Richard Dawkins, I think it’s fair to say, is a bit of a dick. Though he’s an expert popularizer of science he seems to be a bit of a blithering idiot on every other topic he tries to address; his broadsides on religion are patronizing and profoundly ignorant, and his forays into gender politics are even more cringey.
He puts his foot in his mouth so often on Twitter that it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between his real account and this absurdist parody.
In a recent interview, he doubled down on some of his most appalling earlier remarks, reaffirming that he believes there is such a thing as “mild pedophilia” and that pregnant women who discover that they are carrying a Down syndrome fetus should probably “abort and try again.” And in that interview he reminded us all again just why so many feminist atheists have turned against him, telling his interlocutor that
I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something … .
ELEVATORGATE – NEVER FORGET!
Given how often he comes down on the wrong side on gender issues — heck, he recently suggested to his fans that they follow “Based Mom” Christina Hoff Sommers on Twitter — you might assume he would have a certain degree of fondness for the upside-down-and-backwards politics of the Men’s Rights movement.
But you’d be wrong.
At a recent event at Kennesaw State University – yep, the same place where a student organization tied to A Voice for Men held a little conference not long ago – Dawkins offered a surprising, if somewhat limited, defense of feminism. And he reacted with puzzlement when he was asked about the Men’s Rights movement.
“I didn’t, I hardly knew — is there a men’s right movement?” he commented. “If there is discrimination against men, then that’s bad too,” he conceded, only to add that “I haven’t heard of it.”
The audience responded with laughter.
To AVFM head boy Paul Elam, this was the equivalent of shots fired. In a post today, Elam excoriated Dawkins for not having heard of his little movement, and not being aware of the terrible gynocentric injustices being heaped upon the world’s men.
Richard Dawkins has not heard of discrimination toward men? Really? Sorry, Richard, but please tell me this is because you have invented human teleportation and have managed to remain in an academic setting constantly for the past several years. Tell me that you have so successfully avoided the real world that you are unaware of the ongoing problems of fathers and children in family courts, the egregious and blatant discrimination against men in criminal sentencing, and the transparent sexual double standards applied against males in the domestic violence and sexual assault industries. Perhaps you have actually done so well with insulating yourself that you have managed to exist completely within the walls of interdisciplinary studies departments, lest you may have actually heard of the loss of due process for young men now rampant across college campuses. Or maybe it was harder to notice, even for the great scientist-skeptic, because there are so few young men left?
Yeah, I’m sure that’s it, Paul. Dawkins can’t find any male students to talk to.
That is the problem with living the insulated life. Not only do you end up making foil-hat-worthy observations that translate to ideology being good for science, but eventually the insulation becomes so thick, so protective and muffling, that whatever tiny spark remains in the wire is of little use to science or to society.
Says the man who lives in an ideological bubble of his own making. The irony, it burns.
This is priceless, PRICELESS.
Tickets, where can I get tickets? I need tickets!
Bina, ^^ I considered that also!! How about ‘Cherry Picking Non-feminist’?
I know it’s not the main point here, but is anyone else hung up on the human teleportation thing?
When the hell did that happen?
Also, he’s aware that cars exist, and that the UK also has an array of public transport options which one could use to leave one’s ivory tower and mingle with the proles? No teleportation needed.
Heavens, you’re asking Lord High Dickie to mix with the proles? What a terrible, terrible idea.
Dagnabbit, bina, I was trying to eat my dinner! Now I have to figure out a way to get partially chewed broccoli out of my keyboard!
“Booey-hooey man tears!” indeed! I did not need salad in my nasal cavities!!!
(and I will be singing this for the rest of the evening, probably. We need the rest of the lyrics!)
Hello! Me again!
I’ve been thinking a lot about this site for some reason. And I wanted to say, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!! so much! This site has helped enormously. Initially, i thought this site was bad, but have no come to realize it is good. Very good!
In fact, I believe this site is literally one of the best things that has happened for the Men’s Rights Movement.
Why? Because it is so incredibly misleading.
Like most people, the only thing I had ever heard about Mra’s is that they are fedora wearing misogynists who can’t get a date and are a hate group.
Because that is all I ever heard, I had no reason to question it. I just assumed this site’s portrayal of the movement was accurate. When I saw it quoted in news sites, I assumed those quotes were accurate. Because Mras had become so incredibly demonized, I became curious to see what it was all about.
Who are these misogynists I wondered? So I began looking at AVoiceForMen, in the same way I sometimes read Fox news out of curiosity, to see what ‘the opposition’ is up to.
