Lucy Walcott, who publishes a blog called NotParticularlyPauciloquent, isn’t afraid of the big questions. The tough questions. The important questions.
And in a recent post she takes on what is perhaps the most important question of our age: What is We Hunted the Mammoth?
To paraphrase the great Marge Gunderson, I’m not so sure I agree 100% with her police work.
To me, it seems like an arrogant blog made for one purpose and one purpose only, to attack MRA and anything that feminists don’t like.
Uh, what about the cat pictures? I post a lot of cat pictures too.
This blog has no substance, none, none at all.
I’m getting the impression that this isn’t going to be a good review.
It’s about lying about the other side and mocking them all of the time.
As everyone knows, quoting people verbatim is the most insidious form of lying there is.
Oh, I can’t write on the comments section of it, however, because it’s comments are so havily moderated that not a single word of criticism of the sites content can get through. Literally, look at the comments section, about 100% pro-WHTM.
Uh, you’re free to post what you like. I don’t ban for disagreement, As long as you don’t threaten anyone, or make rape jokes, or post victim-blamey shit about people who are already being harassed by half the internet, or post a hundred comments in an hour, or do something else that’s totally vile and/or annoying, you’re pretty much good to go. Trouble is, a lot of the “critics” who come to this site actually do one or more of these terrible things.
Because a lot of them are assholes and/or trolls. Because the Men’s Rights movement is little more than a collection of assholes and trolls.
Now while I am not a MRA, I will state that this site goes above and beyond The O’reilly Factor to become the next Rush Limbaugh of blogging. The sites logo literally says that the whole purpose of the site is to mock.
Also “track.” As in, monitor and write about. You know, like, say, Right Wing Watch, or HateWatch, or Justin Bieber Watch.
Oh, wait, that last one literally is a Justin Bieber watch.
The blog is seeping with arrogance: “I reserve the right to ban anyone at any time for any reason I want.” is just the tip of the iceberg.
Actually, everyone who has a blog has this right, and most of them take advantage of it from time time. I pointed this out explictly, because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life explaining to some asshole rules lawyer who came up with a new and unforseen way to troll the blog why I’m not letting him post any more.
This blog is filled with this head-up-your-ass style of talk. This high-and-mighty level of talk while the blog itself only quotes specific people while refusing to even acknowledge anyone else.
Wait, what? I quote “specific people?” Am I supposed to quote, er, unspecific people? Or groups of people? Or everyone on planet earth?
And it HATES the MRM. Completely, totally, unethically, laments it. Mocks it. I may call out feminism on many points, but I never mock it for shits and giggles.
I mock the Men’s Rights movement because writing about it seriously all the time would be really fucking depressing. Because MRAs are, by and large, shitheads. I mean, seriously, have you ever looked at the horrible things they say and do?
If you haven’t, let me suggest you go through the archives of a most fascinating website called We Hunted the Mammoth for countless examples.
This blog is only around for the notion of inviting a fringe minority of people who seriously hate anything non-feminist.
Really? I like a lot of things that aren’t feminist. Cats. Pizza. Music. I mean, I love Kathleen Hanna and all, but most music is by people who aren’t feminists. And guess what, I don’t automatically hate it because of that. Same with art. Same with books. Same with, well, people. Feminism, historically speaking, is a fairly recent development, and it’s still mostly a minority taste. Which means that most people, and most things, in the world are non-feminist.
If I were given a job hating things that aren’t feminist, I wouldn’t have enough hours in the day to do it. I’d have to hire assistants. Lots of assistants. Assistants who, unlike my current assistants, aren’t cats.
Luckily, the job I’ve assigned myself with this blog is a lot less ambitious than that: I track (and, yes, mock) a relatively small number of people, mostly but not exclusively dudes, whose basically devote their entire lives to coming up with new excuses for hating women.
And yes, I will confess that I’m not really very fond of these people. Except as a source of material.
Which doesn’t help the feminists either. This mocking drivel seems to be very much the thing that many feminists seem to bash male feminists for. Sorry David, but even the Feminist Current wants you to just sit down and shut up.
Huh. Most feminists I know don’t really have a problem with jokes at the expense of MRA asshats. They have a problem when male feminists act like entitled asshats themselves, as I’ve learned by doing just that and getting called out for it. Sometimes sitting down and shutting up is the right thing for male feminists to do, provided that they don’t sit there sulking instead of listening.
Come to think of it, there are a lot of people who could benefit from sitting down and shutting up from time to time. And in some cases, all of the time.
Way to be against misogyny by telling women who aren’t for feminism that they are sad and mockable individuals.
Again, there are lots of women who aren’t feminists. I don’t write about them, much less mock them. The women I write about on this blog are a small minority of these women – mostly female MRAs who are as actively hateful as their male counterparts, and who devote much of their time to, yes, mocking and sometimes viciously harassing other women.
Do they deserve to be called out for that? Well, yeah, as much as any #GamerGate dickhead posting shit about Anita Sarkeesian does.
