We Hunted The Mammoth
In the wee hours of the morning, this morning, there was a great disturbance on the Internet, as if millions of shitposters suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. For about ten seconds.
What had happened? This:
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/623796900903432192
Huh. That’s interesting.
The MGTOWs on the GYOW forum are thinking about tomorrow, putting on their futurist hats and pondering what will happen when, as they think is inevitable, more and more men “take the red pill” and walk away from women to a new life of happiness and wonder in which they devote their days to grousing endlessly about the women they’ve walked away from.
There’s a little talk of apocalypse, and a quick mention of sexbots, but these fellas seem most worried about, well, taxes. Because naturally, big daddy government — under the control of evil feminists and manginas — will try to take a kind of revenge against Men Going Their Own Way by instituting a dreadful Bachelor Tax.
It’s a day ending in “y” and “Men’s Human Rights Activist” Dean Esmay is spamming another hashtag on Twitter with belligerent and nonsensical Tweets directed at some imaginary feminist living in his head.
Wait, these were Tweeted yesterday, not today. Let me check something.
Yes, Thursday is also a day ending in “y,” so let’s continue.
Most conspiracy theorists are surprisingly uncreative in their choice of villains, blaming all the ills in the world on one or more alleged evildoers in a fairly short list: the Jews, the government, the Illuminati, space aliens, and a handful of other familiar suspects.
One Men’s Rights activist wants to add a few more names to the list: the women’s magazines Glamour, Allure, Self, Vogue, and, most terrifyingly, Teen Vogue.
Is MRA thinking simply beyond satire?
Cartoonist Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar on Twitter) recently decided to offer a satirical take on the false rape accusation paranoia that’s endemic in Men’s Rights circles, producing the list of tips below, designed to mirror some of the terrible advice that’s regularly given to women on how to avoid rape.
Pride parades are a bit more fabulous than usual this Pride Weekend, on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage legal across the United States.
A Voice for Men “CEO” Paul Elam is using the occasion as an opportunity to “warn” unwary gay marriers that they may be embarking on “a trip to the gallows.”
Elam, you see, considers himself a bit of an expert on marriages — possibly because he’s had so many of them himself — and wants gays to know that marriage is terrible and that their celebrations this weekend will ring hollow once they end up in divorce court.
If their reaction to the widespread mockery of The Sarkeesian Effect trailer is any indication, the two biggest critics of the “critic who cannot be criticized” cannot handle much in the way of criticism. Davis Aurini, the Nazi-er of the two Sarkeesian Effect auteurs, has been blocking the critics on his Youtube channel, evidently oblivious to the ironies. Jordan Owen, the one with the hair, has been yelling into his computer and putting the results up on Youtube. (See above.)
Are tattooed women a threat to Men’s Rights? Last week, the editors of A Voice for Men decided to promote “compassion for men and boys,” as the site’s old motto had it, by publishing a long and exceedingly creepy jeremiad against young women who taint their “radiant” young skin with icky tattoos, thereby ruining things for the men of the world.
In a post titled “Tattoos, good judgement and women,” Doug Mortimer, a self-described Man Going His Own Way of long standing, reminisces at length about the good old days, when the dancers at his favorite “topless bar” were as free of tattoos as they were of tops.
While Men’s Rights Activists are quick to label virtually any woman that they disagree with a feminist, they react with outrage when anyone who is not a self-admitted MRA is described as one.
The folks at A Voice for Men are still fuming about what they consider a “trust-shattering” media scandal: the fact that a bunch of news outlets wrote about a supposed Men’s Rights boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, when in fact the virulently antifeminist Youtube blabber calling for the boycott wasn’t technically a Men’s Rights activist at all.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude cluttering up my Twitter mentions with demands I take some sort of action against a tiny handful of commenters on this blog who have referred to the woman-hating mass killer Elliot Rodger as an MRA, even though, as far as we know, he wasn’t one.
To which I can only say: Sorry, guys. You’re Kleenex. And you’d better get used to it.
Uh oh! Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men is outraged by the latest terrible calumny besmirching the good name of the Men’s Rights movement. That Big Lie? That Men’s Rights Activists are boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road.
As Esmay puts it, in his characteristically overheated prose, the very notion that there is such a boycott
is a completely fabricated story by a handful of elitists abusing their power in the media–and betraying their fellow journalists while doing it.
Using his powerful internet detective skills, Esmay has managed to track down “the source of the lie,” which, as he sees it, “appears to have originated from a discredited hate-blogger named David Futrelle … .”
I’ve left off the rest of his sentence, as it is straight-up libel. Well, so is the bit about me being a “discredited hate-blogger,” and the part about the “lie” originating with me. I will give him credit for managing to spell my name correctly.
I’ll cop to the fact that my post on a would-be boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road set off an avalanche of articles on the subject. The Mary Sue, I believe, was the first to pick up the story, and was quickly followed by a few others. And then other writers piggybacked off of them. For better or worse, that’s how it works in online journalism these days.
But if Esmay is looking for the source of the incorrect notion that self-described Men’s Rights activists were behind the “boycott,” well, he’s not going to find it in my post, which contained no mention of Men’s Right Activists at all.
Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.
The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,
It’s true that the HuffPo writer, in the original version of her piece, wrongly described the MRA-adjacent Return of Kings — which has urged a
boymancott of Mad Max Fury Road — as a Men’s Rights site proper. There are in fact some differences between ROK and AVFM. For example, while AVFM writers have declared women to be “obnoxious cunts,” who control men with their vaginas, ROK writers have suggested that women are actually depraved, disloyal sheep.
You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)
And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.
Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.
But Esmay seems to think that there is some vast conspiracy afoot, writing that
we are really serious with this question: was anyone paid to put this fake story in the press? If so, who was paid and who did the paying?
Don’t be silly. No money changes hands. At least no human money. We do it under direct orders from our feline overlordsladies.
But as long as we’re asking questions I have one for Mr. Esmay: Are you ever going to do anything about the Holocaust denier and Hitler fan you’ve published many times on AVFM?
Apparently, to Dean Esmay at least, posting that Mad Max: Fury Road is being boycotted by MRAs, when most of the boycotters are in fact merely MRA-adjacent, is a greater crime against truth than denying the Holocaust.
