Misogyny Theater is back with Episode 4!
If you paid any attention to A Voice for Men’s recent conference in – well, near – Detroit, you probably heard about the guy who was ejected from the conference after reportedly “petting” a reporter and a number of other men. (You can read about him here.)
In this episode of Misogyny Theater, we return to the Man Going His Own Way who calls himself Sandman to hear his highly speculative theories about this gentleman and his activities.
Sandman also warns Men’s Rightsers and MGTOWers that if they get together in large groups, they will inevitably attract opportunistic sex-seekers eager to take advantage of the man surplus for their own perverse ends. Apparently, angry dudes who hate women are like catnip to gay men and straight ladies alike.
The audio for this little cartoon of mine comes from Sandman’s video “Men’s Rights Molester.” I have indicated edits in the audio with little scratchy sounds. And I’ve bleeped out the name of the alleged molester. Otherwise it’s all straight Sandman.
My previous Misogyny Theater episode featuring Sandman can be found here.
Crowd chatter and buzzer sounds from FreeSFX.
Agreed. Ah, the smug satisfaction of knowing that someone else is being deprived of basic dignity!
I also think that maybe the paper/soap/personal product industries don’t have as much clout with the USDA. I know that the big U.S. food companies (and their donations) definitely get a warm welcome from Congress, which is probably part of the reason why purchasing their products is allowable on benefits. :
EatDrinkPolitics did a good report on the role of big business (food companies, retailers, and banks) in shaping the SNAP benefits portion of the 2012 Farm Bill. It’s worth a read, if you’re interested and have the time.
@wwth : Everyone knows cocaine is rampant on Wall Street. Yet, when the bank bailout occurred, was there ever a suggestion that the executives should have to get a drug test to make sure they would spend their bailout money responsibly? Of course there wasn’t!
Oh, God – if I was in Congress, I’d be trying to stick that rider in in every bill that gave money to the financial industry.
Here benefit sanctions and delays processing benefits mean people are increasingly being left for months without any income whatsoever. This is income to which they are entitled and often what they have paid in for over the years. And, yes, there have been calls to use a voucher, or foodstamps system, as they did for some years with asylum seekers (now replaced by the “azure card”, a kind of cashless electronic payment card, since 2009).
Fun facts about the vouchers:
– vouchers were priced in round numbers, but the shops which accepted them were not required to give change. As most things in supermarkets are priced in numbers ending 99 or 59, trying to get the full face value of your vouchers involved feats of mental maths and rarely succeeded. The difference was pure profit to the shop owners.
– only certain supermarkets accepted the vouchers. Some smaller towns had not one shop which accepted vouchers, but did have asylum seekers in receipt of vouchers. Did I mention that vouchers couldn’t be used for bus tickets? This is still true with the azure card system, with the added fun that it often fails to work at the point of sale – initially the failure rate was 1 in 6.
But yes, apparently the current thinking is that you have to treat unemployed and disabled people like this too, or they might buy chips and beer. After all, it was them that caused the global financial crash. /s
On mandatory drug testing – one story only.
I have a family member who is addicted to more than one substance – some legal, some firmly illegal. He’s been in and out of recovery with some serious crash-and-burn episodes in between for the last 8 years. (Currently in – long may it last!)
But continually throughout this period, my relative has been able to work as a freelance in a highly competitive and specialised field that he’s extremely good at (and it isn’t one where anyone else’s safety is involved: no airline pilot or brain surgeon here).
Many of the people he does jobs for know all about the addictions (the crash-and-burn episodes were public enough at the time) but would still rather give him work whenever he’s well enough to do it.
The point is: if we had mandatory drug testing here, he’d certainly still be an addict, but instead of the usefully employed addict with an impressive portfolio of work that he is at age 30, he’d be an unemployable addict with a criminal record.
I can’t see that as an improvement, somehow.
“It’s about not acting “gay” in terms of having femme interests/appearances, and “straight” in terms of looking/acting like a stereotypically college fratboy. It’s all about being afraid of/grossed out by twinks and crossdressers and desperate to cling to these ideals of “manliness” at any cost.”
Jack Donovan?
2:17 onward is just un-freakin’-believable. As if women are going to go to an MHRM conference to get laid or find a boyfriend! Hilarious!!!!!
I’ve seen those guys write comments like “I’d rate myself a solid 7” and then you come across pics of them and they are more like 3s, 4s max. 7 is quite a bit above average and I’ve yet to see even one Manosphere dude who registers as above average looking. Most are below average in my book.
Ahhhhhhhh ….. the material these people provide.
@ 2:35 mark,
“If you’re one of the women who went out to the Mens’ Rights Conference to get laid, it looks like a great deal to you.”
That’s the single most funniest thing I’ve heard all year.
About Dainty Dougal’s link, remember when some commenter who seems to have left got really pissy with me for pointing out that the British legal system handles rape cases incredibly badly, and judges often reinforce this by saying horrible rape culture supporting things from the bench? Yeah. I was totes just being mean about that.
Meh, I think we’re just perpetuating the problem if we use those silly rating numbers at all.
