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.
So speaking of books we’re going to write, as my daily act of misandry a couple weeks ago I came up with a story I will probably never actually write titled “Reverse Misogyny” because not using the word misandry is misandy. Basically some dude who is tangetial to whatever the actual plot is going to be gets castrated to provide motivation and humanity for the female protagonist. Because I am sick to fucking death of women solely to be raped to provide motivation and humanity to male protagonists.
…Women *existing* solely…
The blogger discussed in the OP cracks me up. They demonstrate that they don’t know or understand what MRAs and MRMs are all about, what Rush Limbaugh stands for or what feminism is. Gosh, I just hate it when people don’t research the topics they’re writing about. It almost seems like they don’t care about looking stupid and uninformed.
Hey, has anyone here ever read a certain Harlan Ellison short story (which became a film about a boy and his dog), and fantasized about an alternative story in which a female protagonist saves her telepathic feline friend by feeding her the remains of a male villain?
It could be bunnies.
(Why yes, I do like to cross fandoms, why do you ask?)
To be completely honest, I’m not really a Tolkien fan. In the books, I’d get characters confused with each other because their names are so similar, and would get six pages along before realizing the person I was reading about wasn’t the one I thought I was.
I gain more faith in this site based simply on the fact that each and every one of the many people who’ve told me you’re dishonest or somehow misrepresenting MRAs so totally fail to come up with a single example backing this up. It’s a mix of hilarious and genuinely frightening how readily they’ll change the subject and utterly refuse to acknowledge it ever came up as soon as they are challenged to provide any substantive proof for any accusation they’ve made.
I love the idea of Bombadil skipping his way into Mordor. The Orcs would have been completely freaked out.
Been a few years since my latest reading of LotR; I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it. Whenever I was in the mood for fantasy, I’d read everything else I had first, and finish with it, because nothing could beat it. I wasn’t even thinking about problematic elements, or rather, aware of them (I first read it in my teens). Don’t know if I’d even think about them now; I tend to think of it in its own context, not in the real world’s, if that makes sense. The depth, the sense of solidity and thousands of years – uncounted years – of history in those books are things I’ve never felt in any other fantasy.
Welcome package received and assimilated. I shall avoid ableism and paying female penguins for sex.
Thank you kindly. This is the kind of welcoming service you just don’t get elsewhere!
Thanks also for welcomes to Anarchonist and LBT. Should have read whole thread before posting above comment!
Belated Welcome, Gallogly!
I really hate what the movies did to Faramir. They totally destroyed him And for it’s time, Eowyn is really feminist. She was the first strong woman I ever read about.
That’s a major reason I didn’t want to see the films too, gilshalos. Faramir’s my favourite character and I hated what they did to him. Mind you I hated everything I’ve seen from the films, except the look of the Ents.
OT: Sophia Loren in 1961, not the sort of photo one usually sees of her! 🙂
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/33200000/Sophia-Loren-photographed-by-Alfred-Eisenstaedt-1961-sofia-loren-33225244-500-680.png
The first movie in the trilogy is awesome. It matches the book totally (apart from leaving out Tom Bombatil) It gave me such hope for them…then in the other two they go off track and mess stuff up.
How did you have the patience for this one David? At least with other annoying things you deal with on here, it’s for a good cause. This was really super duper annoying.
“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.”
Technically i think it’s the same Original Sin as humans have in Christian doctrine – men first appear “flying from disaster in the East” – scattering either from Eden, in effect, or from the Tower of Babel disaster, given that Middle Earth much, much later morphed into Europe. All the rational beings, and Middle Earth with them, are in some degree Fallen (which is also mainstream doctrine: St Ambrose IIRC says somewhere that if Fauns exist and are rational they must be fallen too, but that it’s not clear whether they do exist).
It’s interesting that Tolkien places the drowned forests where he does, because under the North Sea is a vast expanse of drowned forest and stone-age settlements all the way from here to Scandinavia, called “Doggerland” – bits get hauled up in trawler nets all the time. But I doubt people knew about it when he was writing.
In the mid-1960s Mr Bluecat was studying Classical Chinese and Tibetan at Oxford. He and a friend who was studying Sanscrit and Pali founded the Obscure Languages Appreciation Society purely so they could invite Tolkien (who had just retired from teaching but was still a Senior Common Room member) to be the president – you had to have a Senior as president.
Mr B was invited to the house to take tea with Professor T and talk it over, and returned not knowing whether or not Tolkien had agreed, because he not only had an inpenetrable hyper-RP accent, he also never took his pipe from between his teeth except when drinking tea.
It was the same apparently with his lectures: it was said that the university published his Beowulf lecture (which revolutionised the study of Anglo-Saxon) so that people who had attended could find out what he’d said.
He did agree (Mr B had to write to check), and was very helpful. His schtick was that everything in LoTRs was merely translated by him from obscure sources (the Red Book of The Shire, for example, which gets referred to in the Appendices), so if anyone asked a tricky question he’d say “The sources are silent on that important question”.
He was a gent.
MRA’s are mostly self mocking but a bit extra never goes amiss.
As a man (the last time I checked) I can’t see the point of “the movement” (unless it’s a well needed pooh) and mocking is a valid response to their nonsense.
I didn’t like any of the look of the film, and I was appalled at how they chose Hugo Weaving to play the extraordinarily beautiful Elrond. I have my own very clear images of most of the characters, have for years, so I was never going to be pleased with any film, but this one … oy.
I did like the way Martin Freeman looked as Bilbo in The Hobbit, but I wouldn’t watch that (them, rather) either, and I didn’t even like the book that much!
Tolkien and his pipe – that reminds me of a description of his pipe-lighting ritual as “a pyrotechnic display in honour of Bryant and May”. 😀
I quite liked Hugo Weaving as Elrond, but that depends on your individual views on male beauty.
I like WHTM because I think it is important to know what the enemy are doing, but I find it far too depressing to read pages and pages of discussion about hurting women in various ways. This blog makes it far more palatable, and very entertaining.
gilshalos, yes, for me “Hugo Weavng” and “male beauty” do not go together at all. 😀
Not that I can think of any actor, off the top of my head, who’d do. Elrond was probably the most beautiful (male) person in Middle-Earth at that time, with his Maia-Elven-Human descent. Arwen Undomiel was so beautiful she was described as Luthien Tinuviel reborn.
Do you get that thing of wanting to know more about minor characters in stories, especially ones who hardly get mentioned before they’re gone? I feel that way about Dior, Elrond’s grandfather, Luthien and Beren’s son.
Yeah, I know. Still vague in text and only mentioned once or twice. Still doesn’t excuse the utter indifference Arda has towards them. “Congradulations, you are the inheritors of Middle-Earth! But oops, one of our own has fucked up the place, and we won’t do a thing about it. Have fun being oppressed by unspeakable evil until the end of time!”
I like the alternate reading of LOTR, but I can’t stomach Sauron/Saruman as people’s heroes when they’re clearly another type of dictator.
I thought up an alternative version: Allatar and Pallando were sent to Harad and Rhun as missionaries to convert the people of the East/South to the cause; maybe they “failed” because they realized how these people drew the shitty lot and Sauron actually looked like a better fucking alternative next to the ever-indifferent Valar. So they stayed there to guide them into becoming a force capable of overthrowing the elf-worshippers of Gondor in the future.