I am actually starting to think this site is a troll site meant to get feminists to agree with obviously man-hating propaganda to use against them later on.
This is the favorite insincere “criticism” from people who don’t like this blog but who haven’t actually read enough of it to even begin the process of assembling anything approaching a real critique. I would say [citation needed] for the alleged “man-hating propaganda,” but I’ve said that to countless people before and I’ve yet to get a single example of the misandry that is said to be everywhere here.
But sadly, this site is everywhere, and I cannot go anywhere without finding this radical Feminist Rush Limbaugh blog.
Well, that’s a new one, at least. I’ll give you credit for that.
Contrapangloss, I like your alternate ending. For that matter, why didn’t Gandalf just summon one of the Eagles to fly Frodo to Mount Doom? It would’ve taken, like, fifteen minutes.
I always liked Eowyn, because she was allowed to be fierce and conflicted and valiant, and to strive against the limitations of her gender. It’s hard to read her as a purely feminist character, since she ultimately agrees to put aside her dreams of renown and glory and settle down to domestic life with Faramir. But then, Tolkien was pretty hard on any character who lusted after power (it’s one of the central themes of the book). Most of them met bad fates. Eowyn was one of the few who successfully reconciled power and humility, and emerged as a more complex character because of it.
And yeah, reading LoTR again a few years ago, I had a massive autumn-in-Lothlorien sad also. Must be a sign of impending middle age.
@Buttercup: I read someone somewhere arguing that the eagle plan doesn’t take into consideration the will of the Eagles. Gwaihir isn’t given much detail but I get the impression he’s pretty powerful, and the whole point of the story seems to be to keep the Ring out of the hands of the powerful.
Not to mention they’d have had to do the whole last leg in full sight of the Eye, which seems to multiply the Ring’s power; who knows what could have happened?
Here, Eowyn, you can’t have Aragorn; have Faramir instead, because we need to get everyone paired off.
Except the angel and the emo.
I went on a sort of pilgrimage to Tolkien’s house last year. And by ‘pilgrimage’ I mean ‘walked along the suburban street to it and looked at the blue plaque from across the road’. There were some cats, so I petted them for a while and absorbed Tolkien-ness by proximity in my fangirl way.
You really don’t expect someone who wrote with so much love about the natural world and rural life to have lived in a 1930’s suburban pebble-dash house in a city. You sort of want for him to have lived in something approximating an above-ground Bag End, possibly off a country lane.
What is We Hunted The Mammoth? Come for the misogyny, stay for the nerdery, knitting, cooking, and bra sizing.
@Falconer – True, and also it seems like the Eagles, like the Ents, didn’t care much about the petty squabbles of men and elves and giant flaming eyes. When you’re thousands of years old and above the fray, shorter-lived species are just a bunch of ants squabbling over a sandwich crumb, so why put yourself out?
Re: Eowyn, yeah, it’s like, “The end of the book is coming! We must find owners for all the women!”
I know Faramir comes across as the consolation prize, but he seems more human and a better match for Eowyn than Aragorn would have been. Being the less favored son, he had to earn every ounce of respect, plus he had the strength of mind to turn down the ring, so he’s not going to be all “get back in the kitchen and make me a sammitch, biyotch”. In that respect, being outsiders, the two of them seemed to have a genuine connection. Eowyn could’ve done way worse.
Or, she could have said the hell with it and moved to a lesbian commune in Mirkwood. That would also have been an acceptable ending.
@saphy – That’s pretty cool. Is the house still occupied by other Oxford professors?
Giant eye on top of a tower endlessly searching for the Ring. All the cover you get in the sky is… clouds.
You try approaching Mordor sovereign airspace without the Mordorian Anti-Air Defense Battalions going all sorts of haywire – and by “Haywire” I mean “I stopped counting siege engines after number eight thousand”.
Oh, also, felbeasts. They can probably scramble a few of those and their Nâzghul pilots in, what, an hour or so? Great, now there’s battle in the sky raging over the Mordorian plains, and once the Ring falls out and into the broken volcanic ground, guess who has endless orcs to go fine-comb every speck of ash?
I figure the eagles is always easy to answer.
What I want to know is why I didn’t see orcs with weaponized giant spiders. Last child of Ungoliath, evil in ancient form, vomit is darkness, yeah, sure, but it clearly hatched eggs. I figure the usual ork industry could serviceable phase out the warg riding scheme in favor of those giant eight legged monstrosities.
I honestly was never able to get into Lord of the Rings, despite multiple attempts. Epic fantasy is a hard sell for me; there’s a reason only two have ever been enjoyable to me. (Ladylord and Avatar: the Last Airbender, if you’re curious.) It doesn’t help that the whole fantasy world can not let Tolkien go, meaning that I’m just sick of hard-drinking dwarves, snooty elves, and Bland Blond Vaguely Northwest Medieval Europe settings in general.
