I have a new theory that I think might help to explain why so many Men’s Rights Activists are so obsessed with false accusations of rape. It’s simple: They are so used to making false accusations themselves, about pretty much everything, that it’s hard for them to conceive of someone making an accusation that is actually true.
Naturally, as a critic of the Men’s Rights movement I’m a fairly reliable target for these false charges, and rarely does a day go by in which I don’t learn some new, terrible, and wholly imaginary thing I’m alleged to have said or done. Hell, these days I can barely make it through a Twitter conversation with A Voice for Men’s Dean Esmay without him spouting some grotesque falsehood about me.
The latest accusation from the A Voice for Men crowd – or at least from AVFM’s so-called Honey Badger Brigade – is that all the media talk about Elliot Rodger being an MRA was my fault. Or, as “Honey Badger” Alison Tieman put it in a tweet that she sent to an assortment of media outlets that had written about Rodger and the MRAs,
So A Voice for Men, having lost or abandoned the original venue for their “Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, has announced its new location: A VFW post some 18 miles away from the original hotel where, presumably, most of the conference’s attendees will be staying.
According to Paul Elam, they made the move in large part to spare conference-goers the terrible inconvenience of having to watch the no-doubt riveting presentations from an “overflow room.”
No, really.
In a post last night, Elam declared that all the media attention given to the conference
Men in Canadian elevators are sometimes also used as chairs.
Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
MRAs seem to think that they can spin their way out of pretty much anything. And on the internet, particularly in their own little echo chamber, they can kind of get away with it. It’s when they venture out into the real world that they run into some trouble.
Take, for example, the mad spinning that accompanied the implosion of the Canadian Association for Equality’s “E Day” concert scheduled for last weekend. CAFE, you may recall, is a Canadian Men’s Rights group that’s probably most famous for organizing a series of talks by Men’s Rights-friendly folks on Canadian campuses that, well, caused a tiny bit of a stir.
Oh, sorry. The group says that even though its “focus is currently on men and boys … [W]e do not consider ourselves a Men’s Rights Group.”
Anyway, so this non-Men’s Rights group decided to hold a concert on Toronto Island celebrating “Equality Day,” a holiday they made up just for the occasion. They found a venue, got some sponsors and even managed to convince a bunch of bands to sign on.
So about a week ago, someone put a petition up on Whitehouse.gov asking the president to classify the Men’s Rights Movement as a terrorist group. The petition, posted in the immediate aftermath of Elliot Rodger ‘s killing spree, seems to be sincerely motivated. But it was a bad idea. The Men’s Rights movement is full of assholes, some of them potentially quite dangerous. Still, not every MRA is an Elliot Rodger in the making, and this kind of hyperbole doesn’t help those who are trying to expose the true terribleness of the Men’s Rights movement.
After their initial outrage wore off, MRAs decided to treat the petition as a golden opportunity for self-martyrdom. Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men urged fellow MRAs – sorry, MHumanRAs – to sign it themselves, perhaps not realizing that it might prove difficult to convince the world they’re being oppressed by a petition if they’re the ones most actively collecting signatures for it. (Esmay also took a moment to compare me to Bull Connor, which seems a tad odd, to say the least.)
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.)
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
Thought Catalog – which seems to be rapidly becoming the go-to site for terrible antifeminist posts – is making a bit of a stir on Reddit with a post bearing the deliberately provocative title “Wait A Second, Did Amy Schumer Rape a Guy?” Spoiler Alert: The anonymous author concludes that yes, she did. The anonymous author is full of shit.
In the Thought Catalog piece, Anonymous takes a look at a speech that Schumer – a comedian with some subversive feminist leanings — recently gave at the Gloria Awards and Gala, hosted by the Ms. Foundation for Women. The centerpiece of Schumer’s speech, a bittersweet celebration of confidence regained, was a long and cringeworthy story about a regrettable sexual encounter she had in her Freshman year of college, when her self-esteem was at an all-time low.
Professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly – perhaps best known for her fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – seems to have been channeling the manosphere in a column she published yesterday on the issue of “paycheck fairness.” Turns out she thinks such fairness is actually a bad idea, because ladies love marrying rich guys more than they love earning money.
According to Schlafly, equal pay messes with the fundamental female desire for “hypergamy” – that favorite manosphere buzzword – and undermines marriage:
[H]ypergamy … means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Indeed, Schlafly argues, women love marrying men who earn more than them so much that when the pay gap is eliminated some of them just won’t marry at all. Which is apparently the end of the world, or something.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. …
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
So it’s not enough that most people end up getting married; civilization will crumble if more than half of them don’t marry before the age of 30!
And so, she suggests, if American women knew what was good for them they would be begging for employers pay them even less, relative to men.
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Schlafly – a best-selling author and popular speaker on the right – didn’t send back any of her royalties or speaking fees so that she would feel more like a woman and her late husband would feel like more of a man, and I doubt she’s doing so now, as a widow. She’s also been unmarried for more than twenty years. Coincidence?
NOTE TO MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: When you find yourself agreeing with Phyllis Schlafly on pretty much anything (beyond, say, the existence of gravity, the need for human beings to breathe air, and other widely accepted beliefs of this sort), this is an indication that perhaps your movement isn’t the progressive, egalitarian movement that you like to pretend that it is, and that in fact it is sort of the opposite.
That said, I should also note that Schlafly’s notion of “hypergamy,” while sexist and silly, is decidedly less obnoxious than the version peddled by PUAs and websites like A Voice for Men — congrats, Men’s Human Rights Activists, you’re actually worse than Phyllis Schlafly!
She just uses the term to indicate a desire to marry up. For many manospherians, by contrast, “hypergamy” doesn’t just mean marrying up; it means that women are fickle, unfaithful monsters who love nothing better than cuckolding beta males in order to jump into bed with whatever alpha male wanders into their field of vision. (I’m guessing Schlafly hasn’t actually been going through the archives at AVFM or Chateau Heartiste looking for column ideas.) While many MRAs love to complain about hypergamy, many of them also seem to think that it’s unfair that “beta” males with good jobs aren’t automatically entitled to hot wives.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual definition of the word “hypergamy” involves none of that. According to Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, the word means “marriage to a person of a social status higher than one’s own; orig., esp. in India, the custom of allowing a woman to marry only into her own or a higher social group.”
That’s it. It refers to the fact of marrying up, not to the desire to marry up, much less to the alleged desire of all twentysomething women to ride the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel. The manosphere’s new and not-so-improved definition came from a white nationalist named F. Roger Devlin.
ANOTHER NOTE: Big thanks to the people who emailed me about this story. If you ever see something you think would make for a good Man Boobz post, send me an email at futrelle [at] manboobz.com. I get a lot of ideas from tips!
I follow a lot of truly terrible people on Twitter — Manosphere bloggers, white supremacists, Fidelbogen — so it took me a moment to realize that this dopey, backwards tweet didn’t come from some obscure reactionary bigot but from none other than antifeminist celebrity academic Christina Hoff Sommers, inventor of “equity feminism” and the author of the bestselling The War Against Boys.
If "bossy" has to go because it is sexist, then shouldn't we stop using male-vilifying terms like "mansplaining" & "rape culture"? @banbossy
