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’m glad to know I’m not the only one who gets sick of hearing shock-whores who go into a fit because you didn’t find their “edgy” stuff amusing. Just because someone says they thought it was offensive, doesn’t mean they want to take away your right to free speech, too stupid to get it or are meanie PC-Nazis.
*Waves to Nick86*
Hullo!
The “rebuttal” is a soup sandwich. It starts with a misrepresntational conflation of privilege and class, and goes downhill (admitting to a tu quoque, claiming lots of MRA are non-heteronormative, non The bit about Mary… incoherent. It’s a non-sequitor.
Do Catholics, “elevate her about her place in Scripture”? Maybe, but he’s begging the question. In the statement he implies there is a some orthodox “level” for Mary. It ain’t so. What is in the Gospels (and Acts) is an obvious level of respect for Mary on the part of both Jesus and the Apostles.
If Catholic Tradition keeps that she had a greater role than the text can be used to “prove” then so be it. Talmud has lots of that too. Since the texts are imperfect (and incomplete, and chosen from a larger body held to be apocryphal) his imputation of some absolute role for Mary (or anyone) in them, is to arrogate himself to a position more authoritative then the Pope (who at least has some internally consistent arguments for how he might be infallible on some matters, in some circumstances).
This yahoo is a moron.
Argenti: Did that meet your needs?
Perfectly my dear, can I interest you in a pepperidge farms captiva before I eat the whole package?
I’ll pass on any soup sandwiches though, I do live with two of them after all!
If I can add to pecunium’s bit on the role of Mary in Catholic tradition, it’s definitely a thing that a lot of non-Catholics see Catholicism as idolatrous in the veneration of saints (including the veneration of Mary, who is probably the most-venerated of all saints, what with her being the Mother of God and also without sin and one of the few people who was corporeally transported to heaven instead of going solely in spirit after death), which is seen as worshiping entities other than God/the Holy Trinity, whereas Catholics differentiate between worship and veneration, the latter being more like asking someone super-holy to pray for you also (kind of like a super-powered prayer group).
But it’s a pretty misogynistic thing to complain about the veneration of Mary and leave out whining about the veneration of all the other saints, too, imho.
[/deste’s unasked for commentary]
we can leave the gendered slurs out…
See, the thing with Madonna is that we’re living in a material world, right? And she is a material girl. Plus she has more record sales than Jesus.
I only get that with Tzimisce… ‘swhy I generally prefer games like Deus Ex where wholesale slaughter is only one option – the other main option being no slaughter at all, with a handy gradient between the two. That’s one of the things that really disappointed me about the last Splinter Cell game – there was no non-lethal method of dealing with people other than just avoiding them.
Has anyone else noticed that the people who no longer take feminism seriously always tend to have no understanding of feminism? It’s almost as if they never even took it seriously enough to find out what it was. Funny how that works.
Suuuuuuuuuure you do.
(Sorry, I’m pretty much in love with that game.)
Hope I didn’t sound like a jerk in the process of making that in-joke. >_<
@Feminist Bees I’d be interested in reading that, got a link?
Podcasts are wonderful so long as you have a job that requires a lot of action and not writing. Like if you paint, make things, clean, cook, do construction, work out, drive a lot, etc. I rarely just sit there and listen, I’m almost always doing something else that I would otherwise have music on during.
Oh my god, that actually was a really good joke by Dane Cook. I didn’t know he still had good jokes.
@freemage The joke you were talking about was already brought up but this is another good one
(albeist language fyi)
@auggziliary I think AHX was a great movie that was unfortunately misinterpreted by a lot of racist pieces of shit. My douchebag little brother who is the actual cause of crime in our community, along with his other white friends, are apparently super racist and constantly throw out this idea that black people are criminals. I’m like YOU STEAL FROM YOUR OWN MOTHER WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO TALK LIKE THAT? Anyways, one day when I was creeping his friend’s fb profiles just to see what the kids were all about, I saw that one of them used the still with Edward Furlong blowing smoke into the other kid’s face, and the kid captioned it with something about not mixing races. I was appalled of course, but then laughed because some friend of his wrote below, “Uhhh, I don’t think you understood the point of that movie.” My brother and his friends are constantly getting dogged by people on their fb’s and they don’t understand why. It’s sad but amusing at the same time.
FYI, The director of American History X did a doc on abortion which was pretty graphic and was technically supposed to be unbiased, but it seemed clear that he was pro-choice IMO. The only people he really interviewed for the pro-life side were over the top, religious zealots, whereas he interviewed well respected philosophers for the pro-choice side. I’m not trying to excuse the pro-life side, but I know plenty of pro-lifers who are at least somewhat moderate and rational sounding, even if their arguments aren’t sound. It was pretty interesting overall but tough to watch in some spots.
