Author: David Futrelle

>QuoteOTD: Un-macho, Un-macho Men

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 15, 2010
13 Comments on >QuoteOTD: Un-macho, Un-macho Men

Enemy of all things manly?

Sometimes women actually live up to Men’s Rights stereotypes. Consider Katherine Miller, a beta-male-taunting, Alpha-male idolizing, Vanderbilt-going, essay-writing gal who looks down her nose at all things wussy, from man-scarves to Joseph Gordon-Levitt:

America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.

John Wayne? Clint Eastwood? Really? Couldn’t you be a little less, well, cliche about your manly idols? Think outside the box. Think inside the ring. How about this guy? He’s a snappy dresser with a hot retro style, he’s a hit with the ladies, he’s built like a fucking piledriver, and he could kick John Wayne’s ass with one hand tied behind his back. (Or both, really, considering that John Wayne is, you know, dead.) Hell, the word Macho is even part of his name — and plastered on his sunglasses to boot!

>”Fag bashing,” woman-hating, and Men’s Rights myopia

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 15, 2010
68 Comments on >”Fag bashing,” woman-hating, and Men’s Rights myopia

One of the many failings of the Men’s Rights Movement — and “failing” really isn’t a strong enough word for it — is the way in which it ignores or denies real problems faced by boys and men that don’t fit into its grand conspiracy theory in which all the ills faced by men are caused by evil women or by men corrupted and seduced, personally and/or politically, by said evil women.

One of these problems, and it’s a big one, is the “fag bashing” that’s rampant among boys of high school and college age. The atmosphere of abuse has a tragic effect on gay teenagers, as the recent rash of suicides illustrates all too poignantly. And it also has an enormous effect on boys who aren’t gay but who have their masculinity challenged constantly by other boys.

While the MRM is obsessed with the notion of the smug, castrating (Western) woman, the entitled “princess” who looks down on decent, ordinary “beta” males and Nice Guys in favor of jerky, aggressive alpha males, it pays virtually no attention to the daily nightmares inflicted on boys by other boys (and men by other men) by “fag bashing.”

Again, take the recent gay teen suicides. While they have inspired magazine cover stories and ongoing discussion on feminist blogs, the only MRA blog of any prominence that even mentioned any of the suicides, to the best of my knowledge, was the False Rape Society, which essentially used the suicide of Tyler Clementi as an excuse to bash feminism, as I pointed out in a recent post, and (as cat pointed out in a comment here) to turn the story of “brutality against a gay kid” into one “about how hard it is to be hetero.”

While MRAs hate it if anyone calls them “fags” or otherwise criticizes their masculinity, they routinely deride any men they don’t like as a “manginas,” and various other terms to suggest they are not “real men.” A few MRAs, like the folks at the blog No Ma’am, bash gays and lesbians quite openly; they’ve also, you may recall, labeled me a “poof” (among other things)

One of the smartest takes I’ve seen on the phenomenon of anti-gay bullying comes from male feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer. In a recent post on “homosociality and homophobia,” he puts the recent suicides in a broader context. Drawing on the research of sociologist C.J. Pascoe, Schwyzer describes the ways in which “fag discourse” permeates American high school:

The discourse manifests itself in the almost incorrigible way in which young men label each other “fags” while seeking to avoid having that label applied to them. According to this discourse, fear of being called out publicly as a “fag” is the primary driving force behind what Pascoe cleverly calls the display of “compulsive heterosexuality.” … Pascoe notes that among young men desperate to establish their masculine bona fides with their peers, what we see in American high schools amounts to compulsive, almost frantic efforts by young men to prove their manhood.

Anyone who has worked with adolescent boys knows how much anxiety many of them feel about their own masculinity. It’s not news to say that our sons, like their fathers before them, often have to endure or participate in physical or at least verbal violence that we tragically and falsely believe is necessary to transition into manhood. … The real stigma in being labeled a “fag” doesn’t lie in the association with homosexuality, but with being seen as feminine.

