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So over on A Voice for Men, young Jason Gregory seems faintly jealous that young women who put up dating profiles online tend to get flooded with messages — and the occasional dick pic — from horny guys.
F]ree cock is everywhere. Men give it away like it’s worthless. … I doubt that it is unusual at all for a woman to get 300 messages in her inbox from men who are desperate for female affection, approval, and sex. There is no doubt in my mind that men send “dick-pics” and clamor, bother, and sometimes harass women for their affections and attentions.
But Jason feels no sympathy for young women who put up profiles hoping to meet some nice young fellow who’s also into Sherlock and Neil Gaiman and Indian food and instead get messages from guys who introduce themselves by expressing a desire to ejaculate in their hair.
No, Jason is angry because he’s convinced all these offers of “free cock” only serve to make the women of the world into snooty-stuck stuck-up so-and-sos who think they’re all that and a folder full of dick pics.
All you men who give it away, all you do is reinforce the entitlement mentality of women who believe that their being present is plenty. You reinforce the idea that women don’t owe anything to the relationship—that they deserve a free-ride of cocks and that they don’t even have to break a sweat.
Jason, I should add, means this last bit literally. He’s resentful that when he allegedly engages in the act of coitus he has to do all the work while his alleged partners allegedly lie there like inflatable love-dolls.
Anyhoo,.Jason has a plan to take these stuck-up ladies down a peg or two: A cock strike.
Yep, he wants men to start saying “no” to women who are interested in them, just to see how they like it. But he doesn’t want them to just say no. He wants them to be giant dicks about it.
Try telling a girl no. Tell her, after she makes it clear that she wants your cock, that you’re not interested in giving it to her. Tell her that she isn’t interesting, that her soul is dog-shit and that she has nothing to offer other than boobs and booty, that she is a piece of shit and a total failure as a human being, that you don’t find her attractive and that she isn’t even good enough to be a cum-bucket. Tell her that she is never going to be any good at sucking cock and that she needs to stop pretending that she is doing any favors and learn to compensate for her inadequacies by becoming “kinky.” Tell her that her vapid life of shoes and pop-culture and materialism are soulless pursuits of dog-shit. Watch what happens. If you Jez-ladies wanna know what “hostile” means, see this rejected woman.
Emphasis mine.
A Voice for Men, you may recall, sees itself as leading the most important civil rights movement of the 21st century. I am sure Jason Gregory’s post here will be remembered alongside Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail as a classic in civil rights literature.
EDIT: I added a couple more “allegedlys” to a sentence I thought needed them.
Well, at least the clicky link works :/
Man, puppeteering those yip yip aliens must have been fun.
Sexual harassment started at school and on the school bus for me. It’s been waiting for me at work, among “friends” etc. Now, I get to watch my daughter deal with it. When asshats say “You feminists are just angry”, I think,”No, not “just” angry. I’m alot of things, (often primarily amused) but angry is certainly one of them”. I also feel hopeful, happy, encouraged, and deserving of better. Sites like this keep that hope flowing in by the bucket full and I’m grateful to David and all of the commenters here for that.
Please accept this gif of a baby otter as a token of my gratitude.
http://31.media.tumblr.com/5603a28f68c1af90d529a80e7d314e29/tumblr_mul2km3m9j1s3abbdo2_500.gif
Welp, I just received my first weird message on OKC:
Ok then.
Skye: You got it pretty accurate, at least as far as your assessment of my original post. Especially this bit:
That’s why I immediately followed up with the bit about Jason being the Sheriff of Shithead County–it struck me as a suitable alternative to the point JoJo was trying (in good faith, I still believe) to convey.
Snorkmaiden: As others have noted, the sharper remarks from folks on the thread came after JoJo declared the site to be nothing but a bunch of evil bullies and flounced off. If JoJo is going to be continually insisting on using terms that a significant portion of the site finds objectionable, then JoJo is probably never going to feel totally welcome here. That choice is entirely JoJo’s to make. Hell, it doesn’t even make JoJo an awful person–just someone who clashes with the local sentiment on some issues.
TW: I’ve used a few slurs as examples.
This. You know what other words people used to freely use “innocuously” because they didn’t think about it? Retard. Faggot. Gay. I won’t even go into the racial terms.
Language isn’t innocuous. It is used to put people in their place, and it is used to hurt. And taking two seconds out of your day to think about the context of certain phrases and terms, and how those phrases and terms have historically been used to hurt people is not difficult.
Snorkmaiden: What JoJo did was to get a correction on social norms in a group, and get angry about it, and say that any attempt to have social norms with which JoJo doesn’t agree is tryrany.
That’s not acceptable. Are there norms of language here which are different to the language I use at home, or at work, or in casual conversation at conventions, or bars, or hanging out with my Army buddies?
Yep. And vice versa.
Which is as it should be. If I were to start talking about Baby-killers, and morally bankrupt slaves of the military industrial complex at the VFW, they’d ask me to shut it.
If I said, “It’s not fair to make me curb my speech, just because it offends those who don’t like that they are being tarred with the brush of the baby-killers in the world,” I’d expect them to have a stronger reaction.
Which is what JoJo did, and what we did. It’s not bullying to tell someone they are engaging in behavior outside the group norms. It’s still not bullying to tell someone who responds to that with, “fuck you, I’ll do what I want’ that they can take that crap and shove it.
NOr does using a dismissive phrase such as, “gets the vapors” (which has misogynistic overtones, all by itself) help the case you are making.
re the, “can I join in”. I’ve had occasions where women asked if they could join my partner and myself. This isn’t because I was some stellar Alpha dude with great looks.
