Captain America and the guy who’ll be taking over his job
So it turns out that Red Pill Redditors aren’t the only ones in a tizzy about Marvel comics’ plan to replace Thor (the superhero, not the actual Norse god, all praise him) with a woman. All over the manosphere, jimmies are rustling at the news.
The proudly racist, woman-hating pickup artist guru known as Heartiste is not only outraged by the “gelding” of Thor but also, and even more vehemently, by Marvel’s decision to make Captain America black, which he bizarrely describes as a kind of racial cuckolding:
Liberals are gloating over the recent editorial choices to geld Thor and race cuck Captain America. The former will become Whor, the female Thor, and the latter will become Captain Gibsmedat, the numinous negro who saves the right kinds of white people from the wrong kinds of white people.
“Gibsmedat” – I had to look it up – is a term that ridiculous racists like to use to describe welfare checks and other “goods, services, or material … given predominately to minorities, in exchange for their tacit agreement to reciprocate by not burning down America’s cities.” It’s short, you see, for “gibs me dat.”
Heartiste continues, lashing out at a “fat white liberal quasi-male named Devin Faraci” for publicly supporting Marvel’s decision to (at least temporarily) give the Captain America costume to The Falcon, another public-spirited superhero who happens to be black:
Thor, Captain America and other Norse gods prepare for battle.
Huh. So Thor — you know, that dude in the comic books based extremely loosely on Norse mythology — is going to be replaced by a woman. No, for reals. Marvel comics announced it on The View. No, that’s for real too.
I wonder what the alpha dogs over in the Red Pill subreddit might think of this?
I‘ve been so busy with all the shenanigans surrounding AVFM and their little conference that I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting the good old Men’s Rights subreddit. Don’t feel bad, Men’s Rights subreddit, for today I took a few moments out of my hard-core semi-vacationing to pay you a little visit!
While there, I noticed the regulars discussing a terrible quandary that faces all modern men: “As a man, would you help a child in distress?”
Jessica Roy, a reporter for Time magazine covering A Voice for Men’s recent :”Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, found herself the target of a vitriolic tirade from AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam before she even sat down to write her account of her time amongst the MRAs.
Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.
Roy’s “What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s Rights Conference” appeared on Time.com on Wednesday. Far from the hack job Elam and pals were predicting, her piece turned out to be a long, thoughtful and nuanced account that, while skeptical of AVFM and its brand of hateful nonsense, displayed considerable sympathy for some of the troubled men she met at the conference, men who could benefit from a movement that truly tried to offer solutions for men in difficulty instead of encouraging them to scapegoat feminists and women.
Reflecting on her discussions with several conference attendees, Roy wrote,
The Hate Bus, not to be confused with the Peace Train or the Joy Jitney.
So in my email inbox yesterday, alongside a nagging reminder from my dentist to schedule a checkup and my latest marching orders from the Gynocrat Central Committee, I noticed an email from an unknown correspondent with the intriguing subject line “The Holy War against Feminism.”
Clicking on it, I found an angry little manifesto from someone calling himself Mortago Black. It started off with a bold all-caps claim:
THE MENS REIGHTS REVOLUTION IS AT HAND.
The revolution will not be spellchecked.
But apparently, if Mr. Black has any say over things, it will be “liked” on Facebook: our manifesto-writer followed his bold headline with a link to a Facebook page – which, by the time I got around to looking at his email, had been taken down, probably because it contained stuff like, well, the rest of his manifesto.
Roy Den Hollander: Are we lawyer or are we dancer?
The other day I suggested that perhaps it was unfair to the Men’s Rights movement to allow them to handle their own public relations, given how terrible they are at it. Today I wonder if the same principle might also apply to MRAs trying to handle their own lawyering.
A case in point: the lawsuit that antifeminist lawyer, “Ladies Night” hater and hip-hop dance enthusiat Roy Den Hollander has just brought against Australian journalist Tory Shepherd, who wrote about the involvement of Den Hollander and others with links to “men’s rights extremists” in a proposed set of “male studies” courses at the University of South Australia.
It’s still not clear to me if these courses had ever been formally approved – the university says they weren’t – but Den Hollander thinks that Shepherd and another Australian reporter got them cancelled by writing about them. And so he figures that they should compensate him for losing him his teaching gig.
You may vaguely remember all of this. A Voice for Men, heavily involved in the courses, famously denounced Shepherd as a “whore” shortly after AVFM’s Paul Elam indignantly called her a liar for suggesting that A Voice for Men regularly calls women whores. (Which of course it does; Elam himself used the word “whore” 28 times in a single post about Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson.)
Anyhoo, so Den Hollander, acting as his own lawyer, has served Shepherd with the lawsuit. And it’s a doozy of a document, at least going by the excerpts Shepherd posted in a column Wednesday.
Somehow we doubt that this lawsuit is going to enhance Den Hollander’s reputation as a fair-minded analyst of gender relations.
Here are some of the best bits, as presented by Shepherd in her column as “some lessons from Mr Den Hollander, who will not be paid to give lessons at UniSA.”
Lesson 1: How to censor a journalist by accusing them of censorship.
“Two modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under authored and published false and misleading information concerning Plaintiff (Den Hollander) with the intent and result of harming his economic interests and interfering with a prospective economic advantage by causing the University of SA to incinerate the section of a proposed male studies course that Plaintiff would have taught,” he writes. But wait.
Lesson 2: How to personally attack a journalist by accusing them of personal attacks.
“The two reporters, Tory Shepherd, AKA “Tory the Torch” for The Advertiser and Amy McNeilage, AKA “Amy McNeuter” for The Sydney Morning Herald, used their power as reporters to do what weak-minded ideologues have done throughout history — employ personal attacks to prevent the spread of knowledge and ideas that they disagreed with.”
Lesson 3: How to prove you are not an extremist by sounding like an extremist.
“If these two feminist book-burners had not jumped on their broomsticks and scared the bejesus out of the administrators of the University of SA, students there would have had an opportunity to acquire information and consider views not available anywhere else in higher education.”
Yeah, I’m sure that sort of thing is going to go over great in court.
Elsewhere in his lawsuit, Den Hollander denounces “yellow, female-dog-in-heat reporting,” takes a swipe at “girlie-guys,” and offers this intriguing take on Australian military history:
Thank goodness for Australians that Tory was not around for Australia’s battle against the Japanese. Her anti-gun advocacy for men might have even resulted in her and Amy ending up as Japanese “comfort girls.”
The case does at least promise to be highly entertaining, so I guess we have to give Den Hollander credit for that.
You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re being unfair to Men’s Rights Activists by allowing them to handle their own publicity. I mean, it’s pretty clear that they’re terrible at it. Worse than terrible, really. Terribler. Possibly the terriblest.
I mean, just this week we saw the official social media director of A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit announcing the conference’s new venue with this:
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.)
W.F. Price (not pictured) believes the best way to prevent domestic violence is to put men in charge of households, and to keep police out
W. F. Price of The Spearhead isn’t very happy about my recent suggestion that the Men’s Rights movement encourages abusive ways of thinking towards women. It’s a strange claim for him to make, coming as it is from a guy who presides over one of the most notorious outposts of vicious, virulent misogyny in the Men’s Rights universe. Even stranger is his claim that by opposing violence against women and children I am therefore … supporting policies that lead to more violence against women and children.
It’s going to take a little while to work our way through his convoluted argument. So let’s start at the beginning. Here’s the quote of mine he objects to, from my post the other day about Lundy Bancroft:
