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The news of misogynistic marriage-hater Mark Minter’s upcoming nuptials has been ricocheting around the manosphere for about a week now. In my previous post on the subject, I looked at the manosphere’s initial reaction to this startling — and for many, disillusioning — development. Today, a followup, looking at how the manosphere has begun to adjust to the idea of a married Minty.
Over on the blog he’s modestly named MATT FORNEY, Matt Forney uses the whole brouhaha as an opportunity to chide manosphere dudes for their incredible gullibility and childish hero-worship.
The manoblogs are all a-twitter with righteous outrage. Mark Minter is a fraud! A liar! A hypocrite! How could a guy who railed against marriage, called it an institution for “pussies,” go back on his words? With a single mother no doubt? Why did he lie about the fact that he’s a penniless bum who’s been living with his sister for the past few years?
Why? Why? WHY?
You’ll notice that I haven’t joined in the ritual witch-burning, and that’s because I didn’t care for Minter to begin with. …
He was just a pissed-off guy who found a forum to vent in. By any objective measure he made out pretty good, seeing as he’s getting married to a groupie nearly half his age. … Toss in the fact that he’s a broke deadbeat and from his perspective, he’s practically won the lottery.
So who do I blame? I blame you.
You credulous cronies. You gullible dipshits. You idol-worshipping nimrods. You’re no different than the legions of Oprah-watching soccer moms who turned on James Frey after his fabrications were revealed. “But-but-but he LIED to me!!!!!1″ No asshole, you lied to yourself. …
Same with Mark Minter. The evidence of him being a broke basement dweller was sitting in plain view, but no one bothered to do a basic Google search before they decided to deify him. Why? Because he sold a vision of life that the manospambots found appealing, where marriage is always doomed to fail and divorce is always the woman’s fault. …
If you don’t want to get fooled again, stop being so easy to fool. Stop building shrines to every halfwit who assuages your prejudices.
Forney is a bigot and an asshole and an all-around terrible person, but he’s got a little bit of a point here.
Over on The Black Pill — formerly Omega Virgin Revolt — Mr. Pill has a unique theory: Minty decided to renounce his marriage-hating manosphere ways to marry a single mom because he was sick of running into dumb conspiracy theorists on manosphere blogs. Yep, that’s right: the manosphere got too weird for Mark Minter.
[W]hat happened to Mark Minter? He didn’t just get married after being a stalwart against marriage. He married a single mother. Only he knows, but one possibility (assuming that he didn’t troll the manosphere or something like that) is that he came to the realization that the so called manosphere is insane and ran back to his old life (in a manner of speaking). A few months ago Minter had a problem with a Return of Court Jesters … article about how Obamacare mandated that everyone have a RFID chip in them and that this was going to lead to the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelations in the Bible. (This is completely false.)
Oh really? Obamacare ISN’T going to lead to all of us being branded with the Mark of the Beast? Thanks for clarifying that, Mr. Black Pill!
This is something that I suspect happens to a lot of the men who vanished from the so called manosphere or suffer from so called “player burnout”. These men come across some aspect of the manosphere that is too insane for them which causes them to run back to their old (likely feminist derived) ideology because it appears sane in comparison. Minter just chose a way of dealing with this that didn’t involve vanishing (at least not right away) or coming up with a contrived explanation like “player burnout”.
I don’t know what will happen next, but my guess is that Minter will use the ensuing criticism to exit the so called manosphere completely. After that, in a few months no one in the so called manosphere will remember who Mark Minter was … .
So getting married is sort of the manosphere version of faking your own death? Huh.
Over on The Soul is Not a Smithy, “Francis Begbie” writes (in dialect):
[B]asically, that Mark Minter guy, the most staunch, anti conjugal bells motherfucker residing in the manosphere … That guy, well yeah, he’s got himself hitched up with … a single mother. This has disappointed many a cunt in this here parts as of late. But the thing is kind of sobering too, in its one perverted little way.
Oh, a note on usage: In Begbie’s writing, the word “cunt” generally refers to men.
A cunt has learned:
A man will do anything for some snatch. This is why a lot of the MGTOW bozo the clown types can be funny goofy motherfuckers at times. The second the whiff of pussy enflames de nostrils, they’re just like the preacher and mustache Charlie.
There be a lot of paper alpha types doing the rounds. …
[Y]ou need to be a man of your word, not this paper alpha shite. And that is why this whole debacle with Minter is so bloody insinuating. Minter was not a man of his word …
As de Captain would say, stay frosty lads. Nothing more powerful on the planet then pussy ken…
Unless you’re David Futrelle.
