We Hunted The Mammoth
The Paris attacks have inspired cartoonist and opinion-haver Scott Adams to reflect on some of the true injustices in the world today.
Specifically, the fact that in the United States, men often pay for dates, yet cannot have sex with women without getting their permission first.
A writer from Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible Return of Kings site recently got himself into a bit of trouble at a white power convention in Tennessee.
The problem wasn’t that the writer, one Blair Naso, didn’t fit in with the motley assortment of Hitler-lovers and former National Review writers who attended the 2015 American Renaissance conference, put on by an organization that actually has won itself an official “hate group” designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center for its virulent racism and its obsessive advocacy for a white “homeland.”
No, he fit in fine, ideologically speaking. In a post for Return of Kings, Naso praised the AmRen crowd for “doing a wonderful work,” and “saying the things that others are terrified to say.”
The problem? Well, Mr. Naso got a wee bit drunk and started harassing women at a local bar. As Naso sheepishly admits in his ROK post,
From Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, here’s a little skit taking on the phenomenon of the Nice Guy. No fedoras so be seen, but other than that she pretty much covers all the bases, right on down to the neckbeards on some of the fellas. Caution: Mild creepshaming.
NOTE TO ANGRY MRAS: This video does not represent an official statement on the part of feminism. Amy Schumer is a COMEDIAN.
It’s Friday. Why not welcome in the upcoming weekend with a picture of an anarchist cat and a completely unrelated, completely unhinged manifesto from the MensRants subreddit, the Men’s Rights subreddit’s unruly younger brother.
In a post with the somewhat roundabout title “Just posting this publicly gives me an ulcer. But I won’t let it stop me,” an angry fella who calls himself sizzletron set forth his opinions about, well, a lot of things having to do with women. It’s a piece that’s pretty much impossible to summarize, since sizzletron apparently finds it difficult to keep the thread of an argument going from one sentence to the next.
Let’s dig in:
Here — above and below — are a couple of amazing works of Men’s Rightsy propaganda I missed in my survey of deviantART yesterday, both from a fellow calling himself alexlartwork22. And, yes, they both seem to be meant completely seriously.
Two rage comics that capture well the true human tragedy that is FRIENDZONING, both of which I found in the awesome Blue Pill subreddit. The one above is by dont_buy_me_gold; the one below by SaltyChristian (who is, incidentally, a CERTIFIED ALPHA).
I have heard rumors that the entire Blue Pill subreddit is not actually a hangout for super alpha dudes but rather a parody of the Red Pill subreddit but I choose not to believe them, much in the same way I choose not to believe in the supposed “law” of gravity. It’s A THEORY, people!
(Note: These are both parodies, by the way, in case there is any confusion.)
So someone on YouTube decided to put together what was intended as a heartwarming and inspirational video — assembled mostly from Russian dash-cam videos — showing an assortment of ordinary fellows taking a few moments from their day to help out their fellow human beings, and even a few animals. We get to see little old ladies walked across the street, cars pushed or pulled from snowbanks, and so on.
But when Paul Elam of A Voice for Men — the alleged Men’s “Human Rights” site that posts an open call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its “activism” section — watched the video, all he saw was what wasn’t there — that is, helpful women.
JohnTheOther, blabby videoblogger and Number Two at A Voice for Men, has now weighed in with his own, slightly tardy, manifesto on the Aurora shooting and the evils of supposed male “disposability.” I didn’t read the whole thing – seriously, dude, OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS – but a few things stood out when I skimmed it. For example, this lovely passage, which seems to be a longer and fouler version of that ill-advised tweet from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto that I mentioned in my last post.
Our mainstream, which is to say, our corporate media – that which bends and fawns for access to the corrupt elected officials and modern robber barons of corporate statehood – is telling you, young man, that in order to be worthwhile, a real man, you’d better be prepared to die without complaint for the child, or the little old lady, or the drug addled slut in the next seat.
