Yesterday, a message arrived in my email inbox with the title “Are you happy to die a virgin,” a somewhat unusual question, I felt, not just because of its faulty premise but also because of its lack of the conventional question mark at the end. The email itself was equally blunt and illiterate:
You sound like a 40 y/o FAT VIRGIN living in a basement rotting away. Is manboobz.com your way of hide behind your own internal issues u refuse to face? Father issues???
Ah, here’s where the missing question mark went, along with some friends.
The sender appended a photo of an extremely obese Asian man at least 20 years my junior, mostly if not completely nude, along with the question (and I quote verbatim) “This this photo you??”
If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.
Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.
A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.
We have a winner in the We Hunted the Mammoth Banner Contest!
Well, two winners, actually. And they are:
Dani, who designed several variations of a banner which will soon become the banner of We Hunted the Mammoth. I actually haven’t quite decided which of these to use, but I like them all, and it will be one of them! (Tell me which one you like best in the comments.)
Leocigale, who did the awesome cartoon below. Even though it’s not, technically speaking, a banner, I plan to use it on We Hunted the Mammoth as well. So Leocigale is also the winner!
Well, we all are, really.
Dani and Leocigale will split the cash prize of $100.
Well, actually, it might be a bit more than that: a few people made donations during the contest and didn’t leave a note specifying whether they were for the contest or not. If you were one of them, and you want your money to go to the contest winners, email me and I’ll add it to the prize. Once I get that sorted out, I’ll post an updated number here, and a breakdown of the donations in the comments below (I will break them down anonymously, of course).
Thanks to everyone who submitted entries! There was a lot of awesome artwork to choose from.
EDITED TO ADD: The cash prize ended up being … $170!
Yesterday, we looked at 6 memes from A Voice for Men’s “meme team” and decoded what they really meant. Today, some memes from AVFM’s Pinterest page that are a bit harder to decode, because they really make no sense at all. I’ll do my best to try to sort them out.
1) TALK TO THE HAND
What might it mean? “Ha ha girls talk too much, well joke’s on you because I’m GOING MY OWN WAY and later I’ll go home and make a poster about how I imagined I might I totally really did put that bitch in her place.”
I mean, that is what this poster is saying, right? It’s illustrating the notion that men and women should listen to one another by depicting a dude just up and leaving because he’s tired of listening?
How exactly does this advance any “men’s rights” other than the right of men to act like petulant children?
A Voice for Men seems to have gone a bit meme-crazy. The site’s official Pinterest page, which seems to be fairly new, is loaded up with 374 memes on such subjects as Sexual Politics, False Accusations, MGTOW, and of course Feminism.
It’s not clear how many of these memes were created by the AVFM “Meme Team” and how many were simply grabbed from the internet. But a number of the memes are emblazoned with the A Voice for Men name and/or logo, so I think it’s fair to say that these, at least, are “official” AVFM memes.
Going through these memes, one thing about them becomes clear very quickly: most of them seem to convey messages that are often considerably different than those their creators seem to have intended.
So here, without further ado, here are 6 AVFM memes and what they really mean.
Woman sexually harassing a group of men with her slutty attire.
A month or so ago, after an antiques dealer responded to her comment about a piece of furniture by asking her if she and her female friend “ever made out with each other,” Leah Green of The Guardian decided it was time to try a little gender-reversal experiment: she would use hidden cameras to film her to treat unsuspecting men to the same sort of inappropriate sexual remarks that women get treated to every day, using real life examples collected by the @everydaysexism project.
You can see their reactions in the short video she posted on the Guardian’s website; she discusses her motivations more here.
Many of the men, unaccustomed to this sort of harassment, weren’t exactly sure how to react to her comments. When she asked a bartender for a drink and a lap dance, she had to repeat herself several times before he got her point. When she tried the “have you guys ever made out with each other” line on two older men, they couldn’t quite even process the question at first.
Others got angry. When she yelled “oi, get your asses out” at some construction workers – a gender-swapped version of the classic “show us your tits” — one of the affronted men responded with “you can’t talk to us like that.” And that was essentially the point of the video: no one should be talking to anyone like that.
That point seems to have escaped one angry commenter on the Men’s Rights subreddit going by the name of frankie_q, who spewed forth a well-received virtual manifesto arguing that it’s complaints about cat-calling, not the cat-calling itself, that is the bigger problem. And that the biggest problem of all is that women wear clothes that men consider sexy.
Let’s take another visit to the CreepyPM subreddit, where innocent souls post screenshots of the perfectly horrendous private messages they’ve gotten, sometimes on dating sites, sometimes not.
In this case, the recipient is a young black woman on OkCupid, the sender a white man more than twenty years her senior and 13 years out of her specified age range. He decides that the best way to overcome this age gap is to … mansplain and whitesplain to her about the history of Planned Parenthood.
And then there is perhaps the most awkward segue in the history of internet dating.
In the screenshot below, he’s red, she’s blue.
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan!
According to the recipient — no screenshot, alas — he followed this up with a classic bit of passive-aggressive sex nagging:
Take a chance, Ms. Free Love.
SPOILER ALERT: She didn’t.
You can read the original thread in CreepyPMs here.
Professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly – perhaps best known for her fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – seems to have been channeling the manosphere in a column she published yesterday on the issue of “paycheck fairness.” Turns out she thinks such fairness is actually a bad idea, because ladies love marrying rich guys more than they love earning money.
