Even though I run a blog with the deliberately ironic title “We Hunted the Mammoth,” I’m still regularly amazed by how eager men who’ve accomplished nothing of value in their entire lives are to claim a kind of vicarious credit, by virtue of being men, for everything good that we humans have accomplished here on planet earth.
Consider this astoundingly un-self-aware bit of almost literal we-hunted-the-mammothing from a recent A Voice for Men post, written (very, very badly) by Peter Wright and Paul Elam:
Harnessing men’s utility can be witnessed from the erection of Stonehenge to the Roman Empire to the moon landings. Cures for diseases and vaccines to prevent them happened from the intensely intelligent actions of the human male. Exploring new territories and engineering the transport to send people to new places has changed the world, almost all of it through risk and hardship borne by men. Men have driven civilization forward since we first walked away from the African savannah. Men’s blood, sweat, tears and sacrifices are the fuel rods that have always driven the big machine of our society.
So much passive voice! So many mixed metaphors! Can anyone explain to me how blood, sweat and tears (liquids) can be fuel rods (solids, specifically “long, slender, zirconium metal tube[s] containing pellets of fissionable material”)? Or how “sacrifices” (an abstract concept) fit into the mix?
I will give an official We Hunted the Mammoth Award of Artistry to anyone who can draw me a picture — or make a diagram — of Wright and Elam’s terrible paragraph.
Oh, in case anyone is wondering, the ultimate point of that Wright and Elam post is to try to convince troubled men not to go to therapists unless the therapists are wise to the alleged evils of “gynocentrism.” You know, the evil force that made men do all that hard work for the lazy women of the world, who apparently spent all of human history watching soap operas and complaining about the men who were doing all that exploring and engineering and utility-ing and intensely intelligent actioning for them.
If you are searching for a therapist make sure and ask one question: “Have you heard of gynocentrism?” If they haven’t walk away and don’t hire them. In fact be prepared to do so much walking away that your steps will number enough to walk around the entire planet three times.
Well, that last bit, however cringeworthy the prose, is probably true. Because blaming men’s problems on “gynocentrism” is not just psychological quackery, it’s a highly obscure form of psychological quackery.
What a strange way the folks at AVFM have of demonstrating “compassion for men and boys,” as their old slogan had it.
Also, I’m pretty sure that at some point in the development of human civilization, and possibly even before it, women did some things too.
@SFHC
Well played!
Holy fucking shit.
Like seriously, you’re going to want to sit down for this.
Over on ROK, Thomas Hobbes’ idea of gender equality is to implement government programs that forcefully kill, torture or injure women by the thousands. To “balance the books”. Seriously. Not a word of exaggeration. http://www.donotlink.com/feio
His answer to 5000 male workplace deaths is to kill 4900 women (a year).
His answer to 23,000 male road deaths is to run over 14,000 women (also per year), chosen via government lottery.
His answer to male depression and suicide is to implement a Department of Women’s Misery to drive women to suicidal thoughts, and if they still don’t kill themselves, random women will be shoved off bridges to “fill the 22,400 suicides deficit between the genders”.
His answer to the fact that most prisoners are male is to imprison any and every guilty woman for life, no matter her crime.
His answer to the 600,000 male homeless is to throw out 400,000 women onto the streets.
He cites that by age forty 85% of women have had kids compared to 75% of men, even though “both genders want kids the same amount”. His solution is to force 200,000 women a year to carry their husbands’ children.
Oh yeah, and to make up for all the menz that have died on wars over history, not only must women join the army but battles must be rigged so that 5,500 women die every year.
Out of everything that’s been published on ROK this is surely the most likely to be some horrible dark satire piece, but who the fuck knows any more? It’s Return of Kings. Besides…the comments are highly supportive of the idea of forcing women into awful situations in the name of “equality”. Several have suggested ideas of their own…
@ej I try to be really careful how I speak to little girls. I only have a few in my life (I’m around a lot of little boys, though). I don’t avoid complimenting them on outfits or new kit etc, but I try to make sure it’s balanced with other aspects. (Tough, good play, smart move, good team work, – I know them from rugby – mainly) I also try to ensure that I’m even-handed in the way I give out compliments, complimenting boys on their appearance as well when they’ve made the effort to look nice or have nice new rugby boots, etc.
@sunnysombrera: I’ve thought for a long time that all these guys want to “balance the scales” is eye-for-an-eye. At last, someone came out and said it.
sunnysombrera, that’s… we need a new word which means “awful”, but stronger. That’s disgusting. What’s even more disgusting is that people are supporting it.
Fuck these people. Fuck all these people. I can’t even. I was going to try to make a joke, but… blegh. I’m just not funny enough to cope with someone calling themselves after the father of modern governance theory advocating a project like this.
I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF THEY’RE JOKING OR NOT. I want to believe they’re not really serious, but at the same time I’m a believer of “out of the mouth the heart speaks” and…it just cuts way too close to similar shit ROK has written about before. Not to mention, I asked one of them in the comments how exactly this piece was satire and he said something about “it’s a parody of calls to equality” and that they’re “agreeing and amplifying”. It didn’t make any sense.
Foul. Abhorrent. Anathema. Abominable.
You could use “vile” if this one troll hadn’t worn it out a year ago. Anybody else remember him?
Oh my god, that was Steele, according to a quick Google. Well I wouldn’t win at Manboobz Commenter Trivial Pursuit, then.
@sunnysombrera
Thankfully I was lying down when I clicked the link, because oh god. Oh God. OH GOD.
To reduce gender inequality let’s not increase supportive services for men, advocate for better working conditions or increase road safety. Let’s kill women instead.
