In another grand public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement, Paul Elam’s drunken party tape has been featured on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, a sharp and funny political podcast I’ve started listening to on a fairly regular basis (and that you all might want to check out).
Year: 2015
The Sarkeesian Effect has received its first positive review on IMDb!
In a review so gushing it sounds almost as if it had been written by Jordan Owen himself, reviewer kiddo1-1 from the Czech Republic, writes that
So a couple of days ago, as you probably have heard, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn testified at the United Nations about online harassment of women. The two, along with a number of other victims of/experts on online harassment also paid a visit to Google Ideas to share their thoughts on the matter.
This is, in essence, what #GamerGate has achieved over the past year: By launching an unprecedented wave of organized harassment, mostly aimed at women, the Gators have brought about a new awareness of the seriousness of online harassment. And they’ve given the women whose lives and careers they’ve tried most energetically to destroy an influence they never would have had otherwise.
So the fellas over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit are having a little debate, of sorts. What unappealing inanimate object is the best metaphor for women over the dreaded age of 30? You know, elderly women.
Someone calling himself mlpl2015 goes with an old favorite: spoiled milk.
A week or so ago, YouTuber Kevin Logan, known for some pretty hilarious takedowns of some of the manosphere’s, er, leading lights, put up the first installment of what was intended to be a 2 1/2 hour long “review” of Jordan Owen’s The Sarkeesian Effect that consisted basically of him making snotty remarks as he watched the terrible, terrible film.
Owen sent a DMCA takedown notice, claiming (and I suppose he was right) that Logan’s video showed a lot more of his movie than “fair use” would allow. Like pretty much the entire first 25 minutes of it. So it was removed from YouTube.
Logan has returned with a couple of new videos that solve that whole “fair use” problem in a novel way.
Dean Esmay’s wild accusations
I would rather not return so quickly to documenting Dean Esmay’s ongoing internet flameout, but I feel I need to.
Esmay, as readers of this blog know all too well, has a habit of calling those who disagree with him “abusive” and/or “abusers.” He did this in the brief Twitter exchange with Raquel Willis I wrote about yesterday after she politely pointed out his white male privilege (and after he called her both a “privileged black girl” and a “rich privileged bitch”).
But in the case of one of Esmay’s recent targets, he’s gone beyond accusations of metaphorical abuse, declaring that the feminist YouTuber who calls herself Laughing Witch is a “violent” pedophile he knew “years ago … who liked to masturbate to violent fantasies involving children.”
I don’t really intend to write about former A Voice for Men number two Dean Esmay as often as I do. But every time I so much as glance at his Twitter timeline, I find something so noxious and ridiculous it makes my head hurt. In other words, here we go again.
Yesterday Raquel Willis, who describes herself in her Twitter bio as a “black trans queer feminist media maven,” Tweeted pictures of Alice Walker and bell hooks alongside a comment criticizing those who think “black feminism/#womanism is just a way to keep the black man down.”
Mr. Esmay, a big ol’ white dude, saw her Tweet, and decided that he needed to put her straight on a few things. It wasn’t pretty.
The #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag took off yesterday after a Buzzfeed article highlighted a bunch of products being marketed to men with some of the most cartoonish evocations of old-school masculinity you could possibly imagine, from grenade-shaped shower puffs for men to Man Chocolate.
The point of the hashtag was fairly obvious: to look at, and mock, the ways these ads try to capitalize on male insecurities and suggest ways men can free themselves from destructive stereotypes of masculinity.
So Buzzfeed ran a pretty hilarious post today featuring 23 Gendered Products That Prove How Truly Fragile Masculinity Is — including the example above, of a shower puff shaped like a hand grenade, because what real man would ever use a … shower puff to wash off his manly stank?
Well, turns out I’m not the only one who thinks these gendered products are completely ridiculous; the Buzzfeed post has gone viral, getting nearly half a million hits so far and re-igniting the Twitter hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile.
Here are some of the highlights from the hashtag so far. (Click on the smaller pics to enlarge them.)
The repulsive pickup guru and wannabe philosopher of “neomasculinity” Roosh Valizadeh has long made it clear that he has a problem with women making decisions about their own lives, whether that decision is picking a college major — or saying “no” to sex with him.
In one notorious post, he explained to his readers that, as he sees it, a woman’s “no” pretty much never means “no.” Only if she uses the magic word “stop” does he stop. But he doesn’t think she really has a right to use that word, because, in his mind, once a woman “gives” him an erection, she owes it to him to finish the job.
“A man’s nut is sacred,” he wrote, “and for her to impede that should be criminal. I’m serious.”
Given all this, it perhaps should not come as a shock to hear that Roosh thinks women should have their right to make decisions taken away from them altogether, not just when he’s trying to get his “nut.”