So FeMRA videoblogger Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan flapped her gums for nearly two hours the other night and sounds came out. This time she wasn’t sitting at her kitchen table blabbing to a webcam about female “hypoagency” and regurgitating misremembered factoids about bonobos but was speaking to an audience of mostly white dudes at Ryerson University in Toronto Canada.
I haven’t watched her performance — which is of course online as well — because life is short, and frankly I’d rather endure this for ten hours than subject myself to the tedious GWW for nearly two.
But I did take a look at a thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit started by a dude who hoped he and his fellow MRAs could have “a proper discussion about the talk, pros and cons, without descending into a circlejerk or a downvote party.” That’s right: he actually wanted GWW’s biggest fanboys to discuss her ideas (such as they are) on their merits.
This did not go over very well with the regulars, who jumped up to defend their favorite damsel in distress. ManUpManDown argued against the very notion of criticizing GWW, on the grounds of 1) her being supercool and 2) giving talks is hard:
Huh. But by NOT offering any criticism, aren’t you in fact treating her not as a writer or activist or, god forbid, a thinker, but precisely as a mascot?
Still, a few brave MRAs did bring up substantive critiques of her talk. For example, both 2095conash and memetherapy noted that she probably said “Right?” too often. Bluecharge, while proud of her performance, noted with brutal honesty that her “way of wrapping up points by saying ‘so there you go’ was a bit trite.”
So there you go.
Oh, I forgot to mention one dumb criticism some dumb guy made. GWW apparently suggested that if all the men in the world took three days off it would take three years to recover from the disaster that would ensue.
Essemd implied that this was a bit alarmist, arguing that if you gradually replaced men in the workforce with women — over the course of many years — it wouldn’t be the end of the world, because women could do these “men’s jobs” too. “[S]aying either gender is required because this and this job is mainly occupied by men or women is just false,” Essemd concluded.
Luckily there were a few real MRAs around to teach this fella a thing or two. Like Rikevo, who offered the powerful rebuttal that women can’t do shit:
Right?
And xNOM had a little list:
So there you go.
NOTE: I actually had that loop of “What is Love” on during most of the writing of this post. Hey, it’s a catchy song.
And totally off-topic: Shorter Emily Yoffe: “Your anti-rape campaign is nice and all, but I still think we should focus on blaming the victim here”.
@troll
Ah, you mean the same thing that also helps male rape victims by encouraging them to report their rapes to the police? I didn’t know you were such a man-hater.
Troll – is it Good?
@mejas
“nice guys”. “females”. No difference there. I, for one, truly think mejas is a shining example of not-being-a-massive-misogynist. /sarcasm.
@not a muse
Hi and welcome :3
@cloudiah
Do feeemmaaalllesss get used up when they have sex with other feeemmmaaallless? Cuz I’m willing to try to find out. You know, for science 😉
@LBT
Do trolls ever realize trans people exist? How can we answer Important Scientific Questions such as these without more input from our trolls?
Oh dang there’s a maria here and I”m a marie and this will get confusing! DO NOT TARNISH MY GLORIOUS NAME, MARIA!
/sugar rush.
@mejas
I”m not sure what mejas said, but it’s really funny to me atm and I have no clue why. Maybe it was the tut tut.
@thissitesucks
Don’t worry, thissitesucks. You don’t need to be here. Turn away. Utilize the back key! THERE IS HOPE, YOUNG COMMENTER!
I’m going to post before wordpress eats me. Hi everyone :3 I had a great day, which may be fueling my hyper-itude.
Glad you had a great day, Marie!
I’m glad you had a good day, Marie.
Speaking of which, I got a hand-written thank-you note from a client today. I can count on one hand how often that’s happened.
ABNOY? Well, I can’t be the only one who missed his wacky antics (not really.)
Seriously though, I did used to laugh at Abnoy’s posts – not because they were funny. Exposing your erect penis to children (why is it erect around children) isn’t funny. It’s fucking gross – but because his behaviour and defense of that behaviour was just so…. absurd. My brain didn’t know how to respond to it. Nervous laughter ensued.
@Jenna McAdams
Try harder. Also, if daddy govt will give me anything I want, why the fuck is it making stricter laws about abortion? Why can I get fired for being gay in the state I’m in?
I’ll ask you more once you actually respond to these, but I don’t think you will. Trolls never back up their shit.
@kittehs
But chess is so much more fun than yahtzee!
XD I can’t tell if ppl are being funnier in this thread than usual, or my mood is just off from happies. either way is good, 😀
@david
Gosh, curse your parents, ruining your carefully planned cover!
