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).
If this isn’t all some elaborate work of performance art, it may well be turn out to be the most entertaining drama I’ve seen since I started following the manosphere three years ago.
It was Minty’s future wife, a mysterious manosphere-friendly woman known only as Kate, who first broke the news, in a comment on Heartiste’s “game” blog, where she is something of a regular fixture. Heartiste posted about the strange engagement shortly afterwards, wondering if it had been his blog that had “brought these two lovebirds together into a promise of holy matrimony.”
Needless to say, some of Minty’s fans — now ex-fans — reacted as if he had just pooped in the punch bowl.
“Oh crap, the one man wh ostands agianst marraige……destroyed by the unmerciful claws of marraige,” wrote one commenter, evidently too overwhelmed by emotion to type properly. “Farewell Mark, you will be missed. The medusa kate has you now.”
“Speechless,” wrote another. “This is like having Jesus spit in your face while saying ‘FUCK YOU BROTHER!’”
Feeling a tad defensive, Minty rushed to defend himself, and his future wife. In a comment on Chateau Heartiste, he explained
I suppose I have to eat crow. So why the change of heart?
First, I would say I saw some photos that the rest of you have not.
He’s seen some photos? Am I right to think that the only possible interpretation of this is that the two haven’t actually met in person yet?
Second, she is Red Pill and has actually been in this community longer than I have. You cannot imagine what it is like to have conversations with a woman and say “Remember the CH essay on ….” and have a girl say “Yeah, He was right on with that one.”
And I think the odds of men finding someone that fits the first statement AND the second are pretty remote. I believe I nailed down one of the 2 or 3 that might exist in the world that have photos that can make a fellow sit up and pay attention, and then having the intellect and the preparation to keep that attention.
After some proud blabbing about Kate’s apparently quite traditional values, Minty brags about what an alpha dog he is for scoring her:
To me, this engagement is a validation of Game.
I practiced what I learned here. I am 58 year old man. None of you know what that truly entails until you get to that point in your life. Kate is an attractive 34 year old woman, with options galore if she chose to take them.
And in following what I learned here, following the suggestions, the psychology, the mandates, I have an attractive woman 24 years younger than me that is ready to commit to me.
Top that motherfuckers.
As for the medusa Kate, he defended her honor in another comment,
When this Facebook announcement thing happened and members of Kate’s family learned of it, my name got Googled and the writing I have done came to the attention of her family. And some of it was quite provocative and written by me to be intentionally provocative.
And her family came straight at her.
They set up something like an interdiction where she was confronted by not only her family, but also by a PhD in Psychology …
The family compelled her to attend this session with them and this counselor.
They could not believe that a rational woman would wish to marry a known sexist and misogynist.
So she went into that meeting alone, and she stood her ground, she defended our ideas of the Manosphere, she stood up for me, my right to write what I have written, and she won the day. …
She deserves your respect and she has earned it.
Not everyone in the manosphere is convinced that she — or Minty — deserve this respect any more.
In a post yesterday, PUA skeezball Roosh V denounced Minty as a “phony” and warned him that he would no longer be tolerated in Roosh’s corner of the manosphere:
He is like the conservative politician who espouses family values while diddling young boys on the side.
What? What kind of a world do you live in where a man who announces his plans to get married is in some ways equivalent to a child rapist?
He is the PUA who sells products on how to get laid but can’t even approach a single woman, someone who creates a false character to gain either money or—in this case—praise, at the expense of everyone’s trust.
For that reason, he has lost all respect from me. If he were to knock on my door, starving, begging for food and drink, I would only place the sustenance on my front step. He would not be permitted to enter my home so that the foul odor of hypocrisy that now trails him does not infect my place of sleep.
I hope his name will forever be synonymous with a man who doesn’t live by his own code. He deserves to be permanently exiled from the manosphere community. No more praise or compliments should be directed his way.
Contributing to Roosh’s disillusionment with Minty: his discovery of comments left here on Man Boobz by Minty’s ex-wife Suzanne Minter, which depict Minty as something less than the swashbuckling figure so many in the manosphere took him to be. With somethig less than fondness, she described him as
an absolutly insane person. … we have been divorced for ten years, dont you think it is time to get over it? …
[He] has 2 children, including a 19 yr old daugther. He has never paid a dollar of child support in his life, so all of the crap he spews is crap. He has not worked in 5 years because no one will hire him. Amazingly, he has been fired from EVERY job he ever had. He lives with his sister because without her support he would be homeless.
This is the man that people are calling “great” – he is a bitter ass.
In a comment on a site called FOKMCAST, which had posted something supportive of Minty, Suzanne elaborated further:
Mark Minter is a fraud. … Mark is the biggest victim I have ever known. You say his children didn’t appreciate him? What the hell did he do for them? They were 7 and 3 when we finally divorced. He never saw them because he moved out of state and then emptied out is 401k after getting fired for the 6th time , to go to South America to have relationships with women he met on the Internet. (As a result of that brilliant financial decision he owes the IRS about 35k in back taxes and penalties and fees)
You people act like Mark is the greatest thing ever. He is a fraud and a liar. 99% of what he has written on the web is fabricated. Don’t you people have real lives that involve human interaction or do you only have the social abilities to exist in cyber space? I really would have thought that one or 2 of you might have been smart enough to do some fact checking before you took Mark as your messiah.
