So a helpful Twitterer told me that I was a frequent topic of conversation on A Voice for Men’s Honey Badger “radio” show last night — that’s the one hosted by Karen Straughan (Girl Writes What) and Alison Tieman (Typhon Blue) and a newer addition to AVFM’s FeMRA stable named Della Burton. Bored, I went over to take a listen to the archived show. Well, bits and pieces of it, anyway. Life is short, and every minute of this show felt about an hour long.
Anyway, I missed most of whatever it was they said about me, but I did manage to force myself to sit through a good chunk of the segment featuring none other than Nick Reading, the guy who’s running a joke campaign for city council of Edmonton Alberta as the “Patriarchy Party” candidate. You know, the dude we talked about just yesterday.
The gals did their best to play along with his over-the-top patriarchal schtick, proclaiming themselves submissive inferior females unworthy of his manly phallus, and so on. It was as gratingly unfunny as you might imagine, and it went on and on. Even the Honey Badgers, perhaps wondering if this whole segment wasn’t a rather apt metaphor for their own role within A Voice for Men and the Men’s Rights movement at large, couldn’t quite bring themselves to laugh at any of Nick’s, er, humor.
At least not until, about 49 minutes into the show, he brought out the rape jokes.
Take a listen:
Paul “The Thought of Fucking Your Shit Up Gives Me an Erection” Elam, meet Nick “If They Didn’t Scream No, How Else Would I Get an Erection” Reading.
In case you weren’t able to make all that out, due to the clear-as-mud sound engineering job of AVFM’s James Huff — you may remember him as the guy responsible for this amazing rant — I have transcribed the exchange below as best I could, cutting out a few repeated phrases and ignoring some remarks that got buried under other remarks.
Nick Reading: No never means no. It only means yes. That’s an understanding that we have within the patriarchy.
Karen Straughan: It is.
Alison Tieman: That’s true. Actually “no” should be stricken from the English language because it simply makes no sense. How could any woman ever say no to the holy phallus unless she was criminally insane?
Nick: Criminally insane, yes.
Della Burton [?]: Criminally, yes.
Karen: But, but we shouldn’t strike “no” from all the dictionaries and the lexicons of language simply because there are numerous times in the course of a day when a man loves to say “no” to a woman.
Nick: I would almost insist on striking it from the non-male vernacular but if they didn’t scream it, how else would I get an erection?
[Awkward pause]
[Laughter]
Della [?]: Oh my goodness.
Karen: Right, you’re right.
Della: I hadn’t even thought of that.
Karen: So no is still in.
A Voice for Men: Promoting Human Rights, One Rape Joke at a Time
EDITED TO ADD: Below, a video on YouTube about this episode of Honey Badger radio, which not only looks at the show itself but at what was going on in the official chatroom for the show at the time, which turns out to be even creepier than the stuff said by Nick Reading on the show itself.
Along with the standard MRA misogyny from some of AVFM’s regulars, there were bizarre sexualized comments directed at the so-called Honey Badgers themselves: one commenter went on at length about how he wanted to use Karen Straughan’s breast milk in his coffee (and spike her coffee with his semen). Palani provides screenshots and everything. Some of her commentary is a bit problematic — she refers to them as “retards” at one point — but if you’ve got 15 minutes it’s worth a watch.
[VIDEO REMOVED BY REQUEST OF VIDEOMAKER]
I second sittiekittie here. And can we all just let this drop?
Fuck being a minion, if we’re doing this I want my own minions.
They’d be sub-minions. We are all minions of the Furrinati, after all.
But I’m not reasonable! I’m i and therefore irrational!
And I know how to make this go sideways…
Therefor or therefore?
The blockquote monster ate itself! O_O
I’ll be therefor you if you spell therefore properly. 😛
Spellcheck accepts either, and the dictionary is listing therefor as an archaic form of therefore. So I guess it’s therefore and used to be therefor and this actually is nothing like what you call multiple eight legged sea creatures!
The thereforpus!
Oh noes!
(Real definition of thereforpus: a bowl of cat food.)
It does make one imagine that we’re all like this:
When in reality we’re all like this:
Also my lap.
Also the rest of me.
What just happened? O_o I come and suddenly the thread’s all exploded and what?
Thereforpus — my door is open, thereforpus.
To the point my mother was trying to wrangle the cat into her room to go to bed, popped in here to say the cat was at the top of the stairs looking around, I say to just take a step in here and eave the door open. She looks at me like I’ve totally lost it, I tell her to just do it and not 30 seconds later thereforpus is in my door being directed across the hall.
She’s a cat, she’s not allowed in here (puff’s tank is on the 55g stand, he’s at cat eye level), thereforpus is most interested in my room and will ALWAYS attempt to get in here if the door is remotely open.
I cat, therefore I puss.
Just everything, really.
Ok, I’ll withhold my comment, for the nonce.
The humor: that’s how feminists see men, so why not own it, create a caricature and sit back laughing why all the feminists heads pop because they honestly believe “Oh my god, they mean it!”
But, like Inception, it goes even deeper: because the joke is in the same vein as the “ironic” humor responsible for the “Male Tears” mugs. Thusly: if feminists find the suffering of men funny, and we all *know* feminists are all for equality, then surely they’ll find this “ironic” misogyny equally hilarious.
Consequently, the humor comes not from rape but from the delightfully meta-awareness that feminists will react with their trademark seriousness. They’ll get offended… all while drinking from their cups full of male tears, utterly missing the contradiction.
Off topic: I’ve been thinking of getting a mug marked “Patriarchy Party: lifetime member since birth,” you know, seeing as I’m male and have no choice in the matter. Would feminists find that funny? I could even mope my own tears into it as a way of working off “my privilege.”
But hell, what do I know? A feminist friend once told me that my very name was sexist: Patrick. Figured I’d own that too.
I suppose I better get started on working off that privilege! (The missus is behind me holding a whip)