There’s no easy solution for a problem that is so pervasive, but Schwyzer argues that “perhaps the best way to “inoculate against cruelty”is … to encourage strong non-sexual relationships between boys and girls at every age.” Going back to a review he wrote of Michael Kimmel’s book Guyland, a study of teen boys and young men, Schwyzer notes that

boys who have close female friends are much less likely to exhibit the worst and most destructive tendencies of the Guy Code. After all, the “guy code” is wrapped up in the notion that approval from other men … is the most precious commodity a young man can pursue. Even heterosexual conquest is, ultimately, a means of gaining approval from the guys. Young men who have friends of both sexes are less likely to be held hostage to solely masculine approval; they can receive non-sexual validation from their female friends — and that validation is less likely to be connected to the brutal “sturdy oak” ethos of the Guy Code.

And they are less likely to participate in the relentless onslaught of cruelty towards their gay and lesbian peers.

These are lessons that the Men’s Rights Movement — or whatever rises up to supplant it — will have to learn if it wants to be a movement that really benefits boys and men, straight and gay alike, instead of indulging regressive, self-defeating and often dangerous fantasies of manhood that demonize “fags” and women alike.

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>QuoteOTD: I Love a Parade

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 13, 2010
5 Comments on >QuoteOTD: I Love a Parade

>You know, I didn’t bother reading the whole thing, which has something to do with Carl Paladino, and apartheid, and elephant poking, whatever that means, but this little nugget stood out in the latest post on In Mala Fide, a generally retrograde Men’s Rights-ish blog:

“Gay culture” … has about as much cultural legitimacy as redneck jokes. A bunch of nearly-naked men marching down a major city street beating each other with riding crops and wearing makeup is not a legitimate expression of culture, any more than a group of married dudes finger-fucking their wives on a giant vagina float would be an expression of culture.

I’m not sure that’s really a good comparison, and his whole argument sounds a tad homophobic to me, but I will say this: I would totally go to that parade.

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QuoteOTD: Whatever terrible crap men do, it’s all women’s fault. Their sexy fault.

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 12, 2010
36 Comments on QuoteOTD: Whatever terrible crap men do, it’s all women’s fault. Their sexy fault.

The quote of the day today is a long and rambling one, so buckle up. It’s from a comment on The Spearhead, by a fellow named Snark, which was enthusiastically highlighted by the Schopenhauer-loving, Age-of-Consent-Law-hating theantifeminist on his creepy blog. The theme of the post? Whatever nasty, violent, bad shit men do is all the fault of hot young women, who control men through the power of their evil sexiness.

Before settling into his argument proper, Snark gets one little point out of the way: he’s not talking about feminists, who are, he says, generally too old, or, if young, too “neurotic and/or ugly” to control men with the promise of sexy sex. No, Snark is talking about hot young women, who control men without having to resort to feminism. Oh, feminism is evil. But pretty girls are evil squared. So let’s begin:

There is a whole different game of misandry being played here. They already hold the power – sexual power – and so have no need to engage in things like feminism. They already have everything feminism could offer them, that is, control over men.

Gynocentrism Theory teaches us that even when those individuals in powerful roles are mostly men, they are doing the bidding of women, not of men en masse; thus the lie is given to Patriarchy Theory, which suggests ridiculously that the few men in power stick up for all the ‘little guys’ out there, against the interests of women.

Gynocentrism Theory then tells us what women – either the non-feminists who sexually control men, or successful feminists – actually do with this power over men. They get men to fight each other. …

Men aren’t naturally violent or aggressive; they simply have the potential to be these things. It is the fact that women reward with sex those who prove themselves to be the most violent and aggressive which makes men act violently and aggressively.

