By David Futrelle
I get a lot of, well, less-than-complimentary emails from dudes who aren’t what you’d call big fans of this site. But I don’t get a lot of poems.
So imagine my surprise when I checked my email this morning and found this. Enjoy!
You, sir. are an absolute Knave
By G—— R——
David Foo-troll, you son of a bitch.If journalism were art, you’d not even be kitsch.
You riffle through trash, and you dig in the ditch
When you look for your subjects, and you give your pitch.
Your writing is garbage, your ideas are trite,
Not even a pro could set your blog right.
The fix is in, it must be set alight
While flames of justice glow in the night.
The call of the real men, the bark of the wild
Will show you the faces of those you’ve reviled
Male disposability is not a subject mild
All of civilization is on men’s backs piled.
Come to your senses, I beseech you to change;
You’ll find that Men’s Rights are not at all strange,
And feminists your ally badge shall exchange
The moment you see men’s needs on the range.
Give aid to the harpies, give aid, if you dare
But a happy man who did so, never was there
I advise you in such company to take care,
Of their pack-minded bloodlust, I warn you, beware.
The approval of women, these ephemeral things,
Can’t give you the happiness that men’s rights brings
.
Well, it doesn’t always scan, and some of the rhymes are a little rough. But I have to applaud the effort.
Metered poetry is so passé
Who even cares for that shit today
We’re post-post-modern now
It’s time the MRAs got with the show
In fact we should also eschew the dumb rhymes
Poetry can be so much more fun
When you buck the system and compose what you want
Even if it might be a flop
That’s not to say traditionalists should be ignored
Without the foundations, we cannot spring forward
And I am not one to fault one for scansion
Iambs and trochees give me palpitations
Even so, next time, if you would please
Try to at least keep us on our toes
Per row, four rhymes, that’s such a breeze
Why do it at all if your rhyming blows
I will never make claims to writing good poetry
Though I hope those who can well
Find cringe in me
Aw hell.
There’s something oddly earnest about this awful poem that makes me a little sad, even though the writer is a contemptible MRA. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Oh bless his heart. Vaguely Dr Seussian. Pretty sure that’s what this fool was basing his epic on. Love the line about the harpies. Funny.
Stop riffling through the trash, David, and heed the call of the wild already!
Is Shakespeare here implying that real men are werewolves with all this howling he goes on about?
So… are men immortal? Kinda flies in the face of all that ‘male disposability’ nonsense if dudes are highlanders…
Wait… was Highlander supposed to be a metaphor for toxic masculinity? Cos, if not, they should definitely do a remake in that vein. Would watch 😀
Roses are red
MRAs stink
If they write more poetry
I’m gonna need a drink
On another note, you know those cheesy dating/relationship video games? They’re popular in Japan, but not so much here in the US. But (and I’m not making this up) some PUA has made one and published it on Steam. It supposedly teaches seduction techniques and it’s just as cringy as you would expect. David, you’ve got to have a look…
https://youtu.be/03Lf5_FHKPY
https://youtu.be/HS6R2Q7eRdg
Gonna leave these as links. First one is Jim Sterling talking about it and the guy’s attempts to hush up a negative review through a DMCA takedown. Second has actual “gameplay” footage.
Shadowplay:
Really? And if you fail to cancel, and refuse to pay a bill, will they sue you for a few bucks? Or just cancel the damn service?
I may not fully understand how credit card payment works – it was recently discussed here how these services usually require a credit card payment. I guess you can’t refuse a payment from credit card? So if someone is billing you and you can’t cancel the service you’d have to cancel your credit card or something?
(Speaking of being disorganized, I’ve been avoiding online shopping for the very reason that I need to figure this shit out)
@ Malice W. Underland: Off-topic, but your mention of Black Sabbath affords me a cue to share a longstanding, and perhaps overly pedantic, pet peeve: is it just me, or do the lyrics to “Paranoid” portray depression rather than paranoia?
Which in turn is because everything from after 1900, just about, is copyrighted … so this is just one more way that copyright and similar economic monopoly privileges have unintended harmful consequences.
I guess women are dead to these guys once they hit “the wall”. 😛
@dslucia:
There was a young man of Toronto
Whose limericks never did rhyme
Or scan
And they ended too soon
(Also, hi all! Am alive!)
The following is a rant, brought on by grief, fear and deep, deep anger at the patriarchal rule of the world. So be forewarned, and thank you for your patience in reading it.
I am fed up with the notion, false and historically inaccurate, that every advancement…every good thing…all creative intelligence…resides in and is expressed by penised persons. What, precisely, is the biological mechanism that switches on the creative intelligence and inventiveness genes when a penis is present, and switches them off in the presence of ovaries? I really want to know. After all, these guys are claiming that every aspect of humanity that is good – intelligence, ethical and moral thought and behavior, all forms of creativity – from artistic to scientific, the capacity for spiritual connection, and the capacities for compassion, love and honesty – are all, somehow, dependent upon the ownership of dangling genitalia. Of course, this means that those whose genitalia do not dangle are not capable of any of the above.
Also, along with the above, these fine fellows claim that it is the Nature of women to obey, to need some guy to lead us, to be profoundly stupid, deceitful, sexually voracious and so much more. In fact, so certain are the danglers of the truth of their definition of women, our Nature, and our general unfitness and uselessness, that they have spent millennia creating religions, religious and secular laws, and all manner of ways to enforce THEIR ideas of who and what WE are – and many wonderful punishments for us when we insist otherwise.
