NOTE: Today is Day Two of the Man Boobz Pledge Drive. If you haven’t already, please consider clicking the little button below and sending some bucks my way.
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Welcome to Part Two of the 2013 Man Boobz Pledge Drive! (There will be 3 in all.)
If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below and sending a few bucks my way. Or, if you’d prefer, a massive quantity of bucks. You don’t need a PayPal account to donate; you can use a credit card, and there are other options as well. If you’re outside the US, PayPal should be able to handle your weird foreign money that doesn’t even have any US presidents on it.
I appreciate any and all contributions. That said, if you’re broke and can’t swing a contribution now, I completely understand. There are lots of ways to contribute to this blog besides cold hard cash — as anyone who’s checked out the comments here knows well.
Your donations — and other forms of support — have kept this blog going through some tough times. At the time of the last Pledge Drive, I was broke and, frankly, more than a little discouraged, and the outpouring of support from you all made an enormous difference to me. I’ve been a bit tardy — in many cases very tardy — in getting back to people individually with thanks, but I really do appreciate the help. Thanks as well to those who’ve donated since the last pledge drive, and extra special thanks to those who’ve made a point of donating on a regular basis.
I’m not quite as broke now, but I can still use whatever financial support you can give. Thanks again!
Man Boobz has now received some 11 million page views since its inception. Even more impressive: you all have posted more than 300,000 comments. Which is amazing to me. I couldn’t do it without you.
If you really want to get into the Pledge Drive spirit, here’s thirty minutes of a 1980 Pledge Drive from PBS’s Detroit affiliate WTVS:
Mark Minter, a bitter, angry, divorced man in his late fifties, made a name for himself over the last year or so in the tiny world of the misogynist manosphere as that subculture’s most vociferous opponent of marriage.
In a series of little manifestos, deposited as comments on various manosphere blogs, Minter excoriated the institution he thought made a “slave” of men. “Get it through your head,” he wrote in one,
Men are from mars; women are FUCKING IDIOTS.
Never marry. … Duh. Game. Duh. Pump them, dump them, next them. Duh. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO WIN. Duh!!!!!
That was the old Mark Minter. Then, last week, word got out that Minty was getting married. To a single mother (oh no!) over the age of thirty (eek!) that he’s apparently never even met in person (well, actually that does sound a bit worrisome).
Apparently, to a lot of the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit — like the hundreds who upvoted a post of this picture — the notion that men should raise their sons to respect women as equals is nothing more than foul propaganda and MISANDRY of the highest order.
And seriously, those guys in the poster look like total White Knight Beta Manginas.
Some of the Men’s Rightsers were especially offended by the white ribbon at the bottom of the poster, which they saw as a vaguely sinister reminder of a World War I campaign to shame British men into enlisting in the army. Because suggesting to your sons that boys and girls should be treated equally is the same as being guilt-tripped into becoming cannon fodder:
Others used the poster as an opportunity to rail against … marriage. The top comment in the thread, as I write this post, is this one.
Caspian_Drifter responded to the eeeevil poster with a rhetorical question that unintentionally helped to underscore the whole point of the campaign in the first place:
Seriously, ladies, why do gals like to go on and on about “equality” so much when your ladybrains weren’t even smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place? I mean, really, you ungrateful gals, you have a man/men to thank for that.
If I remember correctly, it was T. Reginald Equality who came up with the idea, with some help from his brother Ned (who suggested that he name it after himself).
The fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit are getting worked up over imaginary feminists again!
Yesterday, in a discussion of paternity fraud, a brand-new Redditor who had never posted a comment before posted a completely unsourced screenshot of what quite a few of the regulars took to be some sort of official feminist statement on paternity fraud.
Leave it to the guys at Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog to find a bright side, of sorts, to a study reporting that one in five Americans suffered from some sort of mental illness in 2010, with more women (23%) amongst those affected than men (16.8%).
Since “at least a quarter of the women you run into at any given time are not going to be alright upstairs,” RoK contributor Athlone McGinn argues, and the percentage is likely to be much higher amongst younger women, you might as well use this fact to your advantage.