Hmm. So by this logic, then, we can assume that Hitler was just a hapless schmo driven to genocidal fury by thoughts of Eva Braun all tarted-up in a sexy dirndl. Heck, he probably would have spent his whole life painting pictures of butterflies had it not been for all those foxy frauleins. And just imagine how much worse World War II would have been if he’d actually had two balls, instead of just the one! Let’s continue:

The price of a woman’s titillation is an innocent man getting his head smashed in as he walks home. This, just so that the perpetrator can be sexually selected. Woman’s role in the crime is concealed; she didn’t perform the act, after all; she only manipulated the man’s natural stimulus and response system to get him to perform a violent display for her sexual benefit.

Poor men are stuck between their rock-hard dicks and a hard place:

The outcome of all this is that men today are being ground between two millstones: on the one hand, non-feminist women demand that men must act aggressively and violently if they are to be sexually selected; on the other, their feminist sisters demand increasingly brutal punishments for men who act precisely in this way.

Oh, and the way those ladies dress!

[T]oday we are subject to the new phenomena [of] ambient porn, that is, the promise of sexual rewards from desirable young women at every turn. Women who decry pornography do so while dolled up to look like porn stars themselves, and don’t you dare criticise them for it. There is no escaping the pink wurlitzer: male sexuality is provoked everywhere you look, whether in images from your TV screen, or in magazines, adverts at bus stops, billboards, and more pervasively and perversely than all of this, in the flesh, walking around absolutely everywhere from your home to the local store to the place you work. …

The pink wurlitzer? Do you mean … this? Never mind. Onward:

Our sexuality is being forever provoked, taunted, prodded at. All to ensure that we react in that ‘real manly’ way that the young non-feminist women demand, so that we can promptly be caught and brutalised by white knights employed by institutions controlled and run by or for the benefit of feminist women.

How Women Rule the Universe

And what set all this in motion? The bikini? The Wonderbra? Nope:

[T]his was all quite possibly set in stone from the moment women were granted the vote.

The vote! That sexy, sexy right to vote.

Not that this argument, such as it is, deserves a rebuttal, but if men are naturally nonviolent, and women are the cause of their violence, why do gay men get into fights?

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>QuoteOTD: David Futrelle is “a dancing jackass for the matriarchy.”

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 11, 2010
48 Comments on >QuoteOTD: David Futrelle is “a dancing jackass for the matriarchy.”

Me, apparently.

Apparently hungering for some attention, the blog No Ma’am has decided to launch a carefully reasoned, albeit un-spellchecked, attack on me:

David is another typical Western Male Fucktard, thinking that even on-line sucking up to fembots will slather his withering pole. A true SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy) in every dimension.

Reality is not so, Mr. Futrelle, it is not so.

You are anethema to female vaginal lubrication.

Hope you feel proud! You are the reason panties are starting to be modelled without the protective cotten-lined-gussets! Who needs such a thing when the West produces poofs like you?

Oh, there’s more. Rob, the guy behind the blog, is apparently upset that I haven’t written about him yet:

Pleeeease debate me on… something!?! Please Dave, you are picking on commenters in the MRM only… wtf? Are you Chicken? Why don’t you set your sights higher up and pick on me for a while?

Honestly, Rob, I haven’t really found anything on your site that’s coherent enough to argue against. But I’ll keep looking.

You can read the whole thing here.

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>The Surreal Housewife

>One of the things that still surprises me as I traverse the weird online world of anti-feminism is the number of women I’ve run across who think that they have altogether too many rights. I’ve written in the past about women who don’t believe they should have the right to vote. Today, Laura Wood, a proudly retrograde woman who thinks the solution to contemporary “cultural ruin” is for employers to start paying women even less than they do now. According to “Why We Must Discriminate,” a manifesto of sorts on her blog The Thinking Housewife:

Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural ruin of its women. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. … First and foremost, we must restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions must be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.

It’s a strange manifesto and a strange blog. Unlike many of the reactionaries I regularly quote on this blog, Wood is not an idiot. Her tone is measured and cautious. If you accept her fairly ludicrous premises — the key ones here being that it would be desirable or even possible to undo decades of economic and cultural history to essentially return to an imaginary, idealized prefeminist world in which men could earn enough to comfortably support a family and women would work primarily for “pin money” — her manifesto almost makes sense. And yet what she is saying is, not to put too fine a point on it, vile.

