with a passion — and they hate it largely because Paul give a platform to you and other women.
For someone so obsessed with me, you sure don’t know a lot about me.
Huh, wouldn’t that sort of suggest that maybe I’m not actually that obsessed with you?
From what I do know about Straughan (not much) this seems to be a standard ploy she pulls whenever someone calls her on her shit — to try to throw them off-balance and put them on the defensive by declaring them “stalkers” or “obsessed,” as she did with spermjack_attack, a Redditor who’s done some amazing takedowns of GWW posts and videos in recent days, like this one.
I responded by pointing out that
I often write about MRAs. You’re a prominent MRA, so sometimes I write about you. I should probably write more, given that you’re kind of a big fish in your tiny pond, but your videos are so fucking tedious and slow I can’t bear to watch them.
Which is true. That’s why, despite all the attention she gets from her MRA fanboys, I’ve written only three posts about her — compared with seven about the comparatively less important but much more entertaining Christopher in Oregon, mentioned above. Well, this will make it four posts about her.
Anyway, I also called her out on her evasive answer about Zed, so she tried again, this time with a new evasion:
Zed said categorically, “When a female is in trouble, if I don’t know her, I don’t see her.” Let’s parse that. He would not intervene. Why should he be expected to? Do you have any idea how small the burden is on women to intervene? If a woman were being assaulted and a female witness didn’t intervene, would this be shameful? How about if a man were being assaulted?
That’s an odd way of “parsing” it, since in context it was abundantly clear that he wasn’t just talking about adult women being assaulted. He was specifically talking about little girls. The whole point of his argument, which he repeated several times, was that he didn’t want to help little girls because, as he put it, they might “grow … up to be another Amanda Marcunt, or Jessica Valenti, or Betty Friedan.”
Karen, you can pretend he was talking only about adult women, but he wasn’t.
You can pretend that MGTOWers don’t hate women, but they do.
You can pretend whatever you want about the movement you’ve attached yourself to, but guess what — everyone outside of that movement can see it for what it is.
Most of the rest of her comment was devoted to trying to prove how “obsessed” I am with her.
If you are curious about me and why I might involve myself in a movement you believe hates women, you might concede I’d be curious about you and why you involve yourself in a movement that I believe hates men (or masculinity, take your pick). And yet how many times have I initiated contact with you? How often do I devote entire blog posts or videos to you?
Perhaps I’m measuring you by my own yardstick. Because as curious as I am as to why you would ally yourself with a movement whose foundational ideology is hostile to men (no matter how mainstream or seemingly benign), as much as I might lie awake wondering what motivates you, I am simply not obsessed enough by the question to PM you and ask. Or to read your blog (even when you’re talking about me). Or to devote entire blog posts to you.
If I messaged you over anything regarding that, I would consider myself obsessed with the psychological dysfunction represented by you. So you messaging me indicates (to me) a level of obsession on par with that. If you are the type of person to initiate private contact with people you consider opponents on a regular basis, then I’ve misjudged you.
Yes, I confess, sometimes I ask questions of my ideological opponents, publicly or privately, in hopes of getting an interesting response. I certainly got some revealing answers, and even more revealing non-answers, from Straughan.
And it was definitely more interesting than watching one of her videos.
Oh, and for some reason, before she closed up the debate, she decided she wanted to talk about Mary Daly, of all people, whom she seems to think has never been criticized by any feminists ever except for one by the name of, uh … Dr. Mindbeam? No, that’s really what she thinks. Apparently, in GirlWritesWhat-land, it was one big feminist love-fest for Mary Daly up until Dr. Mindbeam came along in 2011 and wrote a blog post.
Mary Daly’s body was long cold before some random internet feminist named Dr Mindbeam finally excommunicated her on “no seriously, what about teh menz?” I haven’t seen any feminists who write under their real names do so.
Maybe you could educate me.
I mentioned Audre Lorde’s open letter to Daly calling her out for racism back in 1979. I suggested she Google “Mary Daly” and “transphobe” and read through some of the results. Might take a while, as there are 5000 of them.
But I’m not sure how one can “educate” someone like her, someone who has declared herself a “gender theorist” and who makes endless half-hour or even hour-long videos on feminism, without bothering to learn even the rudiments of feminist history first. (Lesson One: Feminists often disagree with each other.)
It would be like someone declaring themselves an astrophysics theorist, then declaring “the moon is a potato! I’ve seen no evidence indicating otherwise. If you think you know better, educate me!”
Her understanding of feminism seems stuck at the “moon is a potato” level, and I just don’t think there’s anything any of us can do about it.
