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.
I hereby declare tcwil00 the winner of the thread!
Falconer has ALL THE WIN.
Crud, I win the thread and it’s under the wrong handle….
This is Falconer, if anyone is confused.
No, no, I don’t deserve it. I ended two consecutive lines with the same word!
(But thank’ee kindly nonetheless.)
Cloudiah’s link is to a thread on r/MensRights where they are talking about this site/David. Reputable_source opines:
Showing that he, like so many abusers, believes that violence is everybody’s fault except the actual person who is committing the violent acts.
Futrelle, you love to present the mammoth quote as some sort of ridiculous encapsulation of the MRM. You mock it for being melodramatic and self-evidently absurd… all the while dancey-dancing around the fact that it’s 100% true.
Inconvenient, eh?
In that same thread, the user Kawakji wrote:
He later states it “happens every damn day.”
I have a really hard time believing there are ANY feminists on reddit who demonstrate their desire to do violence against men.
I don’t mean to imply that Reputable_source is necessarily an abuser himself, just that he shares that point of view with them.
David! I know you’re really being held hostage by kittens!
lease think about what you’re doing! Blink twice! I’ll take that as yes.
You don’t need to be in thrall of adorable fuzzy things!You know how they REALLY are, with their claws and pretending to like belly-rubs and murder on their minds.
Whoops, it’ looking at me! Gotta Go.
I was never here!!!
The giant IRONY here is that the post they link to points to another post of mine in which I cite numerous commenters in r/mensrights for EXPLICITLY ADVOCATING VIOLENCE AND GETTING TONS OF UPVOTES FOR IT. I have screenshots.
And I also show that the mods there are unwilling to ban a certain notorious commenter there who’s known for repeatedly advocating violence against judges.
But apparently me pointing this out … incites violence.
Citation needed. Where’s your evidence that men, not women, were hunters in the Palaeolithic?
You’re also willfully ignoring the idiocy of the claim that men now are owed by women now for something other men allegedly did thousands of years ago.
Do the needful, David. Mail the poor dude a new hat, since the one he has now is obviously too small.
“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).”
There is, surprisingly or not, a considerable overlap between the fundies and the “new” misogynists, as one learns perusing Christian so-called manosphere. They appear to feed off of each other, occasionally getting into squabbles over “principles” (yes, it is painfully ironic that somehow they consider themselves principled), but usually end up united by the common, over-arching hatred and contempt for women, combined with an unmistakable and perennially frustrated desire to control and punish them.
The more things change.
L-O-FUCKING-L.
How? Yes, it’s presented melodramatically, but men did, in fact, “hunt the mammoth.”
AAAAA, that almost made sense, I suspect, in the alternate universe that MRA populate — where black is white, up is down, and poormenz have forever been the oppressed.
Your appeal to David’s conscience is especially touching — “I know that you are on my side, and will do the right thing.”
Except that in this black-is-white fashion characteristic for MRA, you seem not to realize that doing the right thing means opposing the likes of you and exposing the vileness of your ideology every chance one gets. Which is what David has been doing courageously and with style on his blog.
BTW, if you replace “feminists” with MRA in your tirade, you’ll get a sense of how the reality-bound human beings perceive your movement and its ideology (e.g., “MRA only see, what they want to see, and un-see what they do not want to see. Any contradiction of their ideology is completely disregarded and forgotten the very next second.” etc.)
Still no citation Buzzgums? Little is known about the people paleolithic people (as they didn’t have writing), but what is known about them is that they were likely quite egalitarian. Feel free to do your own research in places other than the MRM.
AAAAA? Are you a fan of Alex Jones or David Icke? You sound like one of those silly conspiracy theorists.
Currently this feminist is full of yellow mucus and spent part of yesterday hallucinating that they were a centaur. You both knew this?? O.o
Don’t worry fellow feminists, if it makes you happy it could be Orwellian double speak mucus and a misandrist centaur.
(BTW, I have a cold. The one bit about getting colds that I like is that when I get the fever I start hallucinating interesting things ….. wheeeeee!!!!)
Re: we will mock you.
This made my day. Also I am really glad that “mock” stayed in the tag line. 🙂
‘but men did, in fact, “hunt the mammoth.”’
Almost certainly some men hunted the mammoth and other game.
Also certain, but this time without any exceptions and qualifications, is the fact that each and every one of those men, as well as all men at all times, owes his existence to a woman.
So before you (imaginary today) mammoth-hunters go off waxing heroic about your (mostly imagined) sacrifices, keep in mind that women gave you life, always risking, without exception, and often losing their own.
How quickly and conveniently you forget who made your existence possible.
Scary! Sometimes when I have a fever, I have wild dreams and wake up while getting a really strong electrical shock. It’s weird. Hope you feel better!
“Currently this feminist is full of yellow mucus and spent part of yesterday hallucinating that they were a centaur.”
Oy. NyQuil helps with that, I hear. 🙂
Cheer up, AL3H, things could be much worse: you could have been hallucinating that you were a… mammoth (gulp).
Ah, but if one hallucinated being a mammoth, one could also hallucinate swatting MRAs into waiting piles of poop.
Yes, the new misogyny is just a retread of the old misogyny. “She was asking for it” is the new woman-as-temptress, for example, and other elements (women don’t create or think; childbirth is no big deal; women exist for men to fuck) are just the same old, same old. The veneer of science is a new twist, though, as is their attempt to frame the anti-feminist backlash as a human rights movement.
I don’t know about mammoth hunting, but if you look at the history of bison hunting in North America is seems clear it was a collective effort. I suspect mammoth hunting was similar.