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.
Oh. And to share:
Ooh, ooh, anime thread!
I… almost don’t want to cosign a comment as elitist and jerky as J’s, but yeah, Baccano! is awesome. Especially the theme song. Aaaah, the theme song.
And FLCL! I love FLCL. Although I’m not sure I could recommend watching it unless you’re familiar with Eva? I’m not sure FLCL’s aggressive lack of sense is coherent unless you recognize the tropes from Eva it’s setting up to knock all over the place.
And while we’re talking about animes for which the basic premise is “What if Shinji didn’t have a horrible life and no support network?” there’s always Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. If you can get past the fanservice – and LORD there is a lot of fanservice – and you enjoy ridiculous over-the-top defined-the-phrase-beyond-the-impossible action, definitely check it out.
Re: FMA – I definitely preferred the original anime. I liked Brotherhood, but the addition of characters cut from the first anime seemed… kinda pointless? Like, they show up with their own goals and motivations and reasons for needing the Philosopher’s Stone, but then they don’t end up having any real impact on the plot. I feel like their existence made a lot more sense in the manga (I say this without having read it) because print visual media can get away with a slightly more sprawling, meandering plot and cast. I just preferred the original FMA anime’s tightness of plot and economy of detail.
Heh, not sure how I can forget FLCL. LOve that one deeply. 🙂 The Soundtrack to that is one of my favourite things in the everywhere.
I’m also a huge fan of the late Satoshi Kon. He does real mind-screwy anime like Paranoia Agent (The “How anime is made” episode is especially close this this animator’s heart), and Paprika (Eat your heart out, Inception). I still haven’t had a chance to see Perfect Blue or Millennium Actress though.
I have a much higher tolerance for barely-coherent metaphysical reflections than most people I know.
Tokyo Godfathers is also an amazing film. The portrayal of Hana might be problematic from a trans* stereotype perspective, but she’s also a very sympathetic character, and much of the heart of the film.
DA RE-ALL FO-OLK BA-LOSE!!
Yeah I LOVED the music in Madoka Magica. Especially the end song.
@Marie
Yeah, I can’t argue with that. It’s been a really long time, and I didn’t give the Japanese version much of a chance, but one of the voice actors that I remember finding hilarious was Roy Mustang’s. I remember he was giving some menacing speech and i was rolling in the aisles the whole time 😛
@Falconer
I don’t know really know the fandom, I ran across a review of the series and it piqued my interest. My take was that he’s a lucky optimist, but I also felt like his optimism lead him to just keep going through everything confident that things will always work out, which kept him from panicking when everyone else did. I also really loved the character progression for the crew as a unit, I felt like individual characters weren’t developed as much as I would have liked, but the camaraderie and trust on the Soyokaze is developed very believably (IMO anyways). I do think that Yuriko’s character wasn’t treated well by the writers.
RE: Ally
Another good (and underrated) anime: Black Jack. Especially the Black Jack OVAs (you can find them pretty easily on YouTube).
What? How can Tezuka be underrated? He’s the fucking GOD OF MANGA! I love his shit. (Though I’m way better with manga than anime.) Also, never seen the anime, but I do like the Hourou Musuko manga!
RE: katz
I saw Grave of the Fireflies because I felt it was necessary for me as a lover of 2D animation. I am glad I saw it, and I will NEVER see it again.
RE: leftwingfox
Most of the Disney/Ghibli dubs are excellent as well.
Really? I mean, some of the voices I think are chosen well, but in my case, just about any Disney/Ghibli dub, there will be one voice that just smacks me out of the story every time. Christian Bale as Howl? A young man for Haku, who’s like eight? Just didn’t do it for me.
Also, I heard Paprika was one of the inspirations for Inception. I refer to some of my more dysfunctional behaviors as ‘the parade’ in deference to that.
RE: J
Hey, what’s the appeal of Yaoi to nerd girls? They don’t even show the guy’s dicks!
You act like that’s all anyone cares about.
And when they do show dongs it’s usually in the context of really goddam rapey shit.
What? People with rape fantasies? SAY IT AIN’T SO!
Also, since this is the anime thread… oh god I want to see Dangan Ronpa SO FUCKING BAD. And I’m neither an anime nor a TV fan. I just want to see Sakura Oogami be badass. UBER-BUFF MUSCLE GIRL WRESTLER for the win!
omggggggggggg
Tezuka definitely isn’t underrated, but I don’t hear many people talking about Black Jack. It’s a real shame. :<
I ran across Black Jack when I burned through all the anime I knew and promptly fell in love.