@cloudiah – That Pickup Artist’s Guide absolutely made my day.
(I think that is probably the only time I will ever utter those words…)
Futrelle,
Just a few years ago, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts was driving along the highway when he noticed a van pulled over to the side with smoke emerging from it. He got out of his car, opened the door of the van, and found children inside, suffocating from the fumes. He pulled them out and had them get as far away from the van as possible. Seconds later, the van’s rear tire exploded, but none of the children were harmed. All of a sudden, the children’s grandmother began wacking their savior with her purse, because she thought he meant to abduct the children. He got off lucky, since he was in an altercation with a frail, weak old woman who couldn’t do much damage, and he was a man with considerable political power.
THAT is why men nowadays are hesitant to help children in danger when those children are not their own.
And don’t you dare tell me that feminists are trying to change this by “fighting the Patriarchy”. That’s a cop-out and you know it, especially since feminists are the chief purveyors of the false statistics on men being 99% of child abusers.
I’m not surprised she suggested the typical woman is a herd animal, since she approvingly quoted from the blog of a man who says pretty much the same thing some time ago. I don’t remember the site, but it was for some video where she talked about patriarchy and how, apparently, patriarchy actually means that women own men’s labor, blah blah etc..
I’ll just have to add a quote from Shroeder, “You really are just talking to yourself at this point. And much like other pretend-activists, you’re inventing things to be mad about.”
It’s a shame that Straughan is so good at mentally jousting with the strawman arguments in her head, and yet so, so inadequate when it comes to honest debate. I don’t know if she could stay on topic if Elam was holding a flow chart of points and JtO using marshal wands to point her to the next relevant argument.
I’d feel sorry for GWW, but she’s too much of a shithead. She’s laying down with AVfM dogs, she can enjoy the fleas.
I like how she’s shocked–SHOCKED–that some people might consider self-sacrifice to be moral.
She’s pretty typical: A hardcore libertarian trying desperately to apply insane values to real life. The results are always pretty bizarre.
The Connor MacLeod Syndrome is strong in this one.
Is she really this delusional? Seriously? She blatantly changed the issue. It’s a black person defend some klan member who said he would never save a black child, by saying “we all have the right to self defense” or “we aren’t obligated to save anyone, so just because someone doesn’t go out of their way to spoil every black person they see, doesn’t mean they’re white supremacists!”
(Somewhat off topic. Btw, I have sadly met a few black people who have the “black people are really annoying and stupid so they deserved oppression” mentality… It’s bizarre as hell.)
She’s never gonna stop making excuses for these turds is she?
Hopefully she’s at least paid for her self loathing drivel.
“I think you need to reread Randian views. Rational Selfishness does not mean that a person will kill, ignore and steal. Helping others because you want to, is not the same as selfless altruism, which requires the person getting hurt in order to help others. Most MRA’s are socialists in my view.” It hurts the bank account, tough, which should be sufficient for you vultures. And how the hell are most MRA’s socialists? Do you even know what the word means? No, you seem snot-ignorant and proud of it.l
Maybe she’s secretly not an MRA, but was originally, and is now afraid of being doxxed or being bullied if she tries to not be an MRA anymore.
Really unlikely, but my brain just keeps trying to understand her, and her actually being this delusional baffles me.
(GWW, if you’re reading this and the unlikely event of my theory being correct is true, I’m sorry).
Fuck, this is just gross. I can usually handle most MRApist nonsense by imagining them all to be fedora wearing losers who can’t get laid (which really isn’t to far from the truth) but dear god they seriously lack any sort of morality at all. Ugh they’re all just scum, just genuinely horrible people. I hate MRAs, I hate libertarians, and I hate the people who think they have anything good to contribute to society.
Just reprehensible, and god knows they all got their garbage morality from Atlas Shrugged or something.
WTF? Is it past your nap time?
On a less bleak note, I wonder how long an MRA could last being a women in Afghanistan? If they’re also in on the international Commufeminazi Conspiracy, they too can friendzone with impunity right?
Myopia? I don’t even know what the word means you filthy cock carousel riding females
I know I wouldn’t be able to get this out of my head until I tracked it down, so I did, which was very easy.
In this transcript she quotes from, but does not link to (on her site) this article:
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2008/02/questionators-should-women-have-right.html
One of the article’s major features is its view of women as herd animals:
Not shown: the part where the author uses a picture of a herd of wildebeests to refer to women.
She doesn’t quote the bits about women being herd animals, but it’s very clear she read it and agrees with it.
I think by “they,” j meant MRAs and Libertarians.