A lot of it was because my partner was an amazing person, and we had a strong relationship which was fairly obvious. Only once (TMI warning) did someone abuse it, in that said person was only interested in my partner; which would have been fine, but they didn’t mention that until much later.(end TMI.
So it does happen, but it’s not rampant, and probably requires the sort of settings we were in (where the poly/open nature of the relationship was known, and our interaction was visible). It never happened outside those circles, and the only cases of such I know of are in such circles.
auggz: What? You don’t believe him any more than I do?
Because he’s already ignored several requests for that information.
@ Ally
Are you responding to any? What kinds of reactions are you getting?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Factoid: I think OKC (or POF, or one of those free ones) is where my sister met her bf. They’ve been dating for 3 years now. My sister has some horror stories though, whoo boy. She was just about to quit it before she met bf. Online dating; It’s like looking for a gold nugget a midst a sea of turd nuggets.
@David, no, I didn’t respond to any of the messages. So yes, I’ll grant that it wasn’t really a replication of the fake reddit story. But considering crude messages made up about 5-10% of all the messages I got- the rest being perfectly friendly- I still feel justified in being skeptical.
I also think it says something about the journalistic standards of the feminist community, that everyone from Jezebel to Pandagon have been gleefully pointing to this fake story as “proof” that women are deluged with sexual harassment on OKCupid.
I love that in this very thread people have posted studies demonstrating how women are sexually harassed online, but in spite of the fact that he has no evidence that the story is not true AND that the story conforms both to those studies and to many people’s anecdotal experience buttboy69 thinks he has somehow proven the story is fake.
Because if you don’t believe in something really really hard that makes it untrue!
This has been today’s lesson in magical thinking.
buttboy watch those “perfectly friendly” messages turn terrifyingly scary when you tell them you are interested.
aren’t*
And that’s why your position is silly and baseless.
That kind of mistake is not unique to feminists. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard anti-feminists whine about how the Duke lacrosse rape case is proof that women lie about rape all the time. And honestly, I think it says something about the Manosphere’s journalistic standards that figures like Christina Hoff Sommers, Karen Straughan, Warren Farrell, Paul Elam, and Erin Prizzey are widely celebrated as intelligent and intellectually honest.
Besides, pointing out this instance of harassment wasn’t useless. It served to show how bad online harassment on OKC can be.
Because, of course, the lived experiences of women isn’t “proof” enough.
Bingo. And I notice he’s had not a word to say to MY lived experience of not even using dating sites because I already get harassed “for free”, so to speak.
But then, my twenty-odd years of regular Internet use don’t count for shit, I guess.
Monster, thanks for the dating suggestions.
A followup to my question if it’s not too derailing or anything (feel free to ignore me if it is) – does anyone here have experience with “singles activities” kinds of clubs? I heard a lot of radio advertising about Events&Adventures, for example, and thought about it but then I read a bunch of online reviews about how scammy it is.
skye, that was an excellent post, thank you.
Right? Whenever I saw that post linked it wasn’t with a tone of “omg proof!” it was “nooo shit sherlock” because women already knew this from the experiences of themselves or from other women. Notice too how up to 10% of messages coming your way being creepy garbage is no biggie, of course. Enjoy it, females! That’s the price you pay for existing, or something!
grumpycatisagirl: I did a little googling on E&A, and yeah, it sounds like you have to really fit a small niche to be happy with the service (young, wealthy, athletic), and if you’re not happy with it, it’s almost impossible to get rid of the membership without paying them off.
A better route might be to find a club/group that does things you like to do anyway, then just go and have fun. If you meet someone along the way, lovely, but even if you didn’t, you may make friends and enjoy a hobby you like, both good things in their own rights. In a similar vein, volunteer groups and activist groups that support causes you believe in are a good way to be generically social–and the broader that side of your life is, generally the better you’ll do at running into people you might find interesting.
I’m a regular reader of Pandagon, and I’d like to say that this is a complete and utter lie. Here is what Amanda Marcotte actually wrote about this story:
For what it’s worth (which probably isn’t much), I don’t get harassed on or offline. I don’t know if its because of how I look (fat, no makeup, no trendy or expensive clothes) or where I live (Portland) but yeah it’s just not a thing that happens to me, even on OKC.
But then again, I also am a big homebody so I don’t get out much in meatspace, and I never, never, ever respond to a message online from someone I am not interested in. Not even their chats.
So the worst I get is the occasional “sup” or “how are you” that goes ignored, and every now and again someone sends it several times.
However, I’m not going to run around and say that women who do report these experiences are all lying. I am actually an individual, so things that I experience may not be the same as what other people experience. I know that I am significantly shyer and more introverted than the norm, and I think people can feel that about me.
People shouldn’t have to be total loner types in order to avoid harassment!
deniseeliza – seconding that, and what katz said upthread. I’m in that lucky minority of not having had much harassment over the years, too. Even rarer is that the two serious incidents – one in high school and one in my first year of work – were dealt with immediately when I reported them to my teacher/manager respectively. Dealt with as in the harassment was stopped on the spot. And this during the seventies and eighties!
It’s a few years since some dipshit tried to chat me up in public – planting himself next to me on the train, ugh. “I’m going to meet my boyfriend” didn’t work (this was before Mr K and I were married) so I changed carriages. “I just want to be friendly!” he protested. “I’m not interested in talking,” I said, and left. Fortunately he didn’t follow me. Maybe he did just want to chat, but he was being personal and ignored Every Fucking Message. That killed his chances of a chat right there – and I do chat with people on the train often enough.
These days I have my walking stick, which may or may not read as “old” to jackasses. Hopefully it does read as “this has more uses than easing my knee”. 😉
No, asshole, we’ve been posting our own stories as “proof” for years, and men refused to believe us. People are sharing that story because assholes like you are more likely to listen to men.