You guys are listing a lot of anime I’ve been side-eyeing, not sure if I want to get into it. My tolerance for fanservice has dropped a lot, like Desert Punk made me want to hurt people, so I’ve been hesitant trying new stuff.
Oh gods, I forgot Full Metal Panic. I adore Full Metal Panic. I have such a soft sport for teenagers doing things teenagers simply shouldn’t do.
… Full Metal Panic. The anime that earned me the “Shame of the Hungarian Anime Fandom” title, because I couldn’t stand that thing. :/ (I saw the first 2,5 episodes… in the middle of the 3rd I couldn’t take it anymore and changed channel to watch a rerun of Minority Report.)
Well, your milage may vary, of course. I agree that they tend to use much older guys than they should for young male leads. It could also be that I’m a bit fixated on how AWFUL dubs used to be, growing up in the Robotech/Akira/Fist of the North Star era.
Wouldn’t surprise me. I see Inception much the way I saw the matrix: A smarter-than-average sci-fi action movie which a lot of people took way too seriously. Paprika was much more character driven, looking at how this technology affected the different cast members, instead of being all about one dude’s emotional journey during a wacky brain heist.
I finished FMA and the movie. Still working my way through a bunch of other stuff — holy CRAP you guys Orphan Black is so good — before I get around to FMA: Brotherhood.
Plan to watch it soon, though.
Cowboy Bebop. 😀
I have never watched the last few episodes of Cowboy Bebop … maybe only the last one.
Once Ed and Ein and Faye leave, the THIS IS GETTING DARK YO flags are flying fast and hard and I stopped to work up the emotional fortitude to continue, and just haven’t gone back yet.
There’s only the two-part finale after that. It’s not a happy ending, by any means, but it’s nowhere near as dark as, say, the last 8 episodes of Full Metal Alchemist, or the entirety of Wolf’s Rain (which I loved, but completely destroyed me by the end)
The ending of Cowboy Bebop is probably one of the best anime endings I’ve seen.
**spoilers**
Sure, it was very dark, but at the same time I really like the closure it has. It didn’t seem rushed at all.
**spoliers**
Oh, well I got through FMA. Beloved watched it on [adult swim] and after the cliffhanger at the end of the penultimate episode, they looped back around to an earlier ep, so she though it must have ended there. But it didn’t.
RE: Ally
Tezuka definitely isn’t underrated, but I don’t hear many people talking about Black Jack. It’s a real shame. :<
So bizarre. That was his most popular adult series! Gigi loves Black Jack, and she hates all doctors with fiery passion.
RE: leftwingfox
I see Inception much the way I saw the matrix: A smarter-than-average sci-fi action movie which a lot of people took way too seriously. Paprika was much more character driven, looking at how this technology affected the different cast members, instead of being all about one dude’s emotional journey during a wacky brain heist.
Inception got worse on multiple viewings, for me. Paprika, on the other hand, got better. Me and Sneak bunkered down and watched two nights running (once in subs, once in dubs), and trying to catch all the Jungian references and analyze what made the animation and chaos WORK so well. Normally I HATE things where I don’t understand what’s going on, but I love Paprika.
I have wanted to see Paprika for so long, but there’s just so much Netflix, so much baby, and so little time.
RE: Falconer
Definitely give it a watch, but I’d advise doing so when you can spare a bunch of brain to try and absorb everything going on in it. A LOT happens in that movie. Also wooo, multi subtext!
(and I’m posting kind of late on this thread because I had to get sick the one week I was actually working and had like no energy to do anything but read afterwards. Sorry.)
@J
I see I’m coming late to this…statement, so I’ll just quote CassandraSays* cuz she said it way better.
*CassandraSays, is she your preferred gender pronoun? I just realized I’ve never referred to you in third person. Preemptive apologies if I got it wrong 🙁
@shadow
Haha I found Roy’s voice hilarious too XD And I was extra sad because I started watching FMA when I was more bi-er (er, more attracted to men?) and I had a super huge crush on his voice in the subs. It just sounded nice. So I really didn’t like dub Roy’s voice. I’m weird…
No mention of my comment? It was pretty funny.
Can’t say much about a comment that no one can even see.
I’d question the definition of “funny” coming from someone with that woeful nym.
If you have to ask how your comment went over, assume it failed.