Maybe I’m in a minority, but I’ve never been a fan of the “Give a handout, not a hand up,” mentality. I’ve always believed that welfare assistance should come with things like worker retraining, educational opportunities, mental health assistance, etc., so that the recipient can better themselves and become self sufficient. Very few people want to be on welfare and nobody really lives well on it.
If I were to get behind drug testing, it would only be for the purpose of determining what kind of assistance a recipient needs, not a reason to deny benefits.
Then again, programs to get people off government assistance are being cut daily, which makes me increasingly sad.
You know why they’re so many unemployed people in the UK?
Because there’s four times as many people as jobs going spare.
If every vacancy in the country was filled tomorrow, three-quarters of the people looking for work would still be looking for work. Retraining isn’t going to help. Education isn’t going to help. Therapy isn’t going to help. Sanctions aren’t going to help. We are being fucked over by basic arithmetic.
When you talk as if the work was out there if people just did what it takes, you are not helping.
I don’t know about other countries but in the US most welfare recipients are not able bodied adults who don’t want to work. As of 2012 about half had a working adult in the household. If we retrain them all that won’t solve the real problem. Minimum wage is too low to live on. The real “welfare queens” are corporations. We subsidize their workers so they don’t have to pay a living wage. A lot of welfare recipients are children, the elderly or the disabled. How would welfare to work problems help them? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-stein/where-are-all-the-couch-p_b_4085773.html
I guess I’m not sure why people think hand outs are bad. I’d actually be for a guaranteed minimum income that everyone gets. No exceptions. No means testing. No strings attached. I want to live in a world without poverty. If a minimum income causes some people to not work, so be it. There aren’t enough good jobs to go around, automation can replace human workers more and more. Why should people do menial tasks if machines can do them? There will always people with ambition, people who like to create and people who can’t stand sitting around with nothing to do so there really isn’t a risk that a minimum income would cause every single person to be lazy.
A lot of people, Americans in particular praise hard work and independence but can never really explain why. They just seem to be valued for their own sake.
I think we’re going to actually have to move towards a drastically shortened work week and a guaranteed minimum income anyway thanks to automation. This will be true whether people like it or not. A 40 hour work week will not be sustainable for much longer. It just won’t.
There are countries where drugs are legal, and drug addiction is lower. The money saved from incessant drug convictions are used instead for education and recovery programs. Maybe, just maybe, people are more likely to seek help from a hand reaching out to assist them rather than one holding a gavelin smashing down onto them.
A handout is a hand up. Someone who doesn’t have to work two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet is someone who can take classes, help zir kids with homework, get into rehab, whatever.
Dammit, tried to do HTML on the kindle.
“A lot of people, Americans in particular praise hard work and independence but can never really explain why. They just seem to be valued for their own sake. ”
They are. “Rugged individualism” is the maha mantra of the United States. And it could be the reason for a lot of American problems.
“there really isn’t a risk that a minimum income would cause every single person to be lazy.”
Who’s arguing that a minimum income would cause laziness? What’s the rationale behind that?
Someone’s making a lot of money off of “the war on drugs” and all that’s going on between Mexico and the States in that regard. I don’t see it going away soon. Billionaires gonna trillion!
@GrumpyOldNurse
It’s the idea that women are on a carousel ride of going from one Bad Boy to another during their youth, then get hit by age or urge to breed or something when they’re old (yanno, over 20) and pick some poor beta schlub to support them. David used to have a great pic of a woman riding a cock (as in rooster, not penis!) carousel on the header.
@duckbunny
THIS. The unemployment rate in Australia isn’t nearly that bad (at least, the official unemployment rate) but it’s the same thing. There are hundreds of people for every job. My sister just applied for a floor-staff job in a hardware chain. 95 positions, over 600 applicants.
…it does.
No, really. It does. Worker retraining, educational opportunities… the mental health assistance that’s attached is really half-assed.
But we do have those things.
It’s just that conservatives want to cut those first and foremost.
And the fact that you don’t know about those things?
Is the result of a well-funded misinformation campaign by those same people.
Do you realize that there is a lifetime limit on how much welfare a person can recieve?
Not consecutive… TOTAL. That if a person is on welfare for a while here and a year there, and it adds up to five years… they’re out. That money is gone.
The unfathomable cruelty of that. Just cut off. Just… no more. Just… go starve.
I won’t deny that social assistance programs are there, but the availability in some areas of the country is so limited that they may as well not exist at all. Funding is so limited that only a fraction of those who need it are able to access it. We have intelligent, able bodied people who WANT to work, but do not have the education or job skills. Even if we could get 15% of those receiving benefits into a stable job, that pays a living wage, what a difference that would make.
I totally understand that some who are receiving benefits are unable to work and do not begrudge them anything. I believe that it’s the duty of society to care for the sick, the elderly and the disabled. Did you know that it’s damn near impossible for cancer patients to get disability benefits, unless their case is nearly terminal? That’s ridiculous, IMO.
I also understand that there aren’t enough jobs for the available workforce, yet the age for Social Security benefits keeps getting higher. As it stands now, one must be 68, before they can start receiving Social Security.