But first you need to accept the disadvantages. For one thing, you need to realize your powerful man-logic won’t work on these gals:
If you’re 18-25, you will in many cases be dealing with someone who is fundamentally incapable of being reliably rational.
Never mind that most mental illnesses don’t affect the ability to think rationally about most things. Someone with an intense phobia of Donald Trump’s hair, for example, is able to think rationally about everything except Donald Trump’s hair.
Maybe that’s a bad example. I’m not sure it’s entirely irrational to be afraid of Donald Trump’s hair.
And, like their sane counterparts, the crazy ladies may sometimes turn you down. But at least this time you don’t have to feel so bad about yourself.
You may think you’re a loser because you get shot down by these girls more than you’d like, but this isn’t always the case: you’re often dealing with not-entirely-alright girls with illogical criteria.
Oh, but McGinn assures us that “[t]his isn’t an excuse, mind you.” You still need to make sure your “game” is tight. Just don’t be too hard on yourself, because women (like the prices at Crazy Eddie’s electronics emporiums) are literally insane.
So what’s the great advantage of dating a woman who’s mentally ill? McGinn is a bit vague, probably deliberately, but essentially he suggests that men can keep “dysfunctional” women in line by treating them like shit:
Dysfunctional treatment is often welcomed by dysfunctional people, and many of those with mental issues fit that bill. Since we’ve already established that a very large number of young women fit into that category, you should not be surprised to see so many of them respond positively to dysfunctional behavior.
It is not uncommon for young men to adopt some of these dysfunctional behaviors, find increased sexual/romantic success with their female peers as a result, and then feel guilty about it all. Such guilt is understandable (they don’t like the fact that morally degraded versions of themselves are more appealing to girls in general than the men they actually prefer to be), but ultimately unnecessary—there is nothing a man can do about the female proclivity to welcome such behavior except adapt to it. It is the result of factors much bigger than him.
Poor pickup artists! They don’t want to be abusive, manipulative, exploitative assholes and terrible people generally. They’re driven to this awful behavior by forces beyond their control — like the fact that women are statistically somewhat more likely to suffer from mental illness than men.
Well, it’s time for a little celebration, I guess. Because I’ve just received word — straight from the Manosphere itself — that feminism has defeated Pickup Artistry in the battle for control of America.
That, at least, is the message of a blog post from our old acquaintance Firepower. On his Eradica blog, he writes sadly that “[d]espite 15 years [of PUA] Feminism still rules America – NOT men. Certainly not puas.” The problem, to poor feminism-hating Firepower?
Today, a brief foray into racist conspiracy theory, courtesy of the Men’s Rights subreddit. This is from a discussion of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s internet porn ban, which the Men’s Rightsers seem to think was orchestrated by the evil feminist overlords.
Lovely! You may wish to peruse k66ish’s comment history for many other nuggets of wisdom that may involve use of the word “cunt.”
Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing this one out in the comments here.
Men’s Rights activists have discovered something that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the rest of his gang at the Westboro Baptist Church learned a long time ago: outrageously offensive signs can mean media coverage.
This time the MRAs toned down the offensiveness in favor of simple outrageousness, combined with a healthy dose of incomprehensibility. The most incomprehensible of the current lot is probably this one, which comes straight from the A Voice for Men poster page:
But my favorite is this one:
I was originally going to write a sort of rebuttal to this, pointing out that by most measures Canada is, generally speaking, a rather unfrightening place for men (and women), what with its high standard of living, decent health care, relatively low crime rate, and so on.
I mean, if I were to pick a frightening country to live in, as a man (or a woman), I would probably pick someplace like, you know, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan or South Sudan, someplace like that. Syria’s probably not a great place to visit at the moment either.
But then I was thinking: Canada’s main problem, in terms of its international reputation, is that people tend to think of it as boring, not frightening.
Maybe Canada should embrace the whole “most frightening place to be a man” thing, and take advantage of this silly quote from Erin Pizzy to promote itself as scary, edgy, intense, EXTREEEEEMMME!
Maybe with some posters like the one at the top of this post?
I don’t know. I’m not that great at photoshop. Perhaps some of you would like to have a go at it? I know we’ve got some talented MRA poster-parodists here.