Honey Badger Legal Strategy Hampered by Propensity of Time to Run Forwards

I read “parent” in the sense that the Honey Badger Brigade was an offshoot of AVFM (which it was) rather than than in the sense that they’re a chapter of AVFM (which it appears that Elam also says they’re not, ish.)

You’re right that Pless could have been clearer and that her language can be read ambiguously. However, accusing her of being dishonest is a fairly strong and offensive term. The term implies that she knew the truth and she avoided it out of malice, which I think we both accept was not the case here.

I get that you’re a fan of the Honey Badgers, and while that means you’re my ideological enemy that doesn’t mean that we can’t be nice about it. In particular, I know that Pless reads this forum sometimes, and it would mean a lot to me if you would apologise and take back your repetition of the Honey Badgers’ accusation of dishonesty.

After that, you’re welcome to stay around and chat about cats and video games if you like.

Thank you.

Having more feminists on the show still wouldn’t change that MRA views are toxic.

which MRA views are toxic?

i’m not joking, I think a lot of feminists don’t know much about MRA views. Even the ones on this website

@orange tango drinker – I’ve only had time to skim through this thread as its grown, but I wanted to pop in and say that your ability to keep things civil and to change course when presented with conflicting information is heartening.

This is how ideological opponents can have constructive conversations.

@orange tango drinker

I wrote an essay about that question actually. Let me retrieve it.

This is in answer to a message I received, and grew to essay length. I am unapologetic about my longwindedness.

I was born with a penis and a Y chromosome, and for these reasons my parents decided to raise me as male. I’ve questioned my sexuality and my kink extensively, but not my gender: inasmuch as “male” has a meaning, I seem to be one. I’m very fortunate that I currently live in a society which allows people to question their gender and to explore concepts such as intergender and queer, and I’m even more fortunate that I was born to a comfortable enough existence to have the privilege to do such things without getting beaten up or shunned. While I have an immense respect for those who do, personally, I’ve never felt the need to identify as any other gender.

This does not mean that because I identify as male, I mean the same things by the word as anyone else does. I don’t care about the football, I really don’t. I will politely pretend to follow the rugby and the cricket because I’m of a culture which is expected to do so, but politeness is as far as it goes. I’ve never owned an Xbox or fired a gun, and I hope to go my entire life without doing either. I choose not to grow a beard, and only in the last few years began to cut my hair short. I choose not to engage in aggressive testosterone-measuring contests during conversation. I do not regard my career as being something that I can “win.” I have no difficulty feeling or discussing my emotions, and have been known to cry when upset. In short, I may not fit anyone else’s definition of a typical man.

This is where I differ from a lot of people: I don’t see these as being intrinsically male traits. I see them as being traits that men in our society are taught, from a very young age. The difference between the two is subtle but significant: we’re taught as boys that we should aspire to develop some traits and shun others, while girls are taught that they should develop and shun different traits. Boys are trained to compete against one another, not to feel emotions, and to have wish-fulfilment power fantasies based around money, violence and dominance. Girls, meanwhile, are trained differently (I wasn’t raised as one so I can’t speak for what they’re taught). In neither case are we given a choice. In neither case are we asked to consent to the role that we’re being trained for.

Consent, as every good citizen knows, is key. And this is why I reject both the concept of gender roles in their entirety, and also the concept of the men’s rights movement.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my experience it wasn’t women who brought me up to deny my own feelings and see obedience and discipline as admirable. It wasn’t women who taught the “boys will be boys” attitude of laxity towards violence. It wasn’t women who portrayed sex as being a matter of doing something to someone rather than doing something with them. These are things that men teach one another. We act as distant, unapproachable fathers because that’s what our fathers were like. We act aggressively towards our friends because that’s what boys do. We hide our weaknesses from people who admire us, and so they learn that admitting to one’s weaknesses is a fault.

I wasn’t bullied as a child because I had my growth spurt hard and early and so I was always one of the bigger kids, but I’ve seen people get bullied, and it isn’t a thing inflicted on boys from without. It’s a thing we do to one another, a sickness of our society that never gets cured because we don’t see it as a problem.