Raising minimum wage? Absolutely. Nobody can live on minimum wage, ad Morgan Spurlock demonstrated on 30 Days. A guaranteed income? I think its a great idea that wouldn’t deter most people from working. Government funded advanved education. Definitely. Many countries, including my home country, provide free university education, to those who want it.
I think that I’m agreeing with the general consensus but, being from and visiting Eastern Europe, I’m more and more surprised at how bad things really are here. And how much better other, poorer countries take care of their citizens.
“It’s the idea that women are on a carousel ride of going from one Bad Boy to another during their youth, then get hit by age or urge to breed or something when they’re old (yanno, over 20) and pick some poor beta schlub to support them. ”
They call it AF/BB or “Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks”.
Where are these jobs going to come from? As it is there are a lot of college educated people working retail and food service jobs because there aren’t that many good jobs available. We don’t have a problem with the workforce not being educated and skilled enough. In fact, a higher percentage of the population is college educated than ever before. The problem is that unions have been busted up and labor laws are lax and jobs aren’t paying as well as they were a few decades ago. All the training and education in the world isn’t going to fix that.
Poverty in the US has increased since welfare reform was passed in the 90s. Clearly it hasn’t worked. I’m certainly not opposed to offering welfare recipients education and job training but that alone isn’t going to fix anything. We have a choice. Either we can have lax labor laws with low wages accompanied by a huge welfare state or we can mandate that every job pay breadwinner wages and scale the welfare state back.
It does seem like you mean well, but you’re still putting the burden on poor people to fix poverty with the assumption that all it takes to move up in class is a little more education and training. Poverty is a systemic thing that benefits the wealthy and as long as we allow politicians to only listen to the wealthy it’s here to stay. It’s the system that needs to change, not the people trapped in it.
A well-run society still needs office cleaners, janitors, retail staff, etc. Why the hell should those people be left to rot in low-paying jobs where they’re actually fulfilling a useful function.
The amount of families in poverty, where the parent/s work, is an indictment of how uncaring our societies have become. The classist attitudes towards people in “menial” jobs is horrible. If someone is happy in their job, except the pay sucks, maybe we’d all be better off to raise the pay. There’s fuck all CEOs who actually deserve $1million yet alone multi-millions.
hey, i am an mra, and I am for drug legalization and mandatory minimum incomes.
it’s a libertarian position tbh, so my fedora is strong
i feel like these issues are more important towards human rights as a social justice thing than most issues even being talked about
we can totally hate each other, but be for this plz
I don’t think I’m expressing myself well and I do apologize for that. I do not believe that the onus is on the poor to better themselves, but rather that the onus is on the government to care for it’s citizens. It’s up to the government to develop a healthy, educated workforce and to foster a corporate environment that provides jobs that pay a living wage. It’s up to the government to care for those who are unable to work.
Really, the fault lies with corporate greed, outsourcing and increasingly less consumer dollars. Repealing NAFTA, imposing significant fines for American companies who utilize foreign labor or manufacture overseas, giving tax breaks for companies who manufacture In the US, raising import taxes, lowering the age for Social Security benefits to allow seniors an opportunity to retire earlier and doubling the minimum wage would be a start.
Will the government do this? Probably not in my lifetime. But, for example,there is a shortage of nurses in many parts of the country. Plenty of our STEM related companies are looking overseas for talent. What is the government doing? Certainly not providing Americans with the skills and education to fill them. And, that’s sad to me, because I guarantee that most people who are receiving benefits would rather be working a job with a living wage.
It’s a problem that requires a complete overhaul of how the system works and what our collective priorities are, to even have a chance at a solution.
Nova, I’m going to chock most of this up to miscommunication, so allow me to point out some of the things that are rubbing people (or at least me) wrong.
This is not a thing people actually say, since nobody is against giving people a “hand up.” What you are repeating here is an inverted version of a common Republican mantra, “give a hand up, not a handout.” This is usually repeated by politicians who want to get rid of all benefits and who pretend to support some vague job-training idea so that they don’t sound quite so much like they just want all poor people to die.
So when you say “I’ve never been a fan of the “Give a handout, not a hand up,” mentality,” to an American that sounds like “I want to get rid of the social safety net entirely because I think poor people are lazy and deserve to die.”
You’re still working on the assumption that people are unemployed because they lack skills and education. They’re not. Disabuse yourself of this idea. Unemployment here is 7.9% among recent college graduates. STEM graduates, 7.3% (source). There are scads of highly qualified unemployed people. Companies just refuse to hire them.
To add to katz’s points, there’s only a certain number of jobs anyways. If everyone went out and got a PhD, the unemployment pool would be about the same percentage just everyone would be highly formally educated.
There’s enough dosh to pay everyone good wages, all that needs to happen is to reduce income inequality. And given the amount of corporate welfare that exists now (low income tax rates, government transfers being used to substitute [poorly] for living wages, polluting companies not having to pay for clean-up costs eg in mining), individual income tax payers – you and me – are the ones paying for all this. And the corporate bail-outs because certain companies were “too big to fail” – if they’re too big to fail, they should be deemed a public good and nationalised.
Isn’t this a lot of what the “we are the 99%” movement was all about?