[UPDATE 2: Pogo now says his misogynistic posts were an “experiment.” For my take on this, see here.]
[UPDATE: Pogo has taken down several of the blog posts mentioned in this post. I have replaced the links to the vanished posts with links to archived versions.]
So you know that dude Pogo, who makes all those amazingly perky-yet-somehow-also-ethereal music/video mashups using snippets of old Disney movies and the like?
Turns out he’s a bit of a misogynistic dickbag.
Yep. On his Pogomix blog, Nick Bertke (his real name) has been posting a bunch of tiresome and achingly unoriginal rants about feminism and the alleged privileges of women that might as well have been cut and pasted from the Men’s Rights subreddit or A Voice for Men.
In “Why We Should Envy Women” he argues that “[d]espite what all these feminists talk about, women actually have things pretty damn good. Better than men, I would say.”
He presents a little list of ways he thinks women have it better than men; it’s an assortment of MRA clichés, a sort of mashup (yep) of Warren Farrell and Girl Writes What, as filtered through a million crappy blogs.
– You are naturally endowed with a more valuable, sought after and artistically favorable body.
– At the bat of an eye, you can be excused from accountability regardless of the magnitude of your actions.
– At 18, you lose the protective status of the child but retain the protective status of the female. …
– Society excuses you from needing to work and says all you need is a hard working and generous man. …
– You are granted the rights of a democracy without the burdens of military service.
The creepiest item on the list is undoubtedly this one:
– You can give the opposite sex a thrashing when the person deserves it.
That’s right: the guy who created the gorgeous “Alice” and the charmingly catchy “Upular” envies women’s alleged ability to beat up their boyfriends without consequence, apparently wishing he could do the same to women when they “deserve it.”
Seemingly channeling the “red pill wisdom” of the internet’s self-proclaimed masters of “Game,” Bertke goes on to explain that women are basically overgrown children needing the “discipline” of a firm father figure.
I’ve always found that the more I treat a woman like a child, the stronger the relationship, the better the sex and the more often it happens. Discipline, reprimand and complete indifference. I think the feminine woman craves the attributes of a firm father in the man she enters a relationship with. The more I realize it, the more I see modern feminism in a different light – it could well be little more than the collective feminine cry for drama and childlike retaliation.
Sigh. He seems to have turned this rant, or portions of it, into a video. (I could only make it through about 30 seconds before my annoyance got the better of me and I turned it off.) [UPDATE: He’s deleted the video.]
In “5 Things I’ve Learned About The Real World,” Bertke urges his readers to, yep, “take the red pill for a minute,” and offers more, er, insights into women’s alleged desire for “fatherly order.”
A lot of women you meet, feminists in particular, will preach that you are the source of their failures and womanly strife. This won’t stop them from playing powerless, and they’ll insist that you roll up your sleeves and rescue them from their mysterious bonds. The collective female cry for fatherly order requires that you as a man are expected to make the world spin.
As you may have noticed, Bertke’s prose is not quite as elegant as his songs. He can’t even keep his metaphors straight.
In “Where Feminism Goes Wrong,” he informs us that “inequality is a door that swings both ways but feminism by definition and in practice treats it as a one way street.” (Here’s an archived copy of the post in case he takes it down too.)
Yep. Inequality is somehow both a door and a street.
He goes on to declare that:
Feminism is taken prisoner by too many women and re-branded as a self entitling social status posing as a humanitarian ideology. There’s really only two possible explanations for why feminism has become a bait and switch: 1. Feminism is revealing its self to be a camouflaged push for gender supremacy, or 2. Feminists just aren’t doing a very good job of communicating their true cause.
There’s actually a third explanation, more convincing than the first two, which is that Nick Bertke has no fucking clue what he’s talking about.
Misogynistic outbursts are apparently not a new thing for Bertke. Last spring, after erratic behavior on his part led some of his fans to worry that he might be undergoing some sort of breakdown, one Redditor reported that “some fans and friends close to Nick that have stated that he’s done something similar in the past, going on a rude, sometimes misogynistic rant and basically acting like a 12 year old … .”
