Man Boobz is now We Hunted the Mammoth.
Don’t worry: nothing you knew and/or loved about the old Man Boobz, except the name, is going away. The blog will continue on much as it has. The old comments won’t vanish, and you won’t have to sign up again to post new ones. Your old links to manboobz.com should still work fine. (The new URL may take a little while to make its way around the world; let me know in the comments if you have trouble accessing the site.)
It’s just that, well, I got tired of the old name. I came up with it on the spur of the moment when I first started this blog. But it was kind of a dopey name. It was easily misunderstood, and gave people an easy excuse to dismiss the blog when it reported things that made them uncomfortable. I probably should have gotten rid of it a while ago.
But better late than never, huh?
I’ve given it a name that fits this blog (and its community of commenters) much better. The phrase “we hunted the mammoth” is a shortened version of “we hunted the mammoth to feed you,” which has become a catchphrase around these parts to describe a certain sort of self-important, self-deluding misogyny common amongst the people featured on this blog.
It comes from a quote I once posted from a dude who felt women weren’t sufficiently appreciative of what men had supposedly done for them over the ages. Here’s the full quote, in all of its glory:
We men built a nice safe world for you all the the coal-mines of death, roads, railroads, bridges and tall office buildings. Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety. Forget about the wars we died in and the sacrifices made just ignore history or is it now hersorty? You are accruing the benefits without ever having to pay the price you still don’t have to sign up for the draft and who will protect you? The Sex and the City girls will fight off the North Koreans with their Manolo Blahniks?
Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted we hunted the mammoth to feed you we died in burning buildings and were gassed in the trenches but that was just for fun right?
How quick and conveniently you forget who made this possible.
We gave you Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy not to mention countless others, Jonas Salk saved half the world from death and you just piss on it all.
“We Hunted the Mammoth” is such a wonderful distillation of this entire clusterfuck of misogyny, entitlement and unwarranted self-importance – not to mention historical ignorance – that when I decided to rename the blog it was the obvious choice.
Even though it means a long URL and a bit of an explanation.
Ok, you may wonder, but what is this “New Misogyny” you mention in the banner? Isn’t the misogyny you write about just a bunch of tired old ideas lightly reheated?
Much of it is. But I’m using the phrase “New Misogyny” to refer specifically to the angry antifeminist backlash that has emerged like a boil on the ass of the internet over the last decade or so. These aren’t your traditional misogynists – the social conservatives and religious fundamentalists who make up much of the far right (and whom I’ve always ignored on this blog).
So let me give a basic definition — which will no doubt seem overly basic to anyone who’s been reading this blog for any length of time.
These are guys, mostly, who range in age from their teens to their fifties, who have embraced misogyny as an ideology, as a sort of symbolic solution to the frustrations in their lives – whether financial, social, or sexual.
Some of them identify as Men’s Rights Activists, trying to cast their peculiar struggle against what they see as the excesses of feminism and the advantages of women as a civil rights issue of sorts. Alongside those who explicitly label themselves MRAs we find a great number of antifeminist and antiwomen activists we might call Men’s Rights-adjacent – like those in the Skeptic and Atheist subcultures who still haven’t gotten over an offhand remark Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson made about a dude in an elevator a couple of years ago.
Others proclaim themselves Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), declaring a sort of independence from women – while spending much of their time on message boards talking endlessly about them.
Still others see themselves as Pickup Artists (PUA), or masters of “Game,” espousing elaborate “scientific” theories of male superiority while trading tips on how best to pressure or manipulate drunk women into bed.
This misogynistic wing of the PUA subculture has a considerable overlap with a subset of traditionalist and far-right blogs. Many of those in what has become known as “the manosphere” don’t simply embrace misogyny; they also proudly embrace “scientific” racism and other bigotries.
Still, while some of the New Misogynists see themselves as conservatives, even “neo-reactionaries,” many identify themselves as libertarians or even as liberals. Theirs is a backlash that frames itself as a step forward.
So that’s the New Misogyny.
Like I said, none of this is going to sound altogether new to longtime readers of this site. But I think this helps to make a little bit clearer why I focus on the particular sorts of douchebags that I do.
