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.
Apropos of nothing, what in name of all that is unholy is “the dark triad”?
Heather, not my cats! When I get home from work my cat Rio is practically beside herself. While I fuss around putting things away and changing, she follows me from room to room, hopping onto furniture to get to eye level and purring/meowing at high decibal. The other cat, Rabbit, flops himself on the floor, moving periodically to be more in the way of my path and stares at me. This happens every single day of my work days. I guess it just depends on the cats. Also, it’s not like they are alone all night…my daughter is there!
Off topic, but this is why I have to laugh when some people claim that animals don’t experience emotions or love their human companions. Lol!
Oh here’s Rabbit and Rio (fyi, I adopted them from the Humane Society as adult cats so I didn’t choose their names…I don’t know the reasons for them).
http://i.imgur.com/iOje54j.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Ee4igmt.jpg
I’ve had two cats now and they’ve both been velcro cats. Maybe the reason that dudebro is encountering so much feline hostility is that cats, quite sensibly, don’t like him.
(I’m guessing this is a trait that they share with most of the women he meets.)
marci, I love the way Rabbit’s lazing on the stairs! That’s a gorgeous pic.
Love Rio’s colouring, too.
I’ve had eleven kitties over the decades and they’ve varied enormously in clinginess. Thomas – nope, he’d butt heads and rub ankles, but cuddles and laps were out. Mads is much the same, though I’ve discovered she has a weakness for being held like a baby and cuddled that way. Fribs and Katie – see lap, will inhabit. Magnus and Mamie, ditto, though having Mags on the lap was risking Cat Anger Consequences if you looked at him the wrong way.
Could it possibly be that MRAs have no more clue about cats being individuals than they do about women?
I wonder if they try to neg cats.
LOL can you imagine the blank stares they’d get if they tried?
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/55/1c/03/551c03e329271fbb0118b9d43482be19.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VFYyRjHxjKw/T5HrgFBfJGI/AAAAAAAABZE/_mBh4h-T0e4/s1600/cat_not_care.jpg
It’s the indifference that makes them rage. Nothing pisses someone like that off more than the person/cat/whatever they’re babbling at just not giving a shit.
(Cats do “don’t give a shit” exceptionally well.)
Perhaps we should learn to yawn in their faces, the way kitties do.
I found the perfect tee for all this:
http://rlv.zcache.com/my_cat_doesnt_care_if_you_like_him_tee-rca1c7b52c12c42568516c334cb26b25a_8nhm6_324.jpg
Funny, my mum used to tell me when I was a teenager that men could tell they were boring me and I should probably learn to hide it in case it got me into trouble,
Hey… I really could have done with a lot fewer mocking comments about how if you have any issue with the title you’re dense and don’t get it and need flashing signs; I understand it’s sarcasm, I really do, but it still bugs me. Even sarcasm or mocking someone with a term they use only because they use it can still somewhat legitimize that term. I don’t think it’s a horrible crime, David isn’t a bad person, and I respect that the opposite position is legitimate too, it’s just a little thing that could have been discussed and got shut down by people with more force than I think was needed.
Sorry to drop a post like that and go but I’m going to be off the internet for a while (other reasons, not because of this) so if you reply to my overly serious post and I don’t respond I’m just gone, not ignoring 🙂
There are so many “cat doesn’t give a shit” pics (quell surprise).
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/careless_2335d3_928690.jpg
https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/6936500224/h8F9A3A0A/
http://2vga1o5mew51s6gu7x0mnk7kf.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/main/2013_08/mock-7.jpg
Honey badgers have nothing on cats.
Thanks kittehserf! Rabbit is such a poser, I have tons of photos like that. I don’t have as many of Rio because for some reason her eyes really catch the light and she almost looks demonic lol! Plus she just doesn’t pose nice the brat.
Women like cats because they embody the a dark triad?
What’s this dark triad?
Adorably fluffy (1), arrogantly scatterbrained(2), and codependent?(3)
(1) no explanation required, and I’m off to waste another hour on animal videos on youtube
(2) like when they fall off a windowsill but totally meant to do that. Or chase after imaginary ghosts and then stare at you like they’ve done you a favour by glaring at the dust motes, now would you please remove all the cat toys they just shoved under the couch so they can do it again?