But Mr. TheOther is having none of it:
The instinct – expressing itself variously as chivalry or as fatal self sacrifice — is just one more that no longer has any discernable benefit. It is an encumbrance to any real pursuit of a civilized society in which one class of humans is not legally and socially elevated over another.
Sorry, kids; sorry, old ladies; sorry “drug addled sluts” — you’re on your own. Apparently, in a truly civilized society, no one ever looks out for anyone else. Altruism is for barbarians and Bill Bennett!
Here’s JtO’s stirring conclusion:
Those three men are not heroes, they’re just dead. The calculus of death, where one life is traded in celebration for another by preference of a vagina, is pathological and regressive. It must be recognized as the sickness it is. Those who lionized these men, whose fatal and unexamined instinct led to self-destruction; those who held them up as a heroic example to follow, are cordially invited to go first — or to go fuck themselves.
Charming as always, Mr. TheOther.
In the discussion of Mr. TheOther’s post in the Men’s Rights Subreddit, AVFM’s Paul Elam expands on the whole they aren’t heroes” theme, arguing that we need to retroactively strip away the hero status of the three men who died protecting their girlfriends — because they died protecting women.
The Titanic sank 100 years ago today, and Men’s Rights Activists are still pissed off about it.
They’re not really pissed off that it sank. They’re pissed off that the men on board were more likely to go down with the ship than the women. You know, that whole “women and children first” thing.
Some MRAs were so pissed off about this that they were planning to march on Washington on this very day in an attempt, as they put it, to “Sink Misandry.”
You don’t know how much I would have loved to see this, a dozen angry dudes marching in circles on the National Mall carrying signs protesting the sinking of the Titanic and demanding that in all future sinkings of the Titanic that women and men be equally likely to drown in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. For that would be justice at last!
But, alas, due to unspecified logistical problems this march was cancelled some months back, and so misandry remains unsunk.
Or does it?
For you see, it turns out that the whole “women and children first” thing was not really a thing. Oh, on The Titanic it was. But women unfortunate enough to be passengers on sinking ships that weren’t the Titanic (or the HMS Birkenhead, which sunk off the coast of South Africa in 1852) weren’t able to push ahead to the front of the line. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new Swedish study (link is to a pdf of it).
The chivalrous code “women and children first” appears to have sunk with the Titanic 100 years ago.
Long believed to be the golden standard of conduct in a shipwreck, the noble edict is in fact “a myth that has been nourished by the Titanic disaster,” economist Mikael Elinder of Uppsala University, Sweden, told Discovery News.
Elinder and colleague Oscar Erixson analyzed a database of 18 peace-time shipwrecks over the period 1852–2011 in a new study into survival advantages at sea disasters.
Looking at the fate of over 15,000 people of more than 30 nationalities, the researchers found that more women and children die than men in maritime disasters, while captains and crew have a greater chance of survival than any passengers.
Being a woman was an advantage on only two ships: on the Birkenhead in 1852 and on the Titanic in 1912.
The notion of “women and children first” may have captured the popular imagination, but it’s never been an official policy for ship evacuations. It wouldn’t be fair, nor would it be an efficient way to get as many people as possible to safety.
Nor was “women and children” strictly enforced even on the Titanic. True, my great-grandfather, the mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, was one of those who went down with the ship, while his wife and my great-grandmother, writer Lily May Futrelle made it off safely (in the last lifeboat). But there were many men who survived, and many women who died.
If you want to get mad about the sinking of the Titanic all those years ago, get mad at the White Star Line for not bothering to equip the ship with lifeboats enough for everyone on it. Blame the captain, for ordering the ship to continue plowing ahead on a dark, foggy night into an area of the Atlantic where numerous icebergs had just been sighted by a number of other ships. Blame the crew for botching the evacuation – for the strange lack of urgency after the ship hit the iceberg, for the lifeboats leaving the sinking ship with half as many passengers as they could fit.