His engagement is a sham. Don’t you find it odd that he is marrying someone he has only seen pictures of? Well, I take that back, he did marry a columbian woman he met on the Internet which she shortly after had annulled. …
Moral of the story: mark is a liar and a fraud and they way you people idolize him his a sad testament to the modern Internet. I am a 5’7 135 lb blonde who earned 200k last year. I raised my children on my own and was single for almost 10 years before marrying someone 8 yrs younger than me. I am clearly the slob, pig, bitch, moron, bloodsucker here.
Have a great Sunday.
After quoting Suzanne Minter’s comments here, Roosh sadly added “I don’t know what to believe right now, but our manosphere “innocence” has been violated.” In a followup comment, as he evidently began to take in the implications of all this, he wrote:
Our enemies will use this against us for a long time. Minter has done serious damage. I accept blame since I helped spread his writing. My troll radar seemed to have failed me this time.
Dude, speaking as one of your enemies, we figured out that Mark Minter was full of shit the minute we first ran across him. Why do you think I was writing about him with such obvious relish months ago, back when he was still your hero? When Suzanne Minter came by to tell us that he was (to borrow your own description of him) “literally … a basement dweller troll,” we didn’t even blink, and I didn’t even bother to write a post about it. We already take for granted that the gurus and would be gurus of the manosphere are a bunch of liars and frauds. The fact that the manosphere is full of gullible idiots is not news to us.
In the comments to Roosh’s post, some commenters wondered if he was some sort of “feminist psyop,” sent to disrupt the manosphere. “Until I see the photo of them in wedded matrimony,” wrote taterearl.
I’ll just take this as a pleasant fairy tale for us to bark about. For all we know they could be actually be double agents from Jezebel posing as people with the elaborate plot of trying to take down the place.
Well, it’s pretty clearly not that, but whatever it is, I suspect it will be providing us all with some lovely drama for some time to come. Will the now happy-couple make it to the altar before the old marriage-hating Minty rears his ugly head once more? Will Roosh and Heartiste start a feud? Who the hell knows, but it should be entertaining nonetheless.
Suzanne Minter summed up her reaction in an email to me,
This can not be real. Seriously, Mark is penniless and I don’t see his sister forking over the dollars to buy him a car (he has not owned a working vehicle in 3 yrs) so he can go meet his fiancée in person. I can’t see a woman with an IQ higher than 40 signing up for this, no matter how “red pill” or what ever the hell it is that she is. …
It does blow my mind though that a man who lives like a troll in his sister’s spare bedroom for 4 years, hasn’t had any real human interaction in years, can’t get a job dispute the fact that he is truly gifted in a math/computer science sense, has managed to create a name and following for himself in the cyber world.
I should add that while I have confirmed Suzanne’s identity (and that she’s really the one who’s made all these postings of hers I’ve quoted), I don’t know how much of what she says about Mark is true. I also don’t know if the engagement is real, or even if Kate is a real person. Of course, I don’t know if Roosh has slept with a single HB8. In the manosphere, it’s fair to say, roughly 80% of everything is bullshit. I’m guessing the truth value of Suzanne’s comments is higher than that.
To keep up with the ongoing drama, I suggest starting here:
The original, ever-growing thread on the Roosh forums
The comments to Roosh’s “Mark Minter is a Phony” post.
The comments to Heartiste’s announcement post
For more on Minter see:
Roosh’s two earlier posts quoting him at length.
My posts on him, especially Mark Minter takes on Marriage, Mangina Manservants and America’s Matriarchal Infrastructure.
For Suzanne Minter’s take on the alleged engagement, see her comments to that post, starting here, as well as her comments on the FOKMCAST post, some very pointedly directed at the mysterious Kate.
For more on his future wife Kate, see this post of hers on the racist manosphere blog Eradica, where she urged white men to “alpha up” lest white women desert them for men of other races, thus destroying civilization. Yep, she’s a real prize.
Which is pretty much par for the course in all media.
@Glock
You have a point there, but surely some child characters are more realistic than others.
Well, obviously. And don’t call me Shirley.
Beats the other way around, where characters who’re supposed to be in their late teens or twenties act like 5 year olds (also tragically common in Japanese and Korean media).
My grandmother was a Shirley, and she loved the “And don’t call me” jokes.
I miss her. She drove a Lincoln Towncar with an 8-track that she bought about 5 years after 8-tracks had run their course. She cared not. She made her own sausage. She adored hummingbirds. She shooed black bears off of her yard. She was awesome.
Werd. Oh, your main character is a young guy who’s a bit childish, hotheaded and self-centered? What a novel concept!
