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.
Seriously? You’re questioning the entire existence of softcore?
You think that women’s sexual fantasies are entirely penis-focused? You poor deluded child.
They probably find it appealing for the same reason some straight nerd guys find Yuri appealing. Nothing surprising or hard to comprehend. And cosigning katz and CassandraSays.
@argenti To put this in perspective, discounting any filler, the anime has not yet gotten as ridiculous as Dragonball GT, but there are some aspects of the current arc which really undercut the passing of the torch aspect which I loved about the anime.
I am not sure exactly who you mean by Lee forgetting someone’s name. I might have skipped over it if it did not fit the manga.
Post-time skip arc started off really strong. The latest feels like payoff jackpot and so could be meant as an ender.
Yaoi may benefit from the focus on the beauty of the male characters that a lot of straight-male gaze centered works lack.
I do find a lot of the relationship dynamics in yaoi disturbing (Gravitation creeped me out), but opium has it – it’s the focus on beautiful men that tends to appeal to a lot of women.
Cassandra — there’s a reason it’s my guilty pleasure! I like Shuichi is a banana suit, not Shuichi in a banana suit getting stalkery.
opium4themasses — the legendary sword guy that’s way too much like a shark. Lee’s fought him like four times but is always “wait, should I know who you are?”
That being said, if what you want is stuff that’s female gaze-oriented with a focus on pretty boys there’s plenty of live action het-oriented stuff from Japan and Korea too, but I’m not sure that the women and girls who love yaoi know that it exists, and it’s not porny/explicit. For anyone who’s not sure what I’m talking about, look up the show Boys Over Flowers (the Korean cast is prettier, imo).
@argenti Not Lee! That was Guy (big difference, right?! They are back off filler since him I think. I prefer the manga, and I watch the anime episodes that stick to it. Once Naruto is back in the game things get interesting and then odd and then power level over 9000 back and forth. Still… if you went that far, you really need to get through to the payoff jackpots.
Lol, Lee and mini-Lee in my brain! And I guess I’ll pick it up again once I’m done with my massive fish project. I was expecting power level 9
000tails anyways.This feels weird to mention but does apply to the yaoi discussion. An ex of mine liked rape scenes in hentai because she loved how the men/demons would show obvious and audible pleasure. She said that most straight porn has men who are stone cold silent.
@A horse of course!
I’m late (cursed timezones). They (the class) thought that Marco was a stray, but that kitten was just a throwaway joke (and Big Lipped Alligator Moment) in one episode. Sakaki got to keep Mayaa (against all logic and law) at the end.
– Subbing vs. dubbing.
I’m a sub purist too… except when I do weird stuff like insisting that the German one is the One True Dub (Detective Conan / Case Closed … My guilty pleasure ^^;). I’m justified by the fact that the local dubs are generally atrocious. Even if Anime is actually slightly better off than western cartoons or TV series in this regard (Having a rabid fandom has it’s uses).
That’s what seems so odd, from what I’ve read about straight porn. Is it because it’s about the presumed male audience’s pleasure, and not wanting to remind them they’re not the ones doing it? (Wild guess there.)
I’m a little bit bitter that Revolutionary Girl Utena didn’t get the top spot as “awesome mindtrip” from that era and Evangelion did, because I thought Utena did the final subverting twist so much better than EVA (though admittedly I haven’t bothered with EVA since the first time I saw it).
Revolutionary Girl Utena is the best deconstruction of the prince/princess/witch archetypes and the classic fairy-tale narrative I’ve seen, and comes in an awesome and fun package with memorable characters. The Black Rose Saga might drag a little bit though I appreciate the weird nature of it all the same, but the beginning and the end of the series is just pure bliss. And DAMN, episode 34 (The Rose Crest). I mean… damn.
It’s also the series that made me love pink, I have desktop backgrounds from Utena on pretty much all my devices, and a big rose tattoo (not the rose crest, the other one) on my chest. So… somewhat significant for me 😀
In other news, I’m loving Free! right now. It’s just so blatant and makes no excuses! And do a search on tumblr for it if you’re looking for a good time!
