Dean Esmay: You can close your eyes, but it won’t go away.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.
The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are engaging in a bit of self-reflection. Well, that may be a bit of a generous description on my part. They’re discussing the question “Are we fanatics?” Not surprisingly, they conclude that they aren’t.
A Voice for Men has a little Google Challenge for its readers, and I’m going to invite you to take part in it as well. In the midst of yet another post trying to gin up outrage over Facebook’s banning of violent rape memes and other such repugnant shit, new AVFM contributor and “former feminist” Jason Gregory sets forth this challenge, which he originally posted on his blog several weeks ago:
Those sneaky, sexy ladies, always up to something!
So over on The Spearhead, the fellas are discussing journalist Daniel Bergner’s sexy new sex book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. It’s a book that challenges many conventional wisdoms, both scientific and popular, about sexuality and, as Salon puts it, portrays female sexuality as essentially “base, animalistic and ravenous.”
Men forced into hypermasculine role by straight women, out cruising for chicks.
So we learned the other day from that Man Going His Own Way that male violence was, like, totally the fault of evil sexy ladies. Now, from this Men’s Rights Redditor, we learn that homophobia — or at least homophobia directed at gay men — is all the fault of straight women and their desire for macho dudes. Because straight men don’t ever express any sort of hostility towards gay or effeminate men — it’s just those darn ladies!
But, huh, what about all those straight dudes who are always calling other dudes “gay” and, you know, that other word that starts with an “f?”
Well, apparently that’s just playful joshing. No harm, no foul! If anything, it shows how wonderfully tolerant of gayness these guys are. I mean, come on, if you can’t see this, you must be stupid, or something. Or so says this other Men’s Rights Redditor:
They’re just having a little fun. You’re not against fun, are you?
Over on This is Why MGTOW, the blogger who calls himself Cerberus Alpha (dude, seriously?) attempts to answer the question: Why are men more violent?
Rather than attempting to engage with the extensive scholarly literature on the subject, or even making a token effort to do any research on the subject whatsoever, Mr. Alpha instead spins a few familiar manosphere fairy tales into “evidence” that it’s all the fault of those evil sexy ladies and their evil sexy and/or feminist ways.
There are many, many, many reasons why the Men’s Rights movement is not now, and I suspect never will be, ready for prime time. One of these reasons is that even when MRAs are doing their best to wax eloquent, in the fanciest language they can muster, about the urgent need for men to save civilization from the degradations of feminism and cultural Marxism and whatever by saying even more bad things about women, they just can’t keep themselves from using phrases like “pussy pass.”
How manosphere doofuses think the world actually works.
Another in an ongoing series of posts on seminal works in the manosphere canon, as it were. At some point, I’ll make a page for these.
Like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, F. Roger Devlin’s 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power (downloadable here) is a kind of Manospherianurtext, an original source of many of the terrible ideas that are now accepted as gospel wherever misogynists gather in large numbers online. Though the name of Devlin is hardly as well known as that of Farrell, many of his ideas, most notably his reworked notion of “hypergamy” — which we will get to in a minute — are omnipresent in the manosphere.
Wonder Woman: Forever alienating decent men with her blatant careerism.
NOTE: I’ve closed comments on this post because it keeps attracting crankish comments from misogynists who agree with the misogynists I quote in the post.
Hey ladies! Have you ever wondered why so many men hate you? Well, you’re in luck, because on Reddit, another lady just like you has an answer. It’s because you suck. No, really. Men hate women because women are terrible. And not very ladylike, to boot.
Let’s join FleetingWish as she explains “Why Do Men “Hate” Us?” in Part 2 of her Who-knows-how-many-parts opus “Attracting Alphas,” which she has helpfully posted in the fPUAs subreddit, a forum apparently devoted to teaching “females” how to more effectively get picked up by alleged Alpha males.
So WF Price of The Spearhead, who responded to my previous post criticizing his and his commenters’ appalling reactions to the Cleveland abductions with thoughtfulness and maturity (by which I mean a bizarre and weirdly racist personal attack on a commenter here), has now taken offense to a darkly satirical piece the Onion ran in the wake of the revelations of what allegedly went on Ariel Castro’s house for the past 11 years.
The Onion piece wasn’t funny, exactly, nor was it meant to be; it was pretty clearly the raw reaction of someone reacting with appropriate horror to the details of Castro’s alleged crimes, which seem to surpass even the worst “man-hater’s” vision of male depravity. Price, rather missing the point, sees the Onion piece as simple “feminist man-hatred” and suggests that it proves his point all along: that patriarchy is a lie.
The Castro brothers were neither patriarchal nor privileged; they were low-life predators from the bottom of society. Not to say that low-class men are all bad people, either, but men without privilege are the most likely to commit crimes, for obvious reasons. …
The myth of male power and privilege is just that, and the Cleveland case is one more pebble on the mountain of evidence that exposes it for a lie.
Empowering men in their families will not lead to more crimes against women and girls, but fewer.
Huh. So I guess if we make all men rich, and order the police to stop responding to all “domestic disturbance” calls, all our problems will be solved!
Never mind that Ariel Castro seems to have lorded it over his now-dead ex when he was involved with her, reportedly brutalizing and terrorizing her and getting away with it in part because he threatened to further brutalize her if she testified against him. He may not have had much power in the wider world, but he certainly seems to have felt quite “empowered” in his dealings with women and girls, and the “justice” system didn’t provide any justice to his apparent victims, even before the kidnappings.
And never mind that Price continues to refer to the “Castro brothers” although the police are saying that Ariel Castro acted alone.
Despite not knowing the basic facts of the case, Price seems to like the idea of using cases like this one to push his antifeminist agenda. According to him, his attempts to use the case to “refute” the feminist idea that
male privilege [is] tied to abuse of women … really enraged them, because how dare I use one of “their” cases to point out that they are wrong. From their perspective, it should be a sacred feminist right to use these incidents against men as a political bludgeon so as to coerce more concessions, more power, etc. Some went so far as to accuse me of blaming women and feminists for the kidnappings themselves (rubbish), while a few others sent me some hate mail.
But you know, I’m going to keep it up, because they do not have the sole right to the narrative when convenient tragedies occur. …
Feminists will doubtless use examples of outrageous crimes in an effort to remove more men from their families, thereby creating both more victims and more criminals. They will use examples like the Castro brothers’ kidnapping whenever and wherever they can. We must stop them from doing so, and we must not be intimidated by their feigned moral outrage when we speak the truth about their agenda.
Dude. if you think the reactions people are having to the Cleveland abductions — or to the terrible things you and your commenters have said about them — are in any way “feigned,” then I can only suggest that you may have completely lost touch with your humanity.
Once again, the Spearhead’s commenters lived up to their past standards of moral monsterhood, continuing to put the blame for Ariel Castro’s crimes (and pretty much every other ill) on feminism and women in general. Here are some selections. You’ll notice the one wishing death on feminists is officially “well-liked” by the commentariat there.
The only vaguely encouraging thing in the entire discussion? That Dana’s call for urban genocide got a couple of downvotes. To the two Spearhead readers who don’t think wiping out an entire community of decent people because of the behavior of one man is a good idea, I would like to say “thanks.” And also suggest that maybe you should stop reading The Spearhead.
EDITED: Added paragraphs about Ariel Castro’s alleged brutality towards his ex, and clarification that only he has been charged, not his brothers.