(tw: graphic imagery, a photo of a man who was shot)
Oh gods pro-life ARGH! Long story short my mother’s boss said something about “D and E”, to which I went “tell me that in this context that doesn’t mean what I think it does” (diagnostic and estimate), she goes “huh?”, I say like a D&C but extraction and SUDDENLY IT’S ALL PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION!
Like, I might as well have been banging my head on a wall trying to explain that you cannot get an abortion because you want one when 8 months pregnant. That is not a thing that is legal. And then it was all how you’re already delivering the kid why not just do it? And I try explaining how the skull is the hardest part to get out, which she should know as (slightly graphic) she had forceps shoved inside her to get mine unstuck. Side track to how she was sore for weeks, I decide not to press my luck because HOLY SHIT YOU CAN NOT GET A “PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION” CUZ YOU’RE SICK OF BEING PREGNANT WHEN NEARLY AT TERM!!
/screaming fit
Athywren — Tzimisce *hisses* You have to be somewhat human to reason with, and they are not.
…I think I did manage to get across that the idea that it’s “a perfectly viable baby” is Very Fucking Often not the case and why a late term abortion is being performed. At best she’ll just change her wording though, it’ sure less.
FUCK YOU AUTOCORRECT!!
That should be “it’s useless”…which I typed perfectly before it changed to THAT! The fuck is this shit?
Speaking of not being able to get a boner, has David or anyone here run into this gem yet? It was just posted on a feminist network I follow:
http://mattforney.com/2013/09/16/the-case-against-female-self-esteem/
Here’s a highlight (TRIGGER WARNING): “Insecurity is the natural state of woman. How could it be anything else? Given their lack of physical strength, a woman on her own should be frightened as hell without men to protect her. If society were to collapse, all the Strong, Independent Women™ who read Jezebel and xoJane would last about five minutes before they either found a man to cling onto or got raped and killed. In the bellum omnium contra omnes that is mankind’s default existence, a woman who is alone is a woman who is already dead.
One of the most commonly repeated tropes of feminists and manboobs goes something like this:
“You should be happy that women nowadays are independent, because it means that they’re with you because they WANT to be with you, not because they’re dependent on you.”
This is a fundamental violation of the relationship between men and women. Part of our identity as men based in women needing us, if not necessarily in a material sense, then in an emotional one, though material and emotional vulnerability often go hand in hand. That female insecurity is a crucial ingredient for unlocking our inner masculine instincts. If a girl needs me, feels that her life would end if she were to lose me, I’m doubly inspired to be there for her, to shield her from the cruelty of the world. Frankly, it’s pretty hot. If she just wants me, could take me or leave me, my gut response is one of apathy. “Yeah, whatever babe.”
Confidence doesn’t give men erections; vulnerability does.”
Matt Forney can go fuck himself.
This dipshit screams about feminists demonizing male sexuality and then calls men naturally bellicose and rapey. Ok…
Dude, the fuck? Not financially dependent on you, and not caring whether you go or stay are worlds apart. Obvious thing is obvious — she doesn’t have to need your paycheck to need // want your companionship, sexytimes, and, you know, everything else that goes with a relationship.
Oh, I know. Admitting that “counts” would mean that his desire for her company means he’s vulnerable and we can’t have that!
(“Can’t have” =/= “can’ that’ve”…fuck you autocorrect)
Matt Forney is desperate for attention, and trying to provoke. But I am planning to write about that awful post.
Such a jerk I spill my drink!
Skin crawling as the whole article is, the part that made me feel ill is the part where he talks about how he dated a girl who was fat in highschool, lost 40 lbs, but was hot because she “still saw the world through the eyes of a fat girl”.
Hopefully it was just lemon-lime soda.
All right, I’ll stop. >_>
Now, I’m not Captain Testosteronepants over here or anything, but, speaking as a male-bodied human who has had relationships with female-bodied humans… this guy’s full of shit. That’s not a relationship he’s talking about, it’s a power trip. If you’re wanted, then chances are you’ll be on relatively even footing, but if you’re needed, then you have all the power. It’s a bit squicky if you ask me.
And, yet again, I feel the need to remind these people that they do not speak for me. Especially not on the causes of erections.
How about a cool breeze? Sunshine?
Now, what I’ve always wanted to not be pondering is when Owly’s genitals were exposed to sunshine. I’m gonna assume bedroom window here cuz EWW.
>.<
That was a Book of Learnin' joke about the causes of erections. I fail at context.