I‘ve got a review up on NPR.com of Laura Bates’ new book Men Who Hate Women, an often disturbing deep dive into the worlds of incels, MGTOWs, Red Pillers and assorted other manosphere misogynists.
Here’s a snippet of the review:
Laura Bates … the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of a number of other books about misogyny, spent a year immersed in what’s called the “manosphere,” a vast online world in which incels rub elbows with an assortment of other misogynists — from “pickup artists” with little respect for the concept of consent, to the male separatists who call themselves Men Going Their Own Way (but who can’t seem to stop talking about women). …
Bates is deft in sorting through the angry, hostile, and self-pitying rhetoric of the incels, who manage, as she notes, to be both victims of and purveyors of hate. But she’s also expert in taking apart the self-serving nonsense of the seemingly more respectable Men’s Rights movement, which not only does “vanishingly little to tackle the many very real issues affecting men today” but actually makes them worse by reinforcing the most toxic and backwards elements of toxic masculinity — all the while promoting the nonsense notion that men, not women, are the truly oppressed gender in the world today.
Check it out!
In case you’re wondering, I will be resuming my regular daily posts here shortly. Thanks, everyone, for your support; it means a lot to me.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Yep, that’s another book I can pass on.
Not like I don’t already have more than I could ever read if I did nothing but read the rest of my life, most of which won’t make me angry.
A very nice review, David. Thank you for sharing it with us. Please take all the time you need.
@Surplus
Well, that’s white feminism for you. In the UK this is in large part why TERFism has become so common there, because the most prominent UK feminist groups are meant for upper class women only, so they care about things like “more women inheriting aristocracy positions” and transphobia and other stuff that doesn’t help women.
Gladdened to see you active, again, David, and hopefully setting your own pace. You’ve been in my thoughts.
@Dallilama
Thanks for the heads up!
@Who?
It reminded me (from his discription) about a certain (conservative) kandidate who wanted to let every mariage last only 7 years. She got to idea from listening to comedy.
The Sabaean Order, a mystical sect in Chicago blending Santeria with ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and ancient Sumerian mythoi, used to have something like that: their weddings were termed “eclipses” (when the feminine solar and masculine lunar principle would unite—and yes, that’s the right way around) and were partnerings lasting for a set period—which the couple could then renew if they saw fit to remain together. (Source: Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler, 1979 edition.)
@Full Metal Ox
That sounds like a fairly reasonable system. On the other hand, since it sounds like a cult, I assume there are some hidden clauses that make it less appealing in practice…
.45 : if the duration is fixed or determined by something else than the will of the wed, then it’s probably not terribly good anyhow. While the idea that relationship evolve is true, their length is also extremely variable.
The current system of “last until broken” make it probably a tad too hard to break it but is otherwise on the right track, especially since it include protections for when one of the partner have become dependant on the other.
@Full Metal Ox:
Interesting. Of course you are talking about a group, marriage there hasn’t the legal implication that make an end to a marriage a lot of work in our times.
The problem that I had with the idea of marriage for a time was that I think most people who mary, want to be married not for a short time, but believe they will be maried for a long time. I think that at this time of their live many are still romantics, so I don’t think the marriage for a time would be popular.
Second: I am also not sure, that it is reasonable to tell people who mary you are maried for a few years, that they have to do x to stay maried, problems with ilness not withstanding.
Third: It is very much work to split a mariage, it should get easier but to give the people work is not a good think.
Fourth: It would be a discrimination of poor people, because staying maried would probably cost a bit for the birocracy.
Fith: That was not made clear enough, the idea came up in a conservative part of Germany (Bavaria) in a vote as a leader of a conservative party (The CSU), it was not popular.
I made the point that the theory in the book is unrealistic, because it is not what people want I think (and a society were 80% of men have never sex, because the women couse only the best 20% is provokant rubish not a realistic future world, I reminds me of the Chat stuff posted here)
I don’t know if a marriage for a time is realistic, if then as a choice (I have read that in a SFSeries, but there humans can easily live for 200 years), as a plan for all nope. Sorry for the long post.