It’s always disappointing to find out that someone whose work you enjoy and admire is a shitty person. Alas, he’s far from the first talented musician to turn out to be a woman-hating asshole.
Bertke, dude, stick to sampling other people’s words. Your own words are terrible.
H/T — @Metz77 on Twitter, who alerted me to Pogo’s asshattery.
EDIT: Reworded a couple of things.
@Bina
If you don’t mind a 52yo technogeek I’ll volunteer to be your man. 😉
Sunnysombrera — http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/1996/96sec2.pdf — start on page 19. It’s not exactly recent data, but it’s the legally viable stats and a VERY broad definition for “false” (pretty much, if the cops decided the report was unfounded, in the “8% of rape reports are unfounded” bin it went)
Definitions — http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/handbook/ucrhandbook04.pdf — pages 26 and 84
Of particular note here is that these are reports, not arrests, it’d be damned hard to come up with reliable numbers as to how many false reports end in an false arrest (given the low rate of arrests in rape cases, the words “not that fucking many” come to mind). RAINN should have the arrest data if you want it.
@ Sunnysombrera
One thing we see a lot as lawyers is a story about a ‘change in the law’ that turns out to be nothing of the sort. This seems to be the case here. I could bore you to tears with some lengthy tome on Section 75 of the Sexual Offences Act and the difference between ‘legal burden’ and ‘evidential burden’ (If you think ‘mansplaining is bad, with til you hear ‘barristersplaining’) but I’ll just put it like this:
If you say that you didn’t commit an armed robbery because you were at home watching TV, the police will ask you what you were watching. If you cant give an answer to that, the jury are entitled to be a bit suspicious.
@Mouse Farts:
Is he channelling stereotypical Victorian fathers?
I wonder if Mr “Discipline, reprimand andcomplete indifference” also cries about how unfair it is that mothers “always” get custody.
@WatermelonSugar:
I couldn’t help noticing that all of those were the flipside of a coin that women don’t want or are just plain not true.
Yes, no woman has ever been imprisoned or murdered for oh I don’t know just standing up for herself and not being sufficiently meek. Also, all men throughout history have been suitably dealt with when they’ve done something wrong such as oh I don’t know murdering a woman for getting uppity.
Society says you must marry a man and not take a job because that is unbecoming of a lady.
You are not allowed to serve in the military. And yet, no matter how many times you claim women only want the ‘cushy’ jobs they are actually asking to be allowed to do traditionally male-dominated roles, even those you personally do not like. Complete equality, with all of the joys and all of the burdens. You idiot.
Ah yes, that’s why the most famous nude masterpiece in all of art history portrays a woman.
I mean, uh… wait…
What I meant to say is that there really haven’t been that many male nudes throughout art history, you know?
I mean… crap… hang on, I’ll be back…
Every time I read this popular manospherian myth, I poke my head outside my office to see if my queue of rich eligible suitors has arrived yet so I can select which one is going to sweep me off my feet and carry me away into a life free from troublesome things like “independence” and “financial responsibility”.
No sign of them yet!
@tinyorc:
hahahaha. Indeed, there’ve been one or two.
Never heard of this guy before, but I guess it’s one more person I need to keep in mind not to discover.
Someone in the other thread said we find a person with the last name “Stac” and encourage them to become a Cats Rights Activist. When I couldn’t sleep last night I spent hours imagining stories from the “A Voice For Cats” website. Could not stop giggling.
I don’t understand this at all. I mean, I can kind of see how, say, Thunderf00t would transition from ranting about one group of people he didn’t like (unscientific religious folk) to another group of people he didn’t like (women). I can see how any given, “Kids these days / What’s wrong with the world” blogger might transition into full-fledged Red Pill malarkey, should he become convinced it’s a big enough problem.