Wait, what? I totally did not see that coming!
But of course the best response to the whole brouhaha comes from Minty himself. In the comments to Roosh’s post labeling him a “phony” and essentially drumming him out of the manosphere, Minty replies with a mixture of indignation, defensiveness and self-pity:
If you find me a hypocrite then that it your choice. You all are searching for some path.
I am 58, and I promise all of you, things will change for you dramatically once you do cross 50.
My financial situation has become most public. Divorce took me from a prosperous upper middle class suburbanite to my bottom some one year ago when I found this manosphere. Yes, you can go and find my ex-wife jumping up and down over money, and lack of my ability to pay. Economic forces, my age, and some of the actions I took under the cloud of depression in the first years after divorce caused jobs that I could get with a snap of a finger before 2001 to become few and far between. Interviews that were mere formalities before become inquisitions. And I aggravated my situation by trying to leave the country without guidance, to find how to do it own my own.
And also, unlike almost all of you I never hid behind a pen name, And I have paid the price for my participation. I have been ostracized by family and anyone that searched by name before, particularly any woman, immediately leaped to conclusions about me that preclude from any corporate job for the rest of my life.
Uh oh, he’s started monologuing.
After explaining at length why his impending marriage doesn’t in any way contradict his endless antimarriage rants — because he’s an old dude without many options and women (like his new internet girlfriend) prefer to be married — he suggests that this wonderful new relationship might not survive all these mean comments on the internet.
To be “Branded” like this, to have ensigns of rank ripped of my shoulders, to be drummed out like this, for marrying a manosphere woman, is going to be quite a shock. And frankly I don’t think the relationship will withstand so public a humiliation.
Really? Your relationship can’t take your online buddies actually knowing about it? It can’t withstand some douchebag on the internet that you used to think was super cool calling you a “phony?”
Maybe you shouldn’t have devoted the past year of your life to seeking validation from a bunch of hateful assholes.
Well, grumpycat, after you have experienced a trauma like rape, the only thing to do is go sit in the attic and wait to die, because after all you have now been ruined for life and your failure to protect your chastity has demonstrated that you are unworthy of any role in “decent” society.
I’m going to go look at cat videos for a while
You’re totally right, I apologize. I was thinking of David’s blanket trigger warning on the sidebar but it never hurts to add another one.
Chie – no need to apologize on my account. Just to be clear, I wasn’t chastising you for bringing it up. This stuff is just all over the news today and I’ve got to imagining it’s no fun for a whole lot of survivors to hear this spew-garbage.
imagine. Again, I type too fast.
Heh.
I know, I know. I, especially, shouldn’t be mocking anybody for difficulties with the English language.
But sometimes the fail is epic.
Yeah, I’ma just nopetopus right away from Ariel Castro horror today. I can handle trolls and MRA bullshit, but my rape tolerance is ungodly low at the moment.
RE: gillyrosebee
Well, grumpycat, after you have experienced a trauma like rape, the only thing to do is go sit in the attic and wait to die,
Only if you do, they’ll whine and say how you need to get over it already, JEEZ, it was so long ago anyway.
Sadly a not uncommon attitude. I can’t find a link, but I remember reading about a case where a judge commuted a rapist’s sentence on the strength of a Facebook photo showing the victim smiling at a party ~2 years after the rape, as obviously she couldn’t have been all that traumatised.
It’s a toxic combination of looking to excuse rape, and a belief that a “good” virginal woman must be ruined by such sexual contamination.
@Chie
He calls that an attempt to improve his image? =S
I added a trigger warning to that Ariel Castro statement in Chie’s comment.
I watched it earlier. Just appalling. And I’m sure his lawyers made him tone down what he really wanted to say, which I’m sure would have been even more appallingly self-pitying and narcissistic and victim-blaming.
He accepts zero responsibility for anything that he did. It’s their fault for accepting a ride from him. It’s the FBI’s fault for not catching him, etc.
And I can’t help but think back to one of David’s earlier posts where an MRA argued that women and our insistence to actually choose who we have sex with are to blame for “creating” him….because we only sleep with alphas, so “betas” like Castro are “forced” to rape.
Except, Castro was married. He had a girlfriend while he was torturing these young women. This case is toxic masculinity taken to the EXTREME. Women and children are literally not people to him. They are objects. I see definite parallels between the things he said at his hearing and things that we hear MRAs say.