Term-limited marriages have been (and are) a thing in numerous cultures/times, ranging from one night to a year and a day traditionally. (there’s also a ‘camp marriage,’ where a soldier on campaign takes a partner with the expectation that the relationship will last as long as the soldier away from home, but I’m not aware of any culture that legally formalized those.) Sometimes it’s so people can sleep around without worrying about the legal/financial status of any child that might result, sometimes it’s basically a test marriage, and at the end of the year either party can decide it was a bad idea and end it.
My favorite story regarding such a marriage is when Grainne O’Malley, ruler of a chunk of Irish coast with some well placed fortifications, married Iron Richard Burke, owner of a well-placed fortification across the bay from hers. She moved into the said castle with him, and they lived there some months before Richard was called away by duties elsewhere. When he got back, he found that all the troops at the castle were now O’Malleys who wouldn’t let him in. Grainne leaned out the window and explained that the year was over, the marriage was over, and she was keeping the castle. Which she did, the O’Malleys still own that castle.
@Dalillama: Ancient Roman soldiers weren’t allowed to marry, but plenty of them had “wives” who followed them from camp to camp. When the soldier retired, he was able to marry the woman, and the kids were retroactively declared legitimate (as long as he wasn’t bigamous). If the soldier died before that, his buddies usually gave his savings to the woman.
@GSS ex-noob
I almost said “but if anyone did it was probably Rome”, and what do you know, I should’ve.
@ GSS ex Noob
Quite a few memorial stones to Roman legionaries refer to and appear to have been erected by “unrelated heirs”. That’s literally what the inscriptions say.
Now of course children born in casta were technically illegitimate; and thus were not considered heirs under Roman law with the automatic right to inherit etc.
However Roman law did allow you to override the intestacy rules, and bequeath your legacy to any heir you cared to nominate, even if they weren’t *wink wink* family.
@Alan:
There’s a lot of law (Roman or otherwise) where you just look at how a law is written and pretty much have to say to yourself, “This was obviously written for a specific problem that people were facing at the time; I wonder what that was.”
(I mean, most laws are written to deal with problems, but sometimes a law is just so… oddly specific or apparently unconnected to other laws in the same general field that it seems obvious there must have been one particular event or series of events that resulted in its creation.)
Edited to add: I suppose this makes the legal system kind of a fossil record of society…
@Jenora Feuer
Irish traditional law defined several specific grounds for divorce, one of which is if your husband spends too much time boning his boyfriend to perform his marital duties (defined legally as spending enough time in his wife’s bed to impregnate her*), you can ditch him for a more heterosexual husband.
*If a husband does have sex with his wife and still doesn’t get her pregnant, she’s legally allowed to either divorce him or find someone else to get her pregnant, the children being legally the husband’s. Our lad from a few posts back who was on about cuckoldry would love it.
David: I appreciate the review, but I have to admit being a bit uncomfortable at just how many times you said the killers’ names. We try to avoid doing so in Canada.
@Jenora Feuer,
Years ago SF writer CJ Cherryh once made a case on her blog that the only way to get a (relatively) unbiased look at what Ancient Roman life/society was really like was to look at the laws they passed, and the reasoning behind them. In fact, at one point in her life (when she was somewhere around grad student rank) she was actually writing such a paper, but lost the work (this was in the pre-personal computer age), and wasn’t able to find time to do it all again. Would have been an interesting read I think, if she had been able to complete it.
@Redsilkphoenix:
I can see that argument. And it would have been an interesting paper.
(I think my first exposure to Cherryh was Gate of Ivrel, back before I knew why so many people were going after the Chanur books.)
@Jenora Feuer,
The Chanur books were my introduction to Cherryh’s writing (kitties!! 😀 ), though I have yet to read the last/latest in that series (the one where Hilfy has her own ship and crew). If/when I ever get the latest stimulus check in my hands, I’ll have to at least download that one to my Kindle. Then find time to read it, and the other books I have on it. /:
I think Cherryh’s most popular work right now is the Foreigner series, which is up to about book #19 now. A pretty good antidote to main characters who shoot and fight their way out of problems, at least in my opinion. (The MC is a human guy who’s an ambassador to an alien race whose culture is a cross between medieval Japan and the Mafia, with almost everyone wearing Renaissance clothing, if anyone was wondering.)