She is utterly blithe, for example, about the effect her proposal would have on single and divorced women:

Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.

Who needs a man-sized wage when you can just beg dad for cash when the rent comes due?

Wood not only thinks women deserve to be paid less than men for the same work; she’s also wary of women taking on almost any authority at all outside the home. While she’s admits it’s technically possible for women to be, for example, effective drill sergeants, she finds the idea vaguely abhorrent:

When women start barking orders at grown men, the delicate balance of power between the sexes is disturbed. Women are mothers and wives, lovers and friends to men. These roles are damaged by domineering bossiness. Male psychology is radically different from female psychology. After all, mothers are women. There is no more significant fact than that.

There’s more, much more. Troll This Blog has assembled a lengthy list of Wood’s more backwards utterances, from which I drew the example above, including some thoughts on race that would not be out of place at a (very polite) Klan meeting: “Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today.”

Though I found her blog through links on a Men’s Rights blog or two, and her ideology is more or less consistent with some of the more reactionary MRAs out there, Wood is not exactly an MRA herself. Indeed, she has tangled with the Men’s Rights Movement on several occasions — lambasting commenters on The Spearhead for “juvenile” misogyny, and accusing MRA elder Paul Elam of “idiocy and hatred” for his, er, idiotic and hateful statement that if he were on a jury he wouldn’t vote to convict a clearly guilty rapist.

Wood’s enmity towards certain elements of the MRM has been reciprocated. Our good (not) friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog recently took on a “mangina” commenter at what he calls “The (Not) Thinking Housewife” for suggesting that the MRM had its roots in “radical homosexuality.”

This is one of those battles, to paraphrase Calvin Trillin, in which I can only hope that both sides suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.

NOTE: Before any of the anti-feminists who regularly post here accuse me of lacking “substance” because I do not “rebut” Wood’s “arguments” in detail, I request only one thing: find me something solid to rebut. Wood, like many of those I write about, offers a lot of opinions — see the quotes above, and on Troll This Blog, for numerous examples — but almost nothing to actually support those opinions. Find me an example of an argument she has made that is actually supported with actual empirical evidence, with specific citations and/or links to sources, and I’ll have a go at it.

western women suck

>Creepy Dude Tech: Design your own Asian girl!

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 9, 2010
33 Comments on >Creepy Dude Tech: Design your own Asian girl!

>Attention all Western-women-hating Asian fetishist dudes! Have real Asian girls turned out to be way less submissive than you imagined? Or are they simply disgusted by you? There’s a solution, in the form of an actual iPhone app called Design Your Dream Asian Girl. The 99 cent app, from Spendthrift Studios, allows you to mix-and-match features of young Asian women until you find the perfect imaginary woman to stare creepily at until your iPhone runs down its charge:

You can finally create the beautiful asian girl of your dreams! This app brings you hundreds of beautiful asian girls around the world. Customize your own dream asian girl.

Among the features:

Pick the ethnicity for your asian girl first: China, Korea, Taiwan. More countries coming soon.

What? No Japan?! Luckily they all look alike.*

Pick the eyes, lips, and nose for your dream asian girl. Hundreds of beautiful combinations offered

Share your girl via e-mail to your friends

Come on! The guys in the target demographic for this app have no friends. If they do, their friends may reconsider the friendships after receiving a half-dozen pics of weirdly mix-and-matched Asian faces with the text “HEY GUIZE LOOK AT MY HOTT NEW ASIAN GF!!!!!”

Oh, and if you want to be extra creepy?

Make your dream girl look like someone you know, like your secret lover or ex-girlfriend.

By “secret lover” I imagine they mean “stalking victim.” And by “ex-girlfriend” I assume they mean “girl you went out with once and whom you’re also stalking.” Science marches on.
—

* For Coldfire and any other idiots who are incapable of understanding humor (or who wish to pretend that I am racist), the line about Asians looking alike was from the POV of a potential purchaser of this app, and does not reflect my own opinion.