Minty. Getting married. I saw the thread the other day, but figured it had already been debunked. Married? Really? I dunno, but it’s kind of like thinking about my Yuri ferret sitting up, putting on a pair of wire rimmed glasses and reciting Faust. Fucking hillarious to think about but probably not very likely.
Oh, your female character stamps her little feet and pouts and whines when she doesn’t get her way? How ingenious of you to find such a unique way to signal that she’s supposed to be cute!
@Nova here is a fancy dressed ferret:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/40/ec/40/40ec40b4570578cf8128c2c009a7a836.jpg
Some ferrets are not partial to Faust. They prefer a different self expression:
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/16/d2/a2/16d2a2bc00c0c34ec6030f4224cbd21f.jpg
Elton Ferret! :O
Now you have me grieving my grandparents all over again. But in a good, bittersweet, way,
If anyone else is still up this late, I’m on AIM as vibiasabina. I have videos of my foster kittens, homemade fruit tarts, and I can probably find a hard chair and a skanky penguin somewhere.
Kittehs- I named the momma cat Katie, after your Katie. She seemed like a Katie!
This is Katie and company about 2 weeks after they came home: http://distilleryimage11.ak.instagram.com/cb5e49d6da4211e29fb622000aaa1012_7.jpg
They’re much bigger now, they’ll be 9 weeks old tomorrow. I have to give her babies back to the rescue this weekend, since the littlest is about to hit a kilogram (necessary for spay). Katie will be staying with me at least another few weeks to dry up, but I’ve fallen in love with her, and she’s fallen in love with my husband, so I’m hoping he’ll agree that she has to stay.
There really is no defence against cute kitties. I once bottle-fed some newborns and you can’t help instantly falling in love.
cloudiah, your grandmother sounds like she was the coolest person.
Double agents from Jezebel! Oh, that made my morning.
They project as badly as many conservatives do. Anything they accuse their “enemies” of doing, I just assume they’re the ones doing it. The real MRAs are ridiculous enough, there’s no need to fake them.
FUZZBALLS!!
And if we’re posting Tom Waits …
Someone put a lot of work into this mashup.
I think Cookie Monster might be my favorite muppet.
Hmmm. Anime I’ve seen.
I saw Fullmetal Alchemist, the first series and the movie. If you’re coming off of fluffy sweet silly Azumanga Daioh, FMA is going to be a blow to the stomach. It’s got its light episodes and its silliness and then it gets dark fast. Like dead-child dark.
Trigun is similar, but doesn’t go as far as FMA. Vash tries to live a happy, carefree life, but Events Conspire and peeps get killed.
Rouroni Kenshin is an epic samurai tale. I haven’t seen all of it, but what I have seen included an argument over whether a steam locomotive was run by steam power or spirits that quickly devolved into “Ghost! Tea kettle!” over and over.
There’s plenty of anime available on Netflix; some of it even streams.
Oh boy. Used to be big into anime. Still watch it from time to time, but the current trend towards Dragonball Z epics (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece) has kept me largely out of the loop.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of my all-time favourite series: action and hard-core intellectual sci-fi on the nature of human connections in an increasingly digital world.
Moribito Guardian of the Sacred Spirit: WATCH THIS ONE, it’s on Netflix. Non-sexualized woman as the main character, passes the Bechdel test with the elderly shaman. It’s also a fantasy about the importance of reason and the quest for knowledge, where the ultimate enemy is ignorance (and not the physical manifestation of ignorance either. Just good people doing terrible things because they don’t know better.)
There’s also Summer Wars, a movie which I’m hopelessly addicted to.
Trigun, Full Metal Alchemist (and the “Brotherhood” rebooted series), Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Outlaw Star, and Last Exile, are all series I’ve watched through to completion.
Way late here, but…
“Most of the anime I’ve seen that passes the reverse Bechdel test is anime like Golden Boy and Ranma 1/2. Which is saying a lot, considering how male-centric they are. =P ”
Naruto passes both, I’m wary on their take on trans* people, since he turns into a girl to cause men to cease being capable of thinking clearly, so kinda just a gimmick, but not really mockery either. In any case, Naruto and little Sasuke have legit honest to goodness men can be emotional moments. Well rounded female characters with actual relationships, not a “passes because of this one line here”.
Got so fucking long, but I really liked the original series. To the point that my old gravatar was Haku.
Anybody watches Attack on Titan?
@leftwingfox
Moribito looks awesome! Thanks for bringing it up. I’ve been wanting to watch a new anime for a while. ^_^
Also, you have a great taste in anime. I wish more people talked about Outlaw Star and Trigun (though, to be fair, Trigun is pretty old now).
@a horse of course!
D’awwwww :3
@cloudiah
Your grandmother sounds awesome.
@falconer
I’ve seen the first series but nothing else. Is the movie good?
and more importantly does it have Riza?@leftwingfox
That sounds awesome. Should put it on my ever growing list of shows to check out 🙂
@BlackBloc
*raises hand wildly again*
Pick me! Pick me! I was just about to mention it, in fact. Very dark with great characters, and badass moments like this: