Today is the final day of the We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive! If you haven’t donated yet, click that little button below! Thanks!
I‘m continually amazed by the amount of time and energy that antifeminists put into fighting monsters of their own creation — that is, the imaginary feminists in their heads who bear about as much resemblance to real feminists as the rapacious, Machiavellian characters in The Protocols of The Elders of Zion do to real Jews.
I’ve made the Protocols of the Elders of Zion comparison more than a few times before, but I ran across an example of antifeminist monster-making earlier today that parallels the Protocols so exactly that it’s kind of unnerving.
The original Protocols, as many of you no doubt know, were an anti-Semitic forgery concocted in Russia by the Tsarist secret police around the turn of the twentieth century, purporting to offer proof of a plot by a cabal of Jews to take over the world. The document offered what it claimed was a transcript of a secret meeting of the aforementioned Elders that took place at some point late in the nineteenth century; in fact, most of the dialogue was plagiarized from works of fiction published many decades earlier.
Basically, the so-called Protocols are a collection of cartoonishly eeeeevil fake quotes from imaginary Jewish Elders. But millions of people, including Henry Ford and a certain Adolf Hitler, believed them to be real. Or at least acted as if they did.
Much of what Men’s Rightsers and other antifeminists believe about feminists is similarly bogus. I’ve written before about the collections of dubious “evil” quotes from feminists that regularly make the rounds on the antifeminist web (and that any number of antifeminists have cut-and-pasted into the comments here).
And I’ve written about the deliberate disinformation campaigns started by #GamerGaters and MRAs by spreading made-up quotes attributed to feminists like Jessica Valenti and Anita Sarkeesian.
So today I ran across yet another example, this time in the form of an “infographic” featuring an obviously fake quote purportedly from Gloria Steinem that was being passed around by a couple of A Voice for Men Twitter soldiers today.
I’ve pasted it above, though, as you may have noticed, I’ve taken the liberty of adding the words FAKE QUOTE in big red letters in case the picture gets into someone’s image search results sometime in the future.
So how do I know the quote is fake? Well, there’s the fact that it obviously is. But, to be sure, I used my highly sophisticated internet search skills to type part of the first sentence of the fake quote into a website called “Google.”
Looking through the results, I discovered that the “quote” originally appeared in a post with the ungrammatical title “Are Chimps smarter than Feminist?” on a little blog called The Waterpipe.
The Waterpipe is not a source that inspires much confidence. The blogger behind the site made only four posts in total, all of them attacks on feminism; the site’s “about” page contains the dummy text that WordPress expects bloggers to replace with their own bios.
The “Are Chimps smarter than Feminist?” post begins — shades of the original Protocols! — by plagiarizing a hefty chunk of text about chimpanzee tool use from the website of the Jane Goodall Institute.
The “author” then goes on to suggest that chimps are in fact smarter than “feminist” because
The chimps have demonstrated an ability to conduct their parasitical relationship with termites in a sustainable manner as to not exhaust the termite nest and thus increase chances of survival, this survival instinct is not present in feminist. …
the feminist movement has made it its primary objective to eradicate masculinity. Ironically women in their 30s who are childless, unmarried and on a steady supply of anti-depressants are now questioning “Did we overdo it”
As evidence, of sorts, for this contention, the author presents us with the similarly ungrammatical lament of an obviously fictional character named “Clara Strongwoman,” who declares
I was willing to be a good wife, cook and clean while the man bought home the bacon, but you lousy feminist had to ruin it for all of us with your endless victim-hood, outrageous demands and out of control sense of entitlement.
While it’s pretty clear that the blogger here seriously believes the MGTOWish crap he’s peddling, it’s also pretty clear that he means “Clara Strongwoman” to be a joke.
He follows her obviously fake quote with an obviously fake dialogue amongst famous feminists, which he introduces as follows:
Top feminist from different organisations were secretly recorded by an anonymous user called Agent Orange on a debate with each other if they exhausted their parasitical relationship on men.
In other words, these famous feminists are purportedly discussing what to do now that they’ve driven men away with their endless demands.
Here’s a portion of the dialogue, purportedly between Steinem, radical feminist and anti-porn activist Gail Dines, and someone called “Bonnie Grabenhoffer” (two f’s) — who is presumably supposed to be NOW Action Vice President Bonnie Grabenhofer (one f).
As you’ll notice, the blogger doesn’t bother to try to make the discussion sound even vaguely convincing; it’s basically a very crude satire. The fake Steinem quote from the infographic is right in the middle of it all; I’ve put it in bold.
>Gail Dines: We pushed them too far and now there’s no going back, we had men right where we wanted, they worked long hours while we could play hide and seek in our pajamas with the kids, they went to die in wars, while we did easy house chores with our washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners.
>Gloria Steinem: I agree with Gail we even had chivalry, a fu**ing social etiquette that was heavily enforced which disposed men to heroic actions for the benefit of women, but now chivalry is being associated with beta behaviour.
Of course I agree with everyone in this room that emasculating and degrading men was the right thing to do, but we should have left a little bit of dignity in men so that they were still useful to us>Bonnie Grabenhoffer: We could try shaming tactics but even the dumbest men still have an adequate survival instinct
We are trying very hard to rebuild society by removing male spaces but now we have things like Men Going Their Own Way and male rights groups popping up>Gail Dines: Why? We cant even shame men into doing things anymore, they have little masculinity, how can a man even sink lower? I think what we need to also do is destroy the male survival instinct. Then they will start marrying women again.
Yes, that’s right: it’s a secret cabal of “top feminist” trying to figure out … how to get men to marry women again. Frankly. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were more convincing.
Yet this ridiculous blog post got picked up by other antifeminist blogs and passed around by assorted antifeminists on Facebook. Now the fake quote is making the rounds on Twitter.
One atheist/Linux blogger reposted some of the dialogue above as if it were authentic, taking particular umbrage at the fake Steinem’s fake “stupidity.”
These so-called feminists put men down for doing just that to women for centuries. What’s their answer? If women are to be happy and productive, women need to do to men what women thought was horrible when men did it to them. I see no difference between Steinem and some chauvinist pig who thinks women should be in the kitchen cooking, barefoot and pregnant. …
I have a suggestion for the Steinems of this world: help free humanity from its primitive roots and stop spreading this bucolic bacchanalia about making slaves out of men.
Fake quote, real anger. See how that works?
People believe what they want to believe. When it comes to feminism, a lot of people are determined to believe the worst.
The more gullible anitifeminists believe the fake quotes are real; the more cynical antifeminists may be well aware the quotes are fake, but they’re happy to spread them anyway, knowing that their more gullible comrades will swallow the lies wholesale.
As the forgers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion knew all too well, if your aim is to spread hate, lies are much more effective than truth.
No need to create fake Elam quotes. The real ones are damaging enough to his reputation already.
@Argenti
Hmmm, I think that would qualify you as being close enough. Most of the people who champion the “SUPERIOR ARYAN RACE” propaganda aren’t even genuinely pure-blooded North-Germanic or Nordic, anyway.
Let’s not forget that ol’ Uncle Adi wasn’t even particularly tall, muscular, or blonde, and he is the father of all these morons – including the MRAs who babble about da jooz and da wimmens and duh blaaaaghs.
Now, put on this tight-fitting black Hugo Boss uniform, wear this intimidating visored officer’s cap, place your finger to the tip of your nose, say “Pip pip” and look as supercilious as you can manage.
@Lady Mondegreen
Why, if I didn’t know better, good Lady, I would say you were trying to seduce me!
Or are you one of the Miscegenation Coordinators, attempting to feel out my suitability for the task?
tee hee, Sir Torpedo, no, just pointing out that denying the conspiracy is PROOF!!11! that you’re part of the conspiracy!eleventy!
Can’t argue with that!
I notice one of those four posts on The Waterpipe is “Can a fart be misogynist?” and quotes Steph Guthrie as saying that “the patriarchy has been controlling women’s flatulence.”
@Boogerghost
Ah, one of the many feminist issues: Should women’s farts be uncontrollable?
BTW I do understand that any normal bodily function is a taboo in women, but to ridicule feminism with bog jokes is just such an expected level of completely levelheaded anti-feminist criticism.
A story about the trans women of that time would be fascinating.
Frank Torpedo — while my entire wardrobe is black (never fully grew out of my goth phase), I don’t do tight other than for aerials. So I guess if I can do it while on trapeze maybe? Disdain I can manage though!
*dons black and looks upon the realm with disdain* why is no one inventing time travel? Pip pip!
Kat
Silly me. I searched this on da googlethingy because I thought it was just a joke come to life.
Turns out I was wrong. Again. When you read the report it gets worse, not better. That is exactly what he claimed. And … the judge took 20 minutes of his evidence in camera (in private away from public scrutiny or reporting).
I haven’t seen any reports of prosecutors contemplating an appeal. Yet.
—————————————-
As for Steinem and all of us 2nd wave people. It’s pretty hard for people nowadays to understand how bad things really were for women back then. Our Bodies, Ourselves was published for the first time in 1971. It was unbelievably radical and controversial for women to discuss things like sexual desire — for other women even! — and the eternally unmentionable domestic violence.
It was often used as a core text for many women’s consciousness raising groups. A lot of women learned lots of stuff about menstruation and contraception and pregnancy and all the other things they were supposed to either ignore or put up with or leave entirely in their husband’s control. The idea, at that time, was that we needed to understand how our own bodies worked and that. we. had. a. right. to. control. them. was a revelation, damn’d near a revolution for many.
I’m pretty sure that some of that you’re a woman, this is how a woman’s body works, you should not be ashamed, you should be proud stuff readily moved in some women’s minds into This! is what a woman is, and nobody else has any claim on the word or the status. Which could finish up as transphobia in women who never even imagined there was such a thing as a transwoman in the first place. Helped along with an almighty, hefty shove from Phyllis Schlafly and all the organisations that adopted her bigoted anti-feminist attitudes during the US fight against the ERA.
@ mildlymagnificent
Unfortunately in England prosecutors can’t appeal against a jury verdict.
Re: Machiavelli
Isn’t there a consensus amongst experts that he was writing a satire along the lines of ‘a modest proposal’?
Re: MRA Doublethink
I don’t find it surprising that they promulgate a lie whilst knowing it’s a lie.
[Sorry for the following Godwin but it seems appropriate]
This sort of thinking is quite common amongst extremists. There are plenty of neo Nazis who deny the holocaust or say that Hitler wasn’t personally responsible whilst at the same time collecting Zyklon B canisters and celebrating Hitler for knowing how to ‘deal’ with the Jews.
I’m not okay with this.
Alan, what is the way forward in ensuring that Mr Abdulaziz goes to prison and that the judge who presided over this is struck off? Please don’t tell me that there is no legal method to do so; that phrase is merely going to be interpreted, in my current mindset, as saying that it is necessary to use extralegal means, and I understand that there may be professional difficulties for you if you were to suggest that.
@ Argenti
Just for you (and any other goths out there) 🙂
@ EJ
Realistically he’s got away with it (sorry, I mean ‘leaves court without a stain on his character’ as we’re supposed to say). Prosecutors can’t appeal a jury verdict (there is a method of prosecutors appealing a judge’s decision about evidence or interpretation of the law ‘prior’ to the jury being sent out but it doesn’t appear that they thought the judge made any errors in this regard)
It’s nigh on impossible to get rid of a judge over here. There are sound policy reopens for that, it does stop politicians leaning on them and maintains the seperation of powers (In practice, when judges do fuck up their senior colleagues ‘invite’ them to spend more time with their families).
In light of recent controversies I’m a bit reluctant to go too much more into depth on this but it may be there’s nothing to criticise the judge about, the prosecution don’t appear to have any complaints about how he ran the trial. In a case like this it’s the jury that pretty much holds sway. I know some people find the fact the defendant gave some evidence in private troubling. All I can say about that, without getting into professional trouble, is that this is a procedure that’s not necessarily adopted in the interests of the defendant but can be for the protection of a third party.