@cloudiah
Your secret dies with me! And the other howmanycommenters on this site…
@david
Eh, I’ll say pell. That’s my bet :3
@serrana
Great, now I’m hungry :p (I love chili peppers)
brb, dinner having.
From the appalling Emily Yoffe article:
Translation: Drinking excessively is more important than encouraging others to stop rapists in their tracks.
I wish people would stop conflating the problems.
Raping people – criminal, horrible problem.
Drinking to excess – can lead to criminal stuff and can be dangerous because of what the drinker does. What other people do to the drinker is a separate problem.
If you’re going to argue that women shouldn’t get drunk because it makes it harder to defend ourselves from rape*, shouldn’t you logically also argue that we should all get extensive martial arts training and be issued guns and taught to use them at puberty? I mean, if not being raped is all on us rather than having anything to do with how rapists act, it’s only logical.
*Don’t actually argue this.
Not to mention that nobody (to my knowledge) argues that men shouldn’t get drunk because they might get raped or otherwise assaulted. No, it’s all about not getting drunk because you might drink and drive and kill someone, or king-hit another guy and kill him (no mention is made of “get drunk and go home and attack your SO” even though there’s far more violence of that sort than the one-punch murders in the spotlight here).
I know, right???
I mean, it was bad enough that she wrote an article a few months ago amounting to “how come people get mad when we blame the victim? After all, it’s totally the victim’s fault, right?”, but now she is actively trying to take attention away from positive, proven rape-prevention techniques in order to promote her obsession with victim-blaming.
Prudie, indeed.
@kittehs
O_o Put on some clothes! XD
deniseeliza
Euurggh. ::eyetwitch::
@cloudiah (and hellkell but I’m quoting cloudiah)
aww, thanks :3
@marinerachel
Dang, I thought that was NWO. Or is it a common troll thing?
@Ally
Yeah :/ With a bonus side dish of ‘if you drink excessively you deserve to get raped.’ Bleagh.
@deniseeliza
Wow, she sounds really terrible :/
Not until the weather really cools down! 😛
I thought the exposing himself (or at least getting an erection) around little kids was NWO too. I know he had a really skeevy session about that, it even made it into A Voice for Pierre.
Abnoy was all like Argenti said upthread, bragging about how low the age of consent is in the Philippines and how he’d had sex with child prostitutes.
Wow! I missed all the quality trolls today.
How can you tell when a vagina is used up? Will a bell sound? Or maybe a buzzer noise? Does the used up vagina send a message to the man’s iphone so Siri can tell him?
Seriously though, is it supposed to be a bad thing that nice guys (not Nice Guys) don’t have a creepy virgin fetish? Do the guys who have virgin fetishes not realize that the older they get the less chance there is an 18 year virgin will want them?
Why is it so hard to learn that the appropriate term for an adult female of the species homo sapiens sapiens is woman?
@kittehs
well, I can’t argue with you there XD I’d love hot weather, here in US it’s winter. 😛
Excellent, pithy summary. Also, I wish I wanted to be in a band so I could claim “unpopular penes” as our name.
@thissitesucks, fuck you and your antisemitic bullshit. I’m used to one-world-government tinhats, and usually I find you hilarious (to the point that I often cruise places like Infowars for a laugh). I would ordinarily love, for instance, to know why you think a more or less unknown website would be affiliated with The Man – unless you think Feminism is The Man. That would indeed be hilarious. But when you assholes bust out your racism you cease to be funny, so instead of enjoying poking you to see what other delicious conspiracy nuggets fall out, I’mma have to ask you to go fuck yourself.
Yeah, he was a big fan of “it’s legal in my country” and strongly hinting that he’d taken advantage of that fact. Super gross. So glad he was kicked back out.
I always got him mixed up with the other otaku troll who was obsessed with tweenagers, the one who wanked extensively here about how awesome it was to manipulate homeless women into sex in exchange for food/shelter.
You can have ALL ours! 😀
Ditto. He more than hinted, he was pretty open about it. Whether he had or was just telling tales to wind us up, I’ve no idea. Either way, he’s a disgusting piece of scum.
cassandra – ewww, that one must have been before my time (or else my memory’s expunged him). I recall David had a post about that, but not a troll.
Can’t remember that one’s nym, but he was trolling here off and on for a while.
Also loving how there are somehow no non-Jews named David. ‘Cause it’s not like there are literally two billion other people in the world using the same holy book.
Who was Maria? Hmm, I’m gonna go with Sticky, just for novelty’s sake. I’m probably wrong, but if I’m right, you’ll all be really impressed 😀
It’s like they’ve never seen us go to town on JudgyBitch or Driver Suz.
Trying the “I’m a woman so you have to agree” tactic on a post created to criticize a woman is especially funny.