When I did, I discovered it was 99% NOT like it is portrayed here. I discovered that i actually agreed with most of what was being said. The degree to which this site gets Mra’s wrong is staggering. Cherry picking random comments and acting as if that is in anyway whatsoever indicative of the movement as a whole. I’m sure the readers are decent, honest people, but the person making these posts must know how absurdly deceptive and misleading they are.
When I first realized how incredibly different Mra’s were to how they have been portrayed, it just made me that much more curious. If they had not been demonized, I probably wouldn’t have cared that much one way or the other. I most likely would never have even looked into them at all.
But because they have been demonized, I became very interested. The more research I did the more interesting (and not like this site portrays) I realized it was.
So thank you thank you thank you! Keep doing what you are doing! Please keep helping the Men’s Rights Movement grow! The more you slander and mischaracterize this peaceful, loving movement, the more appealing it is becoming to liberal, non masculine men like myself, who otherwise wouldn’t have thought twice about mra’s.
(and I know no one here gives a shit about it, but here is my website once again! GenderAllies.org In the very off chance someone here wants to see what sort of things Mras ACTUALLY say.)
Just this morning on the train, I was showing a coworker the hilarious Tumblr post about “Christmas Adam” and found out she didn’t know about MRAs. She was a bit incredulous at first but now understands MRAs are terrible, terrible people.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Puddleglum sez:
Technically it didn’t. It changed the first three periods into the ellipsis character and kept the fourth period a period. In many typefaces, including the one for the theme here, an ellipsis looks significantly different than a period.
WordPress also automatically converts “Wordpress” to “WordPress”, switches straight quotes to curly quotes, and changes two dashes to an en-dash (-– → –) and three dashes to an em-dash (-–– → —). You can prevent it from doing many of these substitutions by adding empty HTML tags between the characters. Like “..<em></em>.” will give you “...” instead of “…”. Just remember that any sequence of three periods gets converted to the ellipsis, so you have to break them all up into twos or ones.
(It would be nice to have a preview feature here to check this.)
Sorry about the typos btw. I realize you might mock them endlessly…but oh well! If you do, it only shows you don’t have any better arguments to make. (I’m sure many here do have decent arguments, but the ones who don’t seem most outspoken. A problem with many movements, not just this one)
… I think you and me have vast and irreconcilable differences in our definitions of peaceful and loving.
If you’re going to AVFM wear flowers in your hair?
Glad to have been of service, or at least in the service of amusement.
Speaking of which:
No, we’re going to mock the general blinkered stoopid in which those typos are merely a condiment. Because this is a mockery site. Sez so right in the header.
I just wonder who’s gonna throw the first peanut.
Meh, it’s so clearly an attempt to bait, including that bit of ham-fisted attempt at snark insurance (“if you correct me, instead of taking me super-seriously, it only proves that I’m right and you’re a poopy head!!”) that it hardly seems worth bothering.
Oh, where are the trolls of yesteryear?
Can we lure them back? Maybe start a conversation about dolls and sexbots?
I totally believe the Christopher Allman was not an MRA before all of us meanie pants feminists converted him. That’s an incredibly plausible story. I also completely buy that he is a progressive and because he likes the MRM now, that must mean it’s a very human rightsy movement aligned with progressive values.
This is a true fact. Just as it is a true fact that Boudica was from Germany.
I blame katz for this. She said she wouldn’t mind smacking this imbecile around a bit more! 😛
Nathan Hevenstone
“GamerGate is a more recent discussion, as one of the very few places I hang out in is frequented by a lot of gamers, and a number of them have told me that GamerGate basically made them feminists.”
Wow that is incredibly good news HAHAHA
Okay, folks, lift up your hands and say it with me three times:
“DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH!”
“DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH!”
“DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH!”
The Keystone Cops levels of incompetence on display from the gamergate dudes warms the cockles of my heart, it really does.
Did it work?
Mikey, come back! He was so funny.
I still just can’t even with the whole gamergate crowd. They all remind me of my brother when he went through his 11s and 12s. He’d been a pretty cool kid up till that point, but for those two or so years, I just wanted to chain him up in the basement until he managed to grab hold of his humanity and stop being such a rancid little shit all the time.
Oh, but shut up, Woody.
They’re not even fun to play with because they just repeat the same talking points over and over again.
christopher allman is like a four-year-old who thinks the “Rabbit Season!” “Duck Season!” bit from that old Bugs Bunny cartoon is an actual example of how reverse psychology is supposed to work, isn’t he?