I think my brain just threw up. Then tried to climb out of my ears and soak itself in bleach so it could unlearn all it had just learned.
Some of the intensely intelligent actions of the human male:
http://www.dumpaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/men-in-a-swimming-pool.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mmBw3uzPnJI/TJnr2sTJYFI/AAAAAAABnss/P95iKiMA3Co/s1600/stupid_things_men_do_17.jpg
http://blog.rottenecards.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Dump12323.png
http://theplasticspoon.blogs.com/the_plastic_spoon/images/2008/03/27/impress_women_2.jpg
http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/shutterstock_91955981.jpg
For every Edison advancing civilization forward, there’s a hundred Johnny Knoxvilles dragging it backwards. One could argue that humanity has gotten to where it is in spite of alpha males, not because of them.
How many tear-soaked fuel rods does it take to cancel a mens’ rights conference?
@sunnysombrera – Wow…I know that’s surely satire, but it’s still pretty darned telling of the average RoK reader’s mindset. Instead of trying to make thing better for all the men suffering, the best solution is to make random women suffer in similar ways? Yup, that’ll work. When I was struggling with PPD, the only thing that would have made me feel better was knowing a man somewhere was being tormented on my behalf; who needs resources when you can inflict pain on an innocent bystander instead!
I wonder if Mr. Hobbes (what a devastatingly clever pen name, that) has thought out his solution and worked all of the kinks out. Surely he’s planning to rig his lotteries so that only women below a certain HB number end up getting culled. Wimmenz gotta suffer, but we can’t have the ever-shrinking boner-pleasin’ population decimated as a result.
And there must be some way to make sure that only the *right* women and men are producing the extra offspring. The RoK readership only wants a select segment of the population to increase by 200K every year, right? Think of the children!
*Shudders, spits*
It must be exhausting to be one of those guys. You have to concentrate on getting yours AND making sure that nobody else, anywhere, gets anything (and that any misfortune you encounter has to also be vested on someone else seventy times seven). For people so certain of their own innate superiority and so invested in meritocracy, they sure are insecure and vengeful.
Sunny,
I’m assuming that piece is libertarian satire meant to highlight the ridiculousness of government affirmative action type programs. However, it accidentally revealed their true feelings. As humor often does. They truly believe that a society with gender equality hurts men. In their minds government programs to hurt and kill women are actually analogous to programs that help women. It doesn’t occur to them that a better analogy to a program that helped women would be something like reforming the criminal justice so there are fewer people in prison for non-violent crimes or putting more money into housing for the homeless. Two things that as an evil big government loving feminazi ess jay dubya, I know I’d be all for.
But to them, loss of privilege is oppression and they’re more worried about that than they are any problem that disproportionately effects men. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this “satire” in the manosphere. As usual, it never lands because it highlights their own ridiculousness and their desire to harm women rather than highlighting any problems with feminism.
… But don’t forget, it’s feminists who want to kill 90% of men. Because a single non-feminist probable-troll’s words reflect more on feminism than a hundred card-carrying completely-serious MRAs’ words reflect on MRActivism.
*headdesk*
Wow, that RoK piece is absolutely loathsome. As long as we’re engaging in tit-for-tat, how about we even up the childbirth mortality gap, fellas? And the civilian war casualty gap, and the sex trafficking gap, and the wage gap, and the domestic violence homicide gap…
The only thing more idiotic than engaging with a straw argument is attempting to parody it. You just end up with a turducken of horribleness stuffed inside WTFery.
Man, that Get a Brain! Morans one is a classic.
@Falconer:
“Foul” refers to the area outside a city’s walls. “Anathema” has unpleasant religious connotations. “Abominable” demeans the noble Yeti. I’m going to go with “abhorrent.” Thanks for the thesaurussage.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
Just one, but it needs to book itself in as a speaker at that conference.
“How many tear-soaked fuel rods does it take to cancel a conference?”
None! It was the Jews!
One more funny “Alpha male” to lighten the mood:
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3555/3462246191_6f68ffa6dc.jpg
That’s what kills me about this: they blather on and on and on the fuck on about “men die in wars!!”
Yeah, how many of the 150,000 plus civilians (and we don’t even know how many, because we didn’t even bother *counting*) that we killed in Iraq were women? Hmm?
Hey, maybe he’s on to something! For every civilian woman killed, we execute one male legislator. It would sure fix the gerrymandering problem quick.
@sunnysombrera
Funny how this kind of thinking from them never stretches to other groups. Why not call for the mass imprisonment of white people to make up for all the poc who get disproportionately arrested for minor crimes, for example.
“Highest form of patriotic” WHAT, Mr. Descenter?
I wonder what happened to bottom half of the Tea Party Patriot’s costume? His buff and blue jacket and tricorne are okay, and he’s got a waistcoat (worn over a t-shirt, but whatevs). And then below the sign he’s got rolled-up khakis, black dress socks, and lace-up shoes. I guess the rental ensemble didn’t include breeches or period shoes and he had to improvise.
Oh, cut him some slack, Flying Mouse. It’s obviously Baby’s First Cosplay.
Another intensely intelligent alpha male
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/stupid-idiot-man-men-guything-03.jpg
The best part, given the manosphere’s anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering tendencies, is where that image came from and the accompanying article. http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/12/12/study-supports-the-theory-that-men-are-idiots/
>I will give an official We Hunted the Mammoth Award of Artistry to anyone who can draw me a picture — or make a diagram — of Wright and Elam’s terrible paragraph.
http://i.imgur.com/pp4AXyY.jpg Had a go