Uncategorized

>New Comments Policy: Don’t be a Massive Douchebag

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 8, 2010
18 Comments on >New Comments Policy: Don’t be a Massive Douchebag

Gandhi vs. Hogan

As anyone who has looked at the comments on this blog knows, I am averse to censoring comments, even when they are filled with profanity and insults. But in recent days there have been a couple of comments — literally two, out of a total of 439 on the site — that have crossed the line, and I’ve deleted them. There have been several others I have considered deleting as well.

So I’m instituting a new comments policy, and here it is, in a nutshell: Don’t post shit that is so gratuitously nasty it would cause Gandhi himself to punch you in the head.

I’m not demanding that you refrain from salty language, or that you be politically correct or even that you try to be polite. What I am demanding is an end to gratuitously nasty personal attacks on other people who post comments here. Threatening people, also not good.

Calling someone an “idiot,” fine. Calling someone a “douchebag,” fine. Not so fine: calling someone a cunt, whore, “lezzo,” or cumbucket. That sort of thing. If you really cannot make an argument without calling your opponent one of these things, or something similar, you should probably read up a bit on the fine art of argument. I’m not going to debate why certain terms are acceptable and others aren’t. It’s my blog, my rules.

If you post something that isn’t gratuitously nasty and it doesn’t appear on this blog, it’s not because I have censored it. It’s Blogger’s less-than-perfect spam filter at work, and I will un-spam it as soon as I see it in the spam box. Sometimes this will take a while, because, you know, I don’t live in front of the computer.

Lest anyone get up in arms about how I am censoring free debate or “unpopular opinion,” I would like to point out again that up until this point I have deleted only two out of 439 non-spam comments for crossing the line. Neither one actually advanced an argument of any kind.

I would really like to never have to delete a comment again. But that’s really up to you guys.

Oh, and to everyone who posts interesting, funny, substantive comments here without resorting to the “c”-word: Thanks!

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>Quote of the Day: Stupidity Strikes Twice

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date October 8, 2010
46 Comments on >Quote of the Day: Stupidity Strikes Twice

They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place. That’s not true. But people like to say it nevertheless. That’s not something anyone would say about stupidity, ever, because stupidity strikes the same places with such monotonous regularity.

And so it is that I can report with pleasure but not much surprise that stupidity — really massive stupidity, in fact — has once again hit the discussion thread on The Spearhead which provided us with our previous incredibly stupid Quote of the Day. This time, a fellow called TFH offers his unique take on rape statistics:

“1 in 4 women on college campuses have been raped”

….and none of those women are ever higher than a 6 in looks. Most are 4s or lower.

Coincidence? I think not.

We never, ever see women who would rate a 7 or higher making a big fuss about ‘rape’, claiming that rape is rampant, etc. EVEN THOUGH THEY WOULD BE THE ONES MORE AT RISK.

This fact reveals the rape industry to be a complete fabrication. A ploy to get attention.

Always ask yourself : Where are the women who are a 7+ in looks, who are sufficiently afraid of rape to bring it up as often as the uggos do?

I should note that in addition to the rest of the stupidity, he’s a little confused as to what the 1-in-4 statistic refers to. The study in question, by Mary Koss, found that 1-in-4 college-age women had been the victim of rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives. (1-in-8 had been raped.) For more on the study upon which this figure is based, take a look at this extremely useful piece on Alas, A Blog, which has a whole category on the site devoted to the study in question, and on the claims of various anti-feminists to have “rebutted” it. Daran of Feminist Critics, a regular commenter on this blog, has also written two very useful posts on the subject as well.

EDIT: Here is another excellent post from Daran taking down Heather MacDonald, one of Koss’ recent critics, as well as two comments here that shed even more light on MacDonald’s flawed arguments. Thanks, Daran!