(Yes, I know Tolkien actually did more worldbuilding than that. His imitators, not so much.)
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
All I can see online is that it is ‘privately owned’, and it’s a big house, so I would probably guess it’s been sold to successive families. Which is nice in its own way, I suppose.
@Falconer, the part that always confused me is he does have some names that get recycled without recycling the whole character. Like… Human with decent night vision Legolas.
I might be misremembering, because the Similarion was a bit mind numbing.
Still, it warms the cockles of my heart to know the balrog slayer was around, terrifying little elflings who thought they wanted to be warriors…
@LBT: Yeah, so many imitation elves and dwarves and everything is north Europe!
Books that do different make me happy. I still need to see a slovenly elf with his/her prissy dwarf minstrel friend…
@Contrapangloss:
Hissssss, have you somehow found my manuscript for: “Rude, Crude and Wearing Leaves“, the first amazing book in the pentalogy “Sword Kings Sword Sword”?
RE: contrapangloss
Yeah, so many imitation elves and dwarves and everything is north Europe!
I knoooooow it’s soooo BORING. I actually wrote the Princess and Her Monster out of sheer spite, wanting to set it somewhere very specific (North Tyrol, Italy) with very specific cultural influences (an alternate universe Judaea where the second temple never fell and the diaspora never happened) and a specific time period (the 13th century, before the advent of gunpowder).
That is how sick of the setting I am.
Oh dear, somebody mentioned the eagles thing. I sincerely wish Tolkien had written the eagles out of his world so that we wouldn’t have to listen to everyone on the internet bringing them up.
Heheh. But but but I have this theory!
Fibi, no. BUT NOW I WANT IT!
Hurry up and get it published, so I can get a copy.
(I know, it’s not that easy, but still…)
Well, and volcano smog and Mordor Shadow…it wasn’t exactly sunny and nice in Mordor. But presumably the Eye was equipped with infrared vision.
I’d like to know what sort of orogeny resulted in a mountain chain forming three sides of a square. Was Middle Earth floating on tectonic rectangles?
Shorter Lucy: I’m not an MRA, but I’m defending the MRM against mockery. I’m a feminist, but liberal feminists are man-hating communazis. David is a femmunazi Rush Limbaugh, says this closet dittohead.
So far, so tediously familiar. With extra polysyllabic word salad.
Memo to Bill Maher: If Rush Limbaugh is a comedian, he’s the worst comedian in the history of stand-up and deserves every one of the rotten tomatoes that gets thrown at him. And if you insist on defending him, don’t be surprised when some of those tomatoes get thrown at you.
Addendum to memo: If Rush Limbaugh is a comedian, then Dennis Miller is a comedian. Actually, Dennis Miller is the lamest comedian I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure. Back when I was getting blocked by alleged comedian @RushLimbaugh, I tweeted that if Dennis Miller is a comedian then I’m the queen of Venus, which provoked the expected hail of identical screamingly unfunny dittohead replies telling me that Dennis Miller is funnier than I’ll ever be because I’m a communazi libtard. Ha, ha, funny.
Re Tolkien: He was writing in the days when the rights of women and minorities were still universally considered dangerously radical ideas, about long-ago times when rights of any kind, much less for non-aristocrats, were not even a concept. I accept the values dissonance for what it is, while simultaneously keeping in mind how far we’ve come since then.
This woman is a fruit loop who is under the impression she’s an intellectual. The world is full of them. They have blogs just like the actually smart people do. What can you do, eh?
Keep up the valuable and laudable work, David.
Because she, like Lúthien and Elros, gave up her super speshul elf rights when she married Aragorn. Yeah, the gods are assholes like that.
Tolkien had to invent a vague “Original Sin” for the Men (which they don’t talk about) so that he can explain why the gods give so much little of a shit about them. Remember that, if it weren’t for Fëanor’s bullshit they would basically have abandoned Middle-Earth in the hands of Morgoth.
Well, it’s a setting where you can have a gigantic forest behind a rain shadow, and where minor gods can fuck up the weather with their sheer hate.
Quick comment: Tiffany Aching’s series is fantastic.
We’ve begun reading through it with our older daughters (for as long as I can manage a Wee Free brogue before my throat revolts) in the evenings.
/sidesteps out
Falconer
In 1917, people actually died from drowning on the battlefield at Passchendaele.
I’ll spare everyone the pictures. (I didn’t even go looking this time, I accidentally found some last week. Not keen to go there voluntarily.) I got this extract from http://www.battlefield-tours.com.au/html/ypres-menin-gate.html
I’m not usually into fanfic, but I’d read one about Eowyn going to live in a lesbian commune in Mirkwood.
Definitely sounds like this reviewer isn’t entirely familiar with the sort of evil that comes from the MRA. It’s almost as if he believes they’re just a peaceful rights group, like he just looked at the name Men’s Rights and thought, “oh my, how nice.”
Oops, meant she. Force of habit? Sadly.