And now, back to work.
And regardless of who did what percentage of the hunting, back in the days of the mammoth, human beings were hunters and collectors, and the food that was collected actually made up the bulk of their diet. Women weren’t sitting around while men did all the work.
And also, the job of butchering, dressing, preserving, and preparing the meat most likely fell to women. Eating required teamwork. Any culture where men were 100% responsible for bringing home food while women lazed around at home waiting would have died out.
It seems a tad myopic to demand that people only be grateful for half of their ancestors.
Cloudiah – good point. I’m sure some people have the counter factual impression that Paleolithic hunting was a matter of one Randian superman heading out with nothing but a spear and a grim look on his face.
Larry Gonick’s “Cartoon History of the Universe” (volume one) has a good overview of this sort of thing. Collaboration has been the linchpin of human societies as long as we’ve been human, and possibly longer. There was never a time when women sent men off to do dangerous things while they wallowed in safety and security.
I love that this is a place where we can simultaneously laugh at pictures of butt trumpets and have a serious discussion of how mammoth hunting actually went down.
XD
“The veneer of science is a new twist, though, as is their attempt to frame the anti-feminist backlash as a human rights movement.”
Indeed. And those too are being co-opted by the traditional misogynists, of the religious kind, to augment their biblically-flavored hatred of women.
“one could also hallucinate swatting MRAs into waiting piles of poop”
Not bad as hallucinations go, not bad at all.
“all the while dancey-dancing around the fact that it’s 100% true”
How many mammoth did Buzzboy hunt?
He didn’t – it’s just using the “we” in the same sense as one might say “we won the cup” when you were never anywhere near the pitch but feel a possibly random association with some sports team or other?
OK so it’s “us, our team” that hunted the mammoths. Really a far distant team to feel an association with, but that’s fine. Not sure they would have felt any association with Buzzboy, but they’re not around to be asked. They certainly were human and they were organised and they did something extremely brave and risky and once in a while ate barbecued mammoth meat as a result.
What I don’t get is how “our team” does not include – is specifically made to exclude -the women who were there too. Women hunt, and they make the tools with which hunting can be more effective. They do that in present-day hunter-gather societies. As far as there’s evidence, they always have done.
The evidence from burials used to be thinner than it is now because – and here’s a funny thing – burials with hunting goods in were automatically interpreted as burials of males, until archaeologists got better at establishing the sex of ancient remains.
Even then, there can be some hasty re-rationalisations: when does a massive sword buried with one partner stop being a symbol of power and leadership and starts being a ‘symbol of union’ placed ‘between’ the partners?
When the skeleton on the bigger plinth with the massive sword turns out to be female and the one on the smaller plinth without weapons male:
http://www.themarysue.com/etruscan-warrior-woman-discovery/
Problem is the “we” is not the human we.
That one does sound pretty fun. 🙂
Thanks everyone for being nice.
More seriously, I plan to do a pharmacy, bread and soup run on the way home.
Also
^This. Some days I wonder how much of MRA stuff is projection.
“Some days I wonder how much of MRA stuff is projection.”
Conservative estimates put it at 99.999%. The remaining 0.001% are feverish delusions (not to be confused with cold-induced hallucinations). Altogether this amounts to 100% of histrionic misinterpretations and exaggerations.
Feel better soon.
Oh, so that’s why I never make it to Oregon….
What if I’d rather the manly men had left the mammoth alone? They are too cute to eat.
I don’t know whether it’s been said before but I miss the “Misogyny. I mock it.” tagline.
I think it’s great that the name has changed. The old name was difficult for me to explain to my male friends, and they fixated on the boobs bit.
So do I, shigekuni. So do I.
So, do any woolies live in close proximity? (I think we should be woolies.) A group of us who can actually get together in person should get together and do a music video of We Will Mock You, a la the Pepsi commercial, only with cave people and mammoths instead of Romans. In fur bikinis, of course. Especially the men.
Awww I liked the name 🙁
Pardon the late post; I just had to rejoice that the new title and URL means my workplace no longer blocks this site as adult. 🙂
I would love for you, David, to dissect Camille Paglia’s article “It’s a man’s world and it always will be”.