According to Schlafly, equal pay messes with the fundamental female desire for “hypergamy” – that favorite manosphere buzzword – and undermines marriage:
[H]ypergamy … means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Indeed, Schlafly argues, women love marrying men who earn more than them so much that when the pay gap is eliminated some of them just won’t marry at all. Which is apparently the end of the world, or something.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. …
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
So it’s not enough that most people end up getting married; civilization will crumble if more than half of them don’t marry before the age of 30!
And so, she suggests, if American women knew what was good for them they would be begging for employers pay them even less, relative to men.
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Schlafly – a best-selling author and popular speaker on the right – didn’t send back any of her royalties or speaking fees so that she would feel more like a woman and her late husband would feel like more of a man, and I doubt she’s doing so now, as a widow. She’s also been unmarried for more than twenty years. Coincidence?
NOTE TO MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: When you find yourself agreeing with Phyllis Schlafly on pretty much anything (beyond, say, the existence of gravity, the need for human beings to breathe air, and other widely accepted beliefs of this sort), this is an indication that perhaps your movement isn’t the progressive, egalitarian movement that you like to pretend that it is, and that in fact it is sort of the opposite.
That said, I should also note that Schlafly’s notion of “hypergamy,” while sexist and silly, is decidedly less obnoxious than the version peddled by PUAs and websites like A Voice for Men — congrats, Men’s Human Rights Activists, you’re actually worse than Phyllis Schlafly!
She just uses the term to indicate a desire to marry up. For many manospherians, by contrast, “hypergamy” doesn’t just mean marrying up; it means that women are fickle, unfaithful monsters who love nothing better than cuckolding beta males in order to jump into bed with whatever alpha male wanders into their field of vision. (I’m guessing Schlafly hasn’t actually been going through the archives at AVFM or Chateau Heartiste looking for column ideas.) While many MRAs love to complain about hypergamy, many of them also seem to think that it’s unfair that “beta” males with good jobs aren’t automatically entitled to hot wives.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual definition of the word “hypergamy” involves none of that. According to Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, the word means “marriage to a person of a social status higher than one’s own; orig., esp. in India, the custom of allowing a woman to marry only into her own or a higher social group.”
That’s it. It refers to the fact of marrying up, not to the desire to marry up, much less to the alleged desire of all twentysomething women to ride the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel. The manosphere’s new and not-so-improved definition came from a white nationalist named F. Roger Devlin.
ANOTHER NOTE: Big thanks to the people who emailed me about this story. If you ever see something you think would make for a good Man Boobz post, send me an email at futrelle [at] manboobz.com. I get a lot of ideas from tips!
Hey, everyone, just a quick update on the still-ongoing We Hunted the Mammoth banner contest (the details of which are here).
First, I want to thank all those who’ve contributed so far. Some great stuff!
Second, I want to announce that due to the generosity of some Man Boobz — soon to be We Hunted the Mammoth — readers, the contest now has acash prize of $100.
Thanks very much for those who’ve donated, and if you want to add more to the prize, use the regular Man Boobz donation button, but include a note saying you want the money earmarked for the prize. (Also include a little codeword or phrase; I want to be transparent with this, so I will list the donations later according to these code phrases so you know your money went to the prize.)
Also, a question: I’m wondering what you folks think should happen if I want to use more than one of the designs? Split the prize money?
The contest will run through Sunday. So submit if you haven’t already!
Here are some of the submissions so far. Anyone is free to use the artwork in a banner design of their own (and if it wins you’ll split the prize with the artist).
If you’ve ever wondered what the carefree, unencumbered-by-women-and-their-cooties life of a true Man Going His Own Way looks like, you’re in luck, as the video above presents ACTUAL FOOTAGE of just this. Apparently, Going Your Own Way looks an awful lot like Hanging Around and Pestering, at least if you’re Vention1MGTOW, a YouTube videoblogger who regularly offers up little glimpses into his awesome life.
In the video above, our hero, in between fits of giggles, gleefully relates how he “trolled” a cutsey YouTube video showing a high school coach who’d gotten his team to help him propose to his girlfriend. Vention1MGTOW did his best to ruin the mood by posting “a few strategic comments” (that is, endless screeds) attacking marriage and women and, well, you know the drill. My favorite line from his comments, which he proudly reads aloud:
I’m sure some old wrinkled up, STD, ex-party party girl would love to move into my home and begin diverting my income for her own use but I don’t really see a benefit for me in that deal.
I hate to break it to you, dude, but I’m pretty sure even the most thoroughly wrinkled-up ex-party girl would rather die alone and unloved than have to put up with you. Hell, I’m pretty sure the only reason your dog (he has a dog) puts up with you is because he has no idea what you’re saying.
If you check out the coach’s video, you can see that a whole swarm of MGTOWers have descended upon the comments. Vention1MGTOW’s comments are actually some of the more polite from that bunch.
Vention1MGTOW – from his choice of snack (ramen noodles) to his, er, casual sense of interior decoration – seems like such a perfect embodiment of MGTOWer stereotypes that it’s hard to believe he’s for real. But he is. He’s got 82 videos up on his YouTube channel detailing his various obsessions: MGTOW, Bitcoins, hugelkultur gardening, doomsday prepping. Oh, and he’s got a Segway.
If the video above merely whetted your appetite for more of Vention1MGTOW’s trolling, here’s a video in which he successfully infiltrates the YouTube comments for an Enya video in order to inform the women there that they’re all going to get old and ugly and no one will want them.
I may have to come back to him again later. He’s a charmer.
Many thanks to the unknown hero on Reddit who brought this fellow to my attention.