Of course I don’t need to remind anyone on this site about the difficulty in securing rape convictions. One thing that I do find mind boggling though is that, in England, “penetration” is an essential element in rape (without that it’s sexual assault”). How do you ‘accidentally’ penetrate anyone even if you did fall? Without going TMI I’m sure some people here will be aware of how tricky it can be to ‘line up’ as it were even with the enthusiastic assistance of your partner.
One of my favourite blogs likes to refer to the Anti-Kitten Burning Coalition: people who are up in arms about the almost certainly imaginary faction of people who think that burning kittens is just fine. Most everyone agrees that burning kittens is not cool, and it’s usually budding sociopaths that dare to disagree, but the Anti-Kitten Burning Coalition seems convinced that there are people seriously advocating kitten burning who must be opposed.
What’s going on here, according to this writer, is that people are staking their moral authority on being better than these imaginary kitten pyros. Most people don’t really have any kind of moral authority – they may profess to be good people, but they haven’t really done anything other than have good thoughts or maybe donate to charity. Kitten burners (or Satanists, or Obama the Muslim terrorist) provide someone they can be morally superior to, so long as they ignore the inconvenient fact that they don’t quite exist. So long as it sounds like it might be true, that’s good enough, because it’s fun to pretend that it is.
That’s the purpose the Protocols, and fake feminist quotes, serve: they’re handouts in the roleplaying game that is being morally superior to people who don’t exist.
Kat:
I’m starting to wonder whether Republicans think the arrow of time is a liberal plot.
I don’t know why he wrote The Prince but it wasn’t published while he was alive. I think he’s more than a cynical exploiter of realpolitik, I think he’s a genuine republican and I think that we may well have him to thank for the reintroduction of the Roman style republic to the West. The Discourses are essential reading for anyone who values representative democracy, perhaps especially at that coal face administrative level – local government.. But he doesn’t get the credit he deserves, because – y’know – The Prince.
I always understood that Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a “fuck you” to the Medici family, who had overthrown the republic of his native city and instituted a dictatorship. Given the extent to which Machiavelli idolised the ancient Roman Republic and regarded the rise of the Empire as being abhorrent, it’s not surprising that he saw the parallels and was not pleased by them.
And this guy asks if feminists are smarter than chimps? I have a funny feeling the chimp in question can write a more thoughtful and enjoyable blog.
Hello.
I am interested in knowing if there is a feminist review of the new star wars somewhere, or if feminist “intellectual” can review it. On the surface, it seem to present the women characters in a decent way, but I don’t put enough time in thinking about feminism to pretend to have a strong opinion on it.
They go on and on about all these 30 something women who just want a man and babies and are so desperate and lonely, etc etc… Why haven’t I met any of these women? I mean ever? Surely they must be out there, but they only ever seem to exist in lazy sitcom writing and MRA fever dreams.
I have known my fair share of single people who are happy being single. I’ve known people who were worried they would never meet someone and then a year later were engaged. The only people I have ever known to lament how depressing and lonely their 30-something singleness makes them have been men. Typically men who, god bless ’em, are still holding out for the independently wealthy, sexually inexperienced swimsuit models they’re sure are just around the corner waiting to snatch them up.
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRFzlFKDbYiWFtgJXqjNPxZqLg58QzTtoc7PYhE2cyfwuOK62llRA
Edit: Failure to embed. Image also applies to this comment.
There’s barely anything to say, since, unfortunately this doesn’t surprise me. This isn’t the first time a MRA attributed a false quote to a feminist.
I just think it’s sad how those people read baffling words from people on their side and respond with “Oh, it’s nothing!/It’s satire!/They’re just one bad apple; not all MRAs/Redpillers/MGTOWs/GamerGaters/whatever are like that!”; but as son as someone attributes a false quote to a feminist they’re more than happy to go “OMGZ!! FEMINAZIS EAT BABIES!!eleven!!”
@Newt:
If the link doesn’t end in .gif, .jpeg or some other image extension, it generally won’t embed.