Much like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, Elinder and Erixson’s research has poked a giant hole in the “women and children first” myth. Of course, MRAs aren’t interested in historical accuracy. They’re looking for excuses to demonize women and feminists. So I imagine we’ll be hearing about the Titanic from them for years to come.
Here’s another tragic sinking, of yet another ship without a sufficient number of lifeboats:
EDIT: I added a couple of relevant links and fixed a somewhat egregious typo.
Oh, the Men’s Rights subreddit is on a roll! Earlier in the week, as regular readers will already be well aware, a sizeable number of the regulars there were waxing indignant about a spermburgling girlfriend who turned out to be imaginary, and expressing sympathy for the imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary boyfriend, even though he’d admitted to punching her in her imaginary stomach.
Now they’re directing their wrath at a British journalist whom they’ve decided is being insufficiently grateful for being rescued from being hit by a speeding automobile by Ryan Gosling.
The backstory: Earlier in the week, British journalist Laurie Penny was wandering the streets of Manhattan, lost in thought, when she almost stepped off the curb into the path of a taxi. A man standing nearby grabbed her and pulled her to safety. That man happened to be famously hunky young actor Ryan Gosling.
Naturally, Penny tweeted about it, and her tweet aroused something of a Twitterstorm, in part because of the novelty of the situation, and in part because the thought of someone so dashing performing this little act of urban heroism made more than a few ladies (and men) swoon a little. I would probably react the same way if I heard a story about Kate Winslet saving a kitten.
Anyway, Penny was a little bit overwhelmed by all the attention her story was getting, and ended up writing a funny, spiky little essay for Gawker reminding people that while, yes, Ryan Gosling had indeed done a very nice thing for her, for which she was grateful, that it wasn’t really the biggest deal in the world. For one thing, she pointed out, lots of ordinary decent people perform similar acts of “heroism” all the time. For another, there are bigger heroes out there – like those working tirelessly to keep Rick Santorum from becoming our next president.
She ended the piece with this:
I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story. I do not mean any disrespect to Ryan Gosling, who is an excellent actor and, by all accounts, a personable and decent chap. …
But as a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.
And the thing is, I’m sure he would. I’m sure he’s as embarrassed about the attention as Penny is.
Well, for some people, Penny’s refusal to play the “boring supportive role” was simply unacceptable. Over on The National Review, antifeminist asshole Suzanne Venker wrote a snide and misleading piece portraying Penny as an ungrateful bitch:
If Western women want to know where all the good men have gone, they need only look in the mirror. Not only can men no longer hold the door open for women or pay the check after dinner, they can’t even save a woman’s life and get a simple thank you.
Never mind that Penny wrote explicitly that she was “grateful to the dashing and meme-worthy Mr. Gosling.” We can conclude that Venker either has terrible reading comprehension, or is deliberately lying about Penny. In any case, she continued on in this vein:
Feminists have totally destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Not all women seek the feminized version of the American male. Most women like big, strong, sexy men. They want men who are willing to put out fires, fight in combat, and, yes, even save damsels in distress. But in post-feminist America, Marlboro Man is a rare breed. We can thank women like Penny for that.
Well, actually, the reason the Marlboro Man isn’t around any more is that he died of lung cancer. (Well, to be more specific, two of the actors who portrayed the Marlboro Man did in fact die that way.) But let’s continue:
If Americans don’t wake up to the evils of feminism, the next time a woman walks down the wrong side of the street, the men of America will simply walk right past her and let her get hit.
And we’ll have no one blame but ourselves.
Really? Really? I’m pretty sure that Penny’s Gawker essay isn’t actually going to turn American men into a bunch of woman-hating psychopaths. I think we can all agree that Venker is being a giant turd here.
Well, not all of us, I guess. Someone posted Venker’s little screed to the Men’s Rights subreddit – you were wondering when I’d get back to them, weren’t you? And the regulars responded, well, like you would expect them to. Here are two of the most highly upvoted comments there, from two of the subreddit’s most prolific posters.
Stay classy. Men’s Rights Redditors!
