Ta da! Man Boobz is now We Hunted the Mammoth

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.