Well, Ayn Rand contributed to the doorstop industry with Atlas Shrugged, so…
I’ve heard that “women are herd animals” argument before and I find it so mind-boggling. Do they think that men and women evolved separately or something? Or that early humans lived in bands where there was only one male and many females like horses or something (and even in actual herd animals like horses, social relationships are a lot more complex than just “dominant male, bunch of females”)? How ignorant can you get?
Even if we buy into the fantasy that there was some monolithic culture that early humans had and it involved men hunting mammoths to feed women, well, guess what? With primitive tools, hunting is a group activity by necessity. Those men depended on each other. In fact, they probably depended on each other more than women gathering berries depended on other women…
It just makes no sense.
j’s post is a tad extreme. I don’t personally (not speaking for anyone else) think that the MRA’s are worth actual hate. That is reserved for people who are both vicious and capable of applying that viciousness in a meaningful way. I see MRA’s as too self-centered and unorganized to make any real negative impact.
They are more like annoying, really, really annoying. It’s that feeling you get when a stranger’s two-year old is throwing a huge tantrum when you have a migraine but desperately needed stuff from the store. Your musings on that child might run the full gamut of less than nice thoughts even though you know intellectually that under different circumstances you might have a lovely interaction. Right now, you just want the noise to stop.
Then again, YMMV. To someone who sees them as a credible threat, either from the horrific things they write or real-life interaction, hate may be an appropriate response (for them.)
I’m happy to admit that I care about
the herdother people, even complete strangers. This is … a bad thing?hellkell – I think j meant “hate the people who think MRAs and libertarians have anything good to contribute to society”, not people who think they themselves do.
Doesn’t she have short hair too? I saw a thumbnail of her videos and it looked like she had a pixie. What does she think of the short hair = misandry stuff?
I bet she thinks that only she got the haircut for the ease or look or whatever, the rest of the female population with hair like hers got it to kill boners since they hate men. She’s not like those herd animals.
I think this is one of those cases in which the MRA contingent is onto something which has a few grains of truth in it, but by the time they (the MRA’s) get done with those few grains of truth, they (the few grains of truth) are indistinguishable from mountain chains of lies. I expect that it’s true, for example, that many people are simply not innately heroic and would not exert themselves, let alone put their lives in danger, to rescue somebody they don’t know or have a reason to care about from death or potential death, even if that person was a child. This may not be civilized, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it’s less the exception and more the rule than most people realize or are willing to admit. Heroics make us gasp and stare because they are unusual. If they were more common, they wouldn’t be so noteworthy.
“When a female is in trouble, if I don’t know her, I don’t see her,” is probably a road rule by means of which lots of guys steer their way around. What gets Mr. Zed noticed is that he enunciates it in public. No doubt there’s a female equivalent: “If I don’t have a stake in him, he can complain to the Marines.” I imagine that the difference is that (some) men will give voice to these sets of priorities while most women (still) will not.
But MRA’s have the only culture I can think of which can take a dislikable human proclivity like this one and elevate it into a categorical imperative. It’s understandable, though not immensely admirable, if you’re unwilling to snuff yourself out to save the life of somebody else’s tot. But it takes gaucherie on the galactic scale to start looking around for stone tablets into which to carve the Law that it’s a no-no to save the life of a girl-kid because she might grow up to be the next…Jessica Valenti. Because cooties are worse than death. And because cats, books, hot baths and tea are the heralds and forerunners of Eldritch Abominations from Tentacle Land.
Although, to be truthful, what they’re probably not telling you about their reluctance to save the live of kids who aren’t theirs is that it would most likely apply to little boys too. There’s that huge strain of libertarianism in MRA thinking which boils down to: “If I can’t connect it to my own interests gonads I don’t want to be bothered”; remember that the MRA version of the Worst Thing Evar is that one man might end up raising (especially unbeknownst to himself) another man’s child. (Which strikes me as being pretty bad too, but not at the level of, say, the sun’s going out or the earth’s being engulfed by green goo. Values differ.)
“Educate me” usually means “shut up” with these people.
@ eseldbosustow:
I get a lot of, “women in place X are more oppressed, so you shouldn’t complain.”
@bekabot:
““When a female is in trouble, if I don’t know her, I don’t see her,” is probably a road rule by means of which lots of guys steer their way around. What gets Mr. Zed noticed is that he enunciates it in public.”
More to the point, he’s talking about letting little girls drown. It’s not walking past an adult in trouble; it’s letting a child of the “wrong” gender drown. There’s not even any talk of him dying to save her. He’s specifically saying that little girls should be deliberately left to die.
That’s more noticable than the low-grade callousness/fear of people in general. That’s actively wishing for someone to die when you’re in a position to save them.