Note to clueless misogynistic dating coaches: Vogue magazine does not run handjob how-to's as cover stories

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After all of the depressing stuff from recent days, here’s something a little lighter: A heartwarming story of misogynist gullibility, and yet another reminder that the evil feminazi double standards that the manospherians think they’re fighting exist only in their own fevered imaginations.

So last night, as a result of a rather nasty contretemps in the comments here, I was going through some old comments, and I discovered that one recently banned troll has a little blog of his own. Curious, I went and checked it out, and discovered that the obnoxious fellow, one “Ronnie Libra,” fancies himself a “dating coach.” And he’d just posted a rant defending pickup artists from accusations of being the creepy, manipulative predators that we know a lot of them are.

Here was his defense:

Pickup Artists are widely considered people who use tactics and techniques to try and “manipulate” members of the opposite sex into bed.  Predatory, manipulative, rape culture, creepy…

Where else have we seen that before?

Popular Women’s Magazines perhaps?

As proof of this matriarchal manipulation, he posted the covers of three women’s magazines, adorned with pictures of sexy celebs and covered with headlines promising women guidance on how best to enslave men with their sexy sexiness.

But let’s look at some of these Mainstream Articles in these Popular women’s magazines.

Article Titles like:

Get Men to do your bidding without being a Nag

Get in his head and in his bed!

Christina Hendricks:  How she chased her man and got him!

How to disappear without a trace.

The Sex position that will Put a Ring on your Finger.

Football and poker will improve your relationship.  Find out how!

And a whole host of ways to manipulate men through sex.

It took me literally 3 minutes to pull of 3 random women’s magazine covers without even skimming for what the content of the covers would be. …

Am I complaining?  Am I saying there’s something wrong with all of this?  NOPE!  As a matter of fact, I am very far from the hypocritical crowd out there spouting out how men learning tactics and techniques or even just improving their lives inside and out is somehow creepy, misogynistic, women hating, rape culture.  If that were the case than women have been rapey, men hating, creepsters since before I was born.

No.  Men and women trying to become more attractive to the opposite sex is AWESOME! … Women and Men are playing the same game, and the fact is, the WOMEN have been making the rules for a long time. …

[T]his double standard that what is great for women to do is evil for men to do just needs to be put to rest.

There’s just one teensy problem with Ronnie’s argument: two of the three magazine covers that Ronnie used to prove his point were obvious, ridiculous fakes. Here they are:

Yep. Apparently Ronnie thinks that Vogue runs cover stories on “The Lost Art of the Handjob,” and that InStyle is obsessed with telling women not to cut their hair because guys like women’s hair long.

You may notice that in addition to being festooned with headlines that sound like they were written not by sneaky sexually manipulative women but rather by a committee of horny dudes, these covers also feature a url on them: coolmaterial.com.

Using the sophisticated internet research technique of typing this url into my browser and, upon reaching the site in question, typing the words “women’s magazines” into the search box, I discovered that these covers were taken from a couple of “humor” features imagining what women’s magazines would look like … if they were written by men.

The basic joke behind them all: how can we convince these silly women to bend over backwards and forwards to please men sexually, while making them think they’re empowering themselves? Hell, there’s even a freaking sandwich joke on that fake InStyle cover.

And seriously, Ronnie, the NAME OF THE IMAGE FILE for the ScarJo cover, the image you posted on your blog and that I’ve reposted here, is if_men_wrote_womens_magazines_00.jpg. How did that not tip you off?

It’s true that women’s magazines do offer sex tips– shocking, I know — and, heck, I even found a handjob how-to in Vogue’s downmarket rival Glamour. But how is that in any way comparable to the manipulative and pedatory techniques favored by so many PUAs? Offering advice on how to please your partner in bed is about as innocuous as providing recipes for delicious food that people will enjoy eating. It’s nothing like the creepy gaslighting and routine boundary-violation regularly recommended by PUAs. Dread Game, anyone?

It’s also true that a couple of the headlines that Ronnie quotes are taken from the one real cover he posted, that of the May 2012 issue of the UK edition of Cosmopolitan. But tellingly, one of these quotes is actually a misquote. Cosmo wasn’t offering sneaky women advice on “how to disappear without a trace” – presumably with a briefcase full of pilfered cash and a vial of some poor man’s sperm. The actual headline?

Cosmo investigates: How can a woman disappear without a trace?

Yes, that’s right: it was an investigative report about a woman’s disappearance. I couldn’t find the piece itself on the Cosmopolitan UK website, which only puts limited stuff from its print editions online, though I found a more recent news story there about a missing woman who has been in the news a good deal in the UK. The American edition of Cosmo has also run investigative reports on missing women.

I’m not quite sure how Ronnie managed to get the headline so wrong. It’s written in big letters on the cover. Maybe he was distracted by cover girl Christina Hendricks’ cleavage? But it’s a revealing little slip nonetheless, transforming a story about a woman missing and possibly murdered into how-to guide to female deception.

More proof that these guys see just what they want to see – even if what they’re seeing is a joke, or entirely a product of their own imagination

Note to Ronnie: If you’d like to defend yourself here. I’ll unban your and let your comments through, just so long as they stay withing my comment guidelines.