We Hunted The Mammoth
Even after all the time I’ve spent on this blog, I can still be astounded by the appalling hatefulness of the manosphere. The latest example? This post from the influential far-right manospherian who calls himself Vox Day, in which he argues, seriously, that encouraging rape is better for society than encouraging (white) women to work.
No, really.
MRAs spend an awful lot of time getting worked up by hypothetical injustices. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, angry Men’s Rightsers regularly post links to stories of women behaving badly – or who may have been charged with or convicted of a crime – with indignant headlines suggesting that the women in question would be treated far worse if “she had been a man.”
The latest example of this outrage over imagined injustices? This post, found in r/mensrights today, with 87 net upvotes:
If you follow the link, it goes to a brief story about the alleged incident in The Huffington Post. I say “alleged” because the woman in question has not yet been convicted of anything. As the story reports, the police arrested her because
school staff told them the assembly was halted and the cafeteria cleared after Meaders began dancing onstage and took off some of her clothes.
She’s charged with seven counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of public lewdness.
An Albany City Court clerk says Meaders was arraigned Friday afternoon and ordered held on $3,000 bail. She doesn’t have a lawyer yet.
There is no mention of putting her on a sex offenders registry because, and let me be blunt here, YOU HAVE TO BE CONVICTED OF A CRIME TO GET PUT ON ONE. She’s merely been CHARGED.
There is no “pussy pass” for women that enables them to bypass the sex offenders registry ONCE THEY ARE CONVICTED of public lewdness. The relevant NY State law can be found here; as you can see, the gender of the convicted offender is not an issue. (It took all of 30 seconds on Google to dig that up.) Meaders isn’t getting special treatment because she’s a woman; she’s not on the offenders registry because an arrest is not the same as a conviction.
Enjoy your imagined oppression, fellas.
So: many if not most of you have probably heard about the whole #INeedMasculismBecause thing. For those who aren’t: a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors and other MRAs, inspired by a post on 4Chan, decided to swarm Twitter with #INeedMasculismBecause tweets in response to the #INeedFeminismBecause hashtag. Feminists responded by outswarming the MRAs, flooding their new hashtag with often quite hilarious parodies of MRAspeak, as well as some just plain ridiculousness.
Today is an auspicious day. For the Men’s Rights Subreddit, which we often write about here on Man Boobz, has won the prestigious World’s Greatest Shitlord Award. Oh, sorry, I mean it won the Subreddit of the Day award on Reddit. Which is, in this case, pretty much the same thing.
Here are some highlights from the official announcement , which I am totally not making up. No, really, you can go look. Someone – that being XavierMendel, one of the mods of r/subredditoftheday — actually wrote these things. And meant them. I AM NOT BEING SARCASTIC THIS IS REAL HOLY SHIT.
One effect of living within the ideological bubble of the Men’s Rights movement is what you might call ideological inflation: MRAs start off believing, for example, that women don’t face discrimination today, in the developed world — an idea that’s wrong enough to start with. But then, surrounded by other delusional MRAs who reinforce their every wrong notion, the denizens of the Men’s Rights bubble come to believe that women haven’t ever been discriminated against anywhere and at any time in the history of the world. (You may recall those evil cavewomen who sat around eating prehistoric bon bons while the men hunted the mammoth to feed them.)
And that leads to things like the following video, in which the FeMRA video maker who calls herself The Wooly Bumblebee declares war on a pair of “Misandric Pants” she bought for her daughter by accident.
Yep, that’s right, she’s furious because one fucking percent of the proceeds made from selling these pants goes to a charity fighting against the very real discrimination and oppression that girls face all over the globe. You know, like being denied educations because they’re girls. Like being forced into child marriages with adult men. Like being forced into prostitution as children. That sort of thing.
Apparently girls don’t suffer from being repeatedly raped as children. But boys are totally oppressed because a tiny portion of the profits from a pair of pants goes to a charity that talks about, and tries to do something about, the shit girls have to endure because they are girls.
Our old friend over at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog is angry again. This time he’s mad at a legitimate target: National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre. But not because LaPierre is the head of an organization that has stood athwart every attempt at sensible gun control, making tragedies like the one in Newtown an all-too-predictable side effect of the easy availability of semiautomatic weaponry.
Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
Among those who celebrate Christmas, the holiday is often (for better or worse) a time to celebrate family, and to bring usually distant family members together – parents and their adult children, grandparents and their grandchildren, and so on.
A proposal from the guy behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog would mean a bit of a change in this tradition: it would eliminate grandchildren from the equation utterly. Not just by excluding them from the holiday celebrations, but by eliminating them altogether – at least until his demands are met.
You all need to go read Kate Harding’s bracing (and given all the recent doxxing bullshit, spectacularly well-timed) Jezebel piece titled “Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists.” Here’s a sample:
Fuck you, first of all, for making it nearly impossible for decent men struggling with abusive partners or unfair custody arrangements to get the help they need and deserve. You have forever tainted those issues with your rage-filled, obsessively anti-woman horseshit, to the point where it’s become difficult for any rational, compassionate person to trust a man who claims he’s been screwed over in family court or abused by a female partner, even if he has. …
Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.
And it keeps going from there.
Thank you Kate, for putting it so well.