Why is that guy puking his sexual guilt all over everyone else? Most men watch porn, statistically speaking, it’s not exactly an unusual habit.
*shudder* It’s awful, but I’m really glad the women got away. A poet I really enjoy actually wrote a poem for her “unlikely heroes” writeathon about the man who found the women and helped them escape.
I recently got married* (although for us, it was more of a “get official recognition for our relationship” thing than a “turning point in our lives” event), and for the time being we’ve just kept our names as-is.
The idea of her changing her last name to mine pretty much never crossed our minds. I did briefly toy with the idea of changing my last name to hers out of sheer feminist spite, but ultimately decided not to, on the grounds that spite probably isn’t the best reason to choose a name. We probably would have gone with a blended name if our names weren’t horribly unsuited for it — the Indian “Kapur” and the Swedish** “Peterson” don’t lend themselves that well to being combined. (Kapurterson?) Picking a brand new shared name is still a possibility in the future.
More than anything, though, we’re probably motivated by being lazy and not wanting to deal with the pain of handling a legal name change. Financial stuff, work emails, job applications, etc. We’ve both got perfectly good names, and we’re in no rush to change them.
* I’m a straight/cis man; she’s a straight/cis woman.
** Sort of. Long story.
I’m not even going to get involved in the Castro comments.
LBT: “Rogan Randy MacIntire-Lee, we decided it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. (If you don’t get it, try saying my full name aloud.)”
Thank the gods saying it aloud meant I couldn’t have a mouthful of cocoa at the time. My keyboard couldn’t have taken it.
Dvarghundspossen,
There is a story I read somewhere about a man changing his name to his wife’s because his name was some long unpronouncable Polish name and hers was “Smith” or something like that. But here in the US it takes a very progressive man to take his wife’s name. It rarely happens.
OT, but the Atheistsphere of the internet is blowing up with unreasonable skepticism at a Healthyaddict sharing her story of sexual assault at TAM. Well, not all atheists are being assholes, but some of them are. Livelife went off in a huff after being criticized for his assholish response. Bring the popcorn, folks!
OT, Argenti, did you see that you’d managed to drive Hugo Fucking Schwyzer off the internet? (at LAST, thank every god I don’t believe in)
Good work!
Since the Ariel Castro stuff is so potentially triggering, I thought it would be best to have a separate thread for it, so I just opened one up for that:
http://manboobz.com/2013/08/01/open-thread-for-discussion-of-ariel-castro-statement-sentencing-trigger-warning-for-whole-thread/
@gillyrosebee
Yeah, I’m with you on that. Honestly, I hope that it’s real, and that they have a long happy marriage together, and that that happiness will cause them to let go of their hatred and be decent human beings for a change. A long shot, but why stop dreaming.
@Howard
Dun worry, I’m just as bad. I saw
and laughed way too hard for such a simple mistake.
@Autolyus
Can I ask why? My take on the car is that it’s most likely the car of some dude who cheated on someone with another woman/women. I would think that it’s statistically more likely to have been done by a woman than a man.
I’ve never been fond of my first name/last name combination, so I didn’t mind changing (my husband’s last name is dark red while mine is more of a dim, muddled black/white/gray/yellow). If I liked my last name better, or if there had been a mellifluous portmanteau of our last names, I might have gone for those options.
Then again, maybe I’m just being one of those dreadfully conventional people who always claim that they have terribly good personal reasons why they just happen to go along with the traditional way of doing things but they would totally do something different if they felt like it.
MRAs talk funny. Isn’t the saying that if you can’t express your thoughts in proper English they might not be worth thinking? I guess their response would be that there has been an Orwellian feminist takeover of language so that they have to invent their own way of describing things(…), but it’s just so tiresome.
Jack White took his wife’s name. Prior to marrying Meg his last name was Gillis.
I get the same impression. Not because of anything to do with the relative perceived jealousness of men and women; just because the nature and wording of the vandalism strongly suggests that a man has cheated on someone with a woman, and that makes it a fairly safe bet that the cheatee is zirself a woman, numbers-wise.
Maybe it’s someone whose significant other said they’d dump them if they got a cat.
My wife opted to hyphenate, which was fine by me (as would either keeping her name, or taking mine, have been). Dvar, in popular media (particularly TV) in the U.S., it’s actually still considered a viable comedic trope to have someone refer to the husband of a powerful/famous woman as “Mr. X”, when X is only the woman’s last name–it’s meant to signify how emasculated he is by his wife’s status. Seriously.