That sickness has a very simple core: we see being male as an all-or-nothing affair. You are either strong and silent and motivated by power, or you are a faggot. You are either heterosexual and strong and smart and cruel, or you are a sissy. You are either obedient and disciplined and aggressive, or you need to man up and grow a pair. At no point do we allow ourselves to take a step back and look at the entire list of traits that we’ve been trained to display, and pick and choose our own definition of being male from it. We keep each other in line, but more importantly we keep ourselves in line. We’ve been taught to panic at anything which differs from the script even slightly, as if losing one of the list of traditional male attributes necessarily means that we’re no longer allowed to excel – or even participate – in another. There’s a very telling word for this: emasculation. If we see a man in a movie who’s henpecked by his wife, or who panics at the sight of blood, or who owns a smaller car than his neighbour, we think of him as being somehow less of a man, and start to suspect him of vacillating in all the other male traits too.

This is a suicide pact. It’s madness. It’s absurdity. I will have no part in it. More importantly, I will have no part of any movement which does not recognise that this is not inflicted by any outside agency. We are not an oppressed group. This is a self-inflicted poison.

This is why I reject the concept of the men’s rights movement. We do not need to win rights. We have all the rights we need. We have no enemy apart from ourselves. What we need to do is to release one another from the suicide pact. You get to be male, I get to be male, your sons and my sons get to be male, and none of us get to dictate what being male means to anyone else. We need to stop treating maleness as being an all-or-nothing affair, and start behaving as though it’s a la carte.

Orange Tango Drinker

Of course you could find some feminists saying reprehensible shit. That has been discussed numerous times on this website, and David tells us sometimes that he has both banned feminist commenters for violent language and the like.

However, this is a few drops in an entire ocean of compassionate, thoughtful and respectful people we call feminism.

MRAs constantly accuse us and other feminists of ‘cherry picking,’ and whether you consider yourself one or simply similar, or even not at all, you are exactly the same in this regard. This has been discussed, debunked, and mocked already. David is not ‘cherry picking.’ Go onto any MRA site. Look at the posts- practically all of them contain bile and hate. Are we cherry picking a few bad article-writing apples (cherries?) No, because look at the comments. They all contain the same bile.

Here’s a challenge- Your charge we are ‘cherry picking’ would be much more plausible if you could just name for us 3 MRAs who are not misogynists. Mammotheers have asked this of numerous trolls, and they never, ever, provide us with what we’ve asked for. David chronicles the true nature of the MRM- there are no non-misogynists in there. David shows us their views in their own words- the MRM have to resort to making things up.

Oh, and ‘if they are MRA views?’ Don’t try pulling a No True MRA here- people here have seen it often enough.

‘there are anti feminist sites that compile terrible things said by feminists.’

Why yes, that is true, apparently.

https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/12/16/the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-feminism-or-gloria-steinem-didnt-really-say-that/

Obvious sealion is obvious.

I’m not sure why people are still being nice to orange and taking them remotely seriously after they’ve been sealioning for days now.

Seriously, orange tango, what is it that you’re trying to accomplish?

Anyway, seconding the request for an example of an MRA who isn’t a misogynist.

I tried to be patient and engage openly with orange tango in the hope that xe would be open to not sealioning and not bringing up PRAAT.

I see that I was foolish. One catches more flies with vinegar than honey, after all.

WWTH, you were and are (as always) right.

@ David Futrelle

Hello, Dave;

I have a question. Could you write an article on the phenomenon of “Honey Badgers” and feMRAs? It’s very morbidly fascinating that some exist. I would love an article on “What the heck are these weird women thinking?!”.

Likewise, a general article about the occasional “Fake Male Feminist Ally Who Turns Out To Be A Rapist-Mole”.

People like the above are ridiculous and I would love to see these examined.

By the way; Awesome site!

Pinki,

Check the tags at the bottom of this post. Try “honey badgers” and “antifeminist women.”