But I cannot fathom what would make a professional musician, admired for lovely remixes of children’s movies, decide it was a good idea to launch into a misogynistic rant on his official, self-promotion platforms. People turn to him for pretty music, not ragey opinion pieces. I mean, even if he wasn’t arguing for anything skeezy, that’s just bad branding.
But I guess hatred has a habit of elbowing logic out of the way.
“…inequality is a door that swings both ways…”
This is some Animal Farm shit right here.
We are all equally unequal!
WE ARE ALL EQUALLY UNEQUAL!
All animals are unequal, but no animals are more unequal than others because WE ARE ALL EQUALLY UNEQUAL except that life is totally way easier for bitches amirite fellas.
I can only say that this man has never lived with children, has children which makes his mashups of children’s cartoons vaguely disturbing. The kind of discipline he’s talking about is utterly ineffectual, what a tosser.
Eleventy-millionthed: What a buffoon.
And: Good Morning, Mammothers!
Here’s my fire.
https://imgflip.com/gif/h06vy
It’s what I’m doing, like, every morning when I post.
Pogo was John Wayne Gacy’s name when he dressed as a clown. Just say’n. He named himself after a serial rapist and murderer. Accident? Probably not.
Like many other commenters I am utterly revolted by the thought of an adult man treating a woman like a child and as a consequence the sex is better! That is so vile, but does sound like standard MRA fare, which he has trotted out chapter and verse.
Maybe the timing coincides with a relationship break up – but whatever the case I agree that he will see an income drop, which will serve him right.
Andy Rehfeldt is someone else who does something (not quite – beware his metal covers!) similar – so any previous Pogo fans might like to check him out. Let’s hope he does not go the bitter MRA route eh!
Well, yes, women’s bodies are quite beautiful. Evidently this guy has never seen any photos of men who are absolutely gorgeous, Downside to that is they are being objectified just like women are. Also, beauty is what each of us finds to be beautiful. I find Rob Zombie to be delectable even without his costumes.
“You are granted the rights of a democracy without the burdens of military service.”
His Youtube bio says he grew up in New Zealand and now lives in the Philippines. New Zealand has had a fully integrated armed forces for 14 years now, servicewomen can be sent to the frontlines and join the NZ SAS. A quick check finds the Philippines didn’t use to allow women in at all but has for a generation, with a woman (Captain Luzviminda Camacho) leading their UN mission to Haiti.
So he can’t be talking about those two countries. He also can’t be talking about the US where he does a lot of business, US servicewomen have been seeing combat in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade (and dying and being maimed for it). And he definitely can;t mean a draft in either country since what draft?
Then again, before he took his blog entry down, he said “It’s the reason why women aren’t given as much power in social and political forums” which means he has to cover his ears every time the Filipino media talks about the Chief Justice, the Justice Secretary, the Health Secretary, the Secretary for Labour, and various commissions.
Poverty is a double-edged sword but community organizers want to treat it like a one-way ticket!
@Lea:
Er … maybe?
Also, do I not pay enough attention, or do we have multiple fresh faces around here?
Hi! Come in! Make yourselves comfortable!
Scroll up (or down, maybe) until you see the candle in the right sidebar. It’s your link to your fabulous new Welcome Package! So in case you don’t yet know what’s up with the penguins in Spanx, or why all our chairs are hard as rocks, click away and all will be made clear.
I’m REALLY hoping it had to more to with Walt Kelly….
That’s a really nice fire, proxieme! My kids would approve, the little firebugs.
By now I’m pretty sure “the better the sex” means “she finally stopped wanting to do stuff that makes her feel good, but is work and hard for me and it’s finally all about MY Boner whenever I WANT.” Because she’s afraid of triggering more abuse and it’s futile anyway. Good job, asshole.
Instead of… you know… a mutual pleasurable experience where you give and get.
Prolly TMI, but I find it’s an enjoyable experience to give orgasms, muscle cramps and all.
I shake my head at people who think sex is all about themselves.