Maybe, and I may be way off base here, we would meekly accept our “roles” if there was even a grain of truth in their assertions. Perhaps we would never even want to fight them if our natures really were what they say. In fact, they wouldn’t have had, for millennia, to erase us and our accomplishments from history nor would they have had to burn us, prevent us from getting educations or owning property, shut our voices out of governance…The list goes on. In other words, you don’t have to make laws about flying in order to get birds to be what they are and live their own natures.
Women rarely try to make men disposable. So much of what they say about us actually mostly applies to them. Yes, there are evil people of all genders, colors, languages and beliefs. But, and history bears me out on this, it is rarely women who make wars, create mass poverty so a few can own more, poison worlds, make religious and secular laws defining men as subhuman beasts – again, the list goes on. These, along with so much more, are usually peculiarly masculine pursuits.
Did you know that when men lie bleeding in the battlefields they have created, their dying words are most often calling for their mothers? I learned that when friends came back from Viet Nam. And men I knew who had served in WWII said the same thing. After vilifying us, denying us our humanity and all, at the end they cry out to their mothers to save them…to make it better. I wept when I learned that.
I don’t know what the answers are, except that we women, and the men who see us and themselves as human first and male or female second, need to walk away…get on with creating real, creative and loving lives, regardless of the threats, the lies and the violence of the Drumpfs of the world. We know who and what we are, what we can do. Supporting each other and living, openly, lives that matter to us, may be the best we can do.
@Arctic Ape
In the UK it’s usually a standing order or a direct debit from your bank account, not a credit card payment that is used for services. Yes, you can cancel it from your end but doing so torpedoes your credit incredibly quickly. You’re better off defaulting on a Rolls than cancelling a standing order without the other party’s agreement.
Edit to add: suing for payment is incredibly easy here. It’s why half the emigrants to the various colonies were doing so to escape the debt system 😛
I don’t think it is about copy right. I read modern poetry at school and modern books too, and studied them with my class. for some of my work i could chose what book i wanted to read and write about. I think it is much more about people think these poets from 1700 and 1800 are classic and great, but it gives only small understanding of poetry. I learned mostly what I said in my original post from my teacher at school, who also read some of my poetry to give criticism. there is no correct way, but it must be original and honest. I feel like this man who written this only wears costume of poet, he writes how he believes someone must write when they create poetry but he doesn’t understand at all what he must do.
Cargo cult poetry?
The poetic efforts here are hugely enjoyable (except for gerg/flerg/erg on the previous page). I have no poetry to offer, so I give you something from the wonderful gwen_no_fear’s twitter feed today (it made me snort my coffee):
And also this extremely adorable kitten:
Blood is red
Bruises are blue
But tales of abuse
Can never be true
Repubs are red
Dems are all blue
But MRAs
Can’t pull off a coup
Roses are red
violets aren’t blue
If I wrote like you
I’d practise a lot more before sharing my work in public, or find something better to do with my time, because I can tell when something scans and rhymes and you quite obviously can’t
Oh look, an actual MRA left us a poem on the previous page.
1) Pretty sure grilling, condoms, and power tools already exist.
2) Pretty sure men’s rights sites spend most of their energy grifting and complaining about women instead of setting up shelters for men.
****
Roses are red…
Well actually, they come in
a variety of perceived colors,
not just electromagnetic radiation
with a wavelength of 680 nanometers.
Forcing me to notice this is gynoMarxofascist
misandry.
(remainder of 15,000 word manifesto omitted)
Roses are red,
HBs are 10,
Strange how evopsych
Always favors men.
“Tools making noise”
I’m side-eyeing. A real man uses hand tools, building and fixing things with whatever’s in his pockets or laying around. Power tools are for wimps.
this is about what I said? i don’t understand, I don’t know what is cargo cult. ?
@Valentin
Cargo cults are fascinating!
Some of the Pacific Islands during the war had American troops stationed on them, who got regular supply by plane.
The residents saw this and thought that the act of making an airstrip etc brought the planes with the goodies. So they made their own copies to try to get some cargo for themselves.
Cargo cult has come to mean imitating some parts of a thing in the expectation that the rest will follow thanks to those magic actions. You don’t need to understand the actions and how they fit into the whole – just to perform them.
thanks. finally I know. someone made fun of me in Twitter before because I didn’t know what this meant. he told me to ‘read a book’ but strangely didn’t give me any suggestion ? maybe he also tried to do cargo cult but for intelligence ? speak like he knows and then if anyone asks for more info say ‘read a book you moron’. perfect crime….
🙂 Glad to help.
I only know about them because their mythos was a plot point in a novel about role playing games and it caught my interest. 😛
Dreampark by Niven and Barnes, if anyone is interested.
I think maybe it is from America mainly because American troops were on Pacific islands. I mainly talked before with British people which can be why I didn’t hear it until recently after I started to use Twitter.
Violets are violet. That’s why they’re called “violets”. But i can’t think of anything that rhymes with that word.
EDIT: Found one: “file it” and “while it”.
@Makroth
Roses are red
Violets are violet
If this were the telly,
It’d die at the pilot.
(works with my accent :p )
@Valentin
It only seems to be recently used as an insult. Kind of snobbish, too – it has horribly classist and colonial overtones (not undertones, these shout) for the Brits to use the phrase much.