(3) and follow you around helplessly meowing even though you just fed them an hour ago, they’re not starving… and why do they need to help with laundry or sit on your face when you’re watching TV?
It would be awfully weird living with a man like that.
Pavlov’s bell works on my cats. Best way to get them inside for the night is so bang on their food bowl. It didn’t take them very long at all to learn that it meant yummy food incoming.
Shayla, I’m fairly immune to sarcasm and many times my goof-ball brain takes things really literally. I get teased all the time about this tendency. People may have been just engaging in what they thought was good humored ribbing, my reading of this thread was that they were more talking about past posters on here who were oblivious to sarcasm too but became hostile because of it. Or that they were aware that it was sarcasm but were trying to argue that it wasn’t or something like that. Anyway, hopefully that helps.
@StarStorm
The name of my triangle collection.
… Also, a generally psychologically dubious term for a series of personality traits that, in a clinical setting, would be psycopathy, narcicism and machiavellism – ie, a lowkey emotions, inability to conceptualize of others as actors and a trend towards treating everyone as bricks in a real-politik game.
Googling The Dark Triad is hilarious. You get a mix of psychology related sites despairing over the apparent high percentage of people in modern society, what to do about it and with it, what it means and tips for living with or avoiding people who may have such a personality type (plus plenty that denigrate the idea as psuedo-scientific valorization of beastly archetypes + typical patriarchial thinking)
… and a whole bunch of MRA-red-pill sites that extol the virtues and go right on claiming it’s a brilliant thing, and here’s how to cultivate the mindset yourself.
I have one link that goes “The Personality of Evil” and another that goes right into
, from a site that’s quite clearly red pill with a fairly beautiful twitter feed on the right. (“Don’t trust bitches that love horses” or “Attempting to pacify a woman with reason is a futily nihilistic endeavour”)
These links are next to each other.
It’s a beautiful example of many of the subtle things that are wrong with red pillish thinking.
I didn’t link to either, because oh dear wow all the trigger warnings.
All of them.
ALL of them.
So basically what you’re saying is that the pro-dark triad sites are like Seven Habits/Artist’s Way/similar self-help crap, but for complete assholes?
Exactly
If you’re the kind of person whose line of thinking goes: “I am having trouble with my life – how do I turn into more of a psycopath, so I won’t feel neither guilt nor regret?” then, well, then I think fervent MRA’s have yet another prophet.
I actually found 7 habits useful, if you filtered out some stuff, and Artist Way was enjoyable.
… I may not be the best person to discuss self help books with.
(Although I do detect a rapidly growing market here.
Globe-trotting And Exploiting 101
Marketing Strategies for a Monster
Seven Habits of Highly Succesful Evil People
How To Be A Worse Person in Ten Easy Steps )
I’m kind of the anti-market for self-help books, but the worst that can happen from reading them is that you procrastinate and navel-gaze a lot. If people read self-help books for assholes then they become…well, I guess they become Matt Forney, and decide to pass the tradition on to others.
How To Give Your Soon-To-Be-Ex PTSD In 6 Weeks Or Less
And the sequel
It’s Not A Successful Relationship If She’s Not Crying
Oh, that’s beautifully evil.
999 Ways to Neg Someone
There’s also the updated versions – Negging, Fifth Edition, 250 New Veiled Insults About Hair (Foreword by some grump in a bar)
HTML Site Design for People With No Graphic Design Taste: Blacker Than Black and Red Is The New Orange
Writing That Rape-Manual Domination Power Fantasy Novel You Have Inside You
Hypergamy, Illustrated – It’s a book with a mirror inside…
Whoa whoa, the person who introduced Straughan was Justin Trottier? Founder and former president of Centre for Inquiry, Canada?
This could help explain the sexism problem in skepticism…
I admit, for a moment I had the same thoughts as breakfastman about the title of this post (was the irony clear enough? Would trolls try to claim that we can’t object to the term because we use it too? Is ironic anti-feminism different from hipster sexism?). Apparently this makes me unintelligent, tiresome, and in need of hand-holding (even though David admits he had to think about it). I’m suddenly very glad I kept my thoughts to myself.
I mean, seriously? That’s what you’re getting from this conversation?