I’m a total Princess Tutu fan; amazing characters, amazing plot, usual “it’s all cheerful until it isn’t”, and one of the best magical depictions of recovering from depression I’ve seen (the plot centers around returning a person’s heart to him, taking him from blank and empty to fully formed). I’m also a huge Ghost in the Shell fan, but it is problematic; cool, but hella problematic (ditto the manga). Fruits Basket is one of my favorites and I really wish the anime company hadn’t lost their nerve and stopped making episodes when they did. And Oiran Host Club is just rollicking fun, though the anime doesn’t have the strong female relationships the manga does. I’m an enormous fan of Gundam Wing, but it’s a huge series, so a lot for someone to take on.
This is the anime thread, right? >.>
Princess Tutu is wonderful, can’t believe I didn’t watch it until earlier this year!
And then someone made me like this song by making a Princess Tutu AMV with it:
Like Utena the conflict sort of revolves around who gets to define the meta-narrative, which I really really like.
YES, I love that AMV so hard.
Pretear is another really interesting one. I’m a huge fan of magical Girl animes, despite getting started with some of the boy stuff (Ranma Half is a boy anime, which explains the endless fight scenes – it’s a staple of shonen). I like Ah My Goddess (another boy anime, funnily enough, though a lot of US people did not get that at all) as well, but one of my eternal favorites which I need to somehow get is Kaito Saint Tail, which is a total amazing magical girl romance of love and sparkles. And who can forget Slayers? I adore Slayers.
I managed to miss pretty much all those (I think I watched an episode or two of Pretear). I got heavy into Hikaru no Go, Princess Nine, Twelve Kingdoms, R.O.D., Maria-sama ga Miteru, and some older stuff like Aim for the Ace! and Rose of Versailles. And probably a whole lot of series I’ve completely forgotten about, as tend to happen 😀
I really would like some more “sports” animes (Hikaru no Go counts, ancient boardgames are sports!) where the main character isn’t an utter tool.
Slayers… Oh gods… I need to rewatch that again! (With the So Bad It’s Good / Good Bad Translation Hungarian dub! It got an errata forum almost 100 pages long but we still loved it. So cheesy and overacted and the translator(s) obviously knew nothing about fantasy at all. Yeah… I’m weird. ^^;)
Bad dubs is part of anime culture (or history, optimistically). The classic being of course how different countries dealt with Haruka and Michiru in Sailor Moon!
I can believe I haven’t watched Mawaru Penguindrum yet. Something must be done about this unacceptable state of affairs.
Well, the Hungarian dub of Sailor Moon… I have no idea… I rarely saw anybody, who could bear more than a couple of episodes because the dub was so painful. But it probably inherited whatever the French one did. (Yeah. It was translated from French!) For the actual Sailor Moon fans the definitive dub was the German one (Satellite television for the win!) which if I remember correctly kept the Haruka and Michiru relationship as it was but gender flipped Zoisite.
I always watch Case Closed (literally). I just have it on on my second monitor always, and since there are 700+ episodes, mostly stand-alone, it’s very non-commital.
“And who can forget Slayers? I adore Slayers.”
Slayers is just fantastic, especially the first one, NEXT, and TRY, the latter two being my favorites because Xellos.
Well I think they’re made for each other 🙂
Has anyone watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica? I watched it (twice — its 12 episodes long) recently and am crazy about it.
It’s a magical girl anime.. except that being a magical girl isn’t all its cracked up to be. I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it, except that it’s great and heartbreaking. I watched it subbed and dubbed (it’s available subbed on crunchyroll) and they were both good.
These days I tend to like dubbing better. I used to be all subtitle purist back in college when I was taking Japanese, but lately I’ve found that I feel more immersed in the story when I’m not reading subtitles. I’m watching the action more and not “reading ahead”, since I read subtitles much faster than voice actors can speak.
Of course, some dubs have terrrrrrrrrible voice acting, but then again, I feel like since I don’t speak Japanese, it’s hard for me to tell whether or not the original acting is any good either. I do know a little bit of Japanese though, enough to tell the difference between super polite and super casual speech, which I think kind of adds something to my understanding, but not enough to make up for what I miss by not understanding inflection/tone of voice and not paying as much attention to the action.
I would describe Puella Magi Madoka Magica as the possibly biggest trolling in anime history. I would also call it a cosmic horror story masquerading as a magical girl show. :]
I also found Magia (the ending song) a terrible ear worm. *facepalm* (That show is worth to watch for the soundtrack alone in my opinion.)