Category: drama

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bullying douchebaggery drama evil women false accusations misogyny MRA rape reddit

The recent ugliness on Reddit

From time to time, something will happen on the Internet or in real life that I know I should write about for Man Boobz, but it’s so infuriating or depressing that I can’t bring myself to write about it. The recent bullshit on Reddit involving a young woman whose story of a sexual assault was met with angry disbelief until she provided video proof that her injuries were real is a perfect case in point.

Briefly, what happened is this:

A young woman posted about a sexual assault she’d endured a day or so earlier – a man had tried to rape her, pushing her to the ground and scraping her face on the pavement. In a separate topic she posted a picture of her injuries, most notably a giant scrape on her cheek. You can see it at right; click on the picture to see it full size.

Then another Redditor noticed that some time back, the same woman had posted a picture of herself in zombie makeup. This, he said, made him skeptical that her injuries were real — it was probably just a good makeup job.

That was all it took to send Reddit into a full internet lynch mob frenzy: obviously this woman was a liar and an attention whore and, even worse, possibly a feminist anti-rape activist! Redditors suddenly became both medical and makeup experts, and declared that the giant scrape on her face was obviously phony. (Not to me; I tried arguing with several of them to no avail.) It got ugly, very ugly, very quickly.

The woman at the heart of the storm asked if she needed to post an actual video of her cleaning the wound on her face to show that it was real; a redditor demanded that she do just that.

So she did. (Here it is.) Long story short: the scrape is real. The woman also posted a picture of the business card given to her by the police detective she’s spoken to when reporting the incident. It’s now pretty clear that there is no reason to doubt that her story is true. Even the Redditor who originally challenged her story realized that she was almost certainly telling the truth.

Here’s her post offering proof to back up her story.

At this point the lynch mob lost its steam; some people even apologized to her.

But the evidence of the ugliness remains in a host of different threads and different subforums on Reddit. I honestly don’t have the energy or the  patience to sift through all of the ugliness; luckily, Jezebel has given a decent account of the whole spectacle; you can go there to get some more of the details.

You might also want to look in to the main thread where most of the ugliness occurred — though at this point many of the vile accusatory comments that got upvoted when everyone seemed to assume she was lying have been retroactively voted down. (The screenshot I posted above gives a better idea of what it looked like at the time; here’s another screenshot with some of the choicer comments.)

Naturally, Men’s Rightsers contributed to the ugliness – though most of the worst comments appeared outside of the Men’s Rights subreddit, and a surprising number of r/mr regulars refused to jump on the original “she’s a liar” bandwagon.

While many Men’s Rightsters are now apologetic, others still think she may be lying.

Here’s a good discussion of the whole thing in ShitRedditSays, and a followup.

 

Categories
douchebaggery drama MRA reddit threats

Breaking News: Men’s Rights mod on Reddit is kind of a dick

So, funny story.

Earlier today, some guy on the Men’s Rights subreddit made a not-so-vaguely threatening remark about me. I sent the mod a message about it, and, well, this was his response:

Yeah. Pretty sure that’s not exactly the way Reddit wants its mods to behave.

 

Categories
drama idiocy misandry misogyny rape rapey scott adams white knights

Scott Adams: Self-proclaimed Misunderstood Genius, Part XVIII

Scott Adams contemplates his favorite subject (artist's conception)

Oy. Scott Adams won’t shut up about that execrable “Pegs and Hoies” piece of his that I (and quite a few other people on the internets) wrote about the other day. Naturally, he’s being willfully obtuse about the reaction his piece caused, and blames it all on the “low reading comprehension” of everyone in the world who is not him and/or one of his sycophantic fans. So he’s decided to interview a number of those who wrote about it. (Not including me. Aww, Scott, but we had such good times together!)

So far he’s interviewed Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon (a great writer and lovely person, by the way) and Irin Carmon of Jezebel. Naturally, the interviewees offer cogent explanations of just what was wrong with his idiotic post, and he responds by completely and utterly missing the point. (Or pretending to; it’s always hard to tell with Scott.)

Scott Adams is so relentlessly irritating – he’s a bit like Eoghan in his stubborn refusal to get the point – that I can’t bring myself to write any more about this idiotic manufactured controversy.  So you’ll have to go check out the posts yourself.

EDITED TO ADD: Adams has put up yet another post on the  subject, entitled “Maybe it’s me?” in which he decides ” to take a step back and seriously consider the hypothesis that the reason people disagree with me is that I’m an idiot and I don’t realize it.” Scott, your hypothesis is correct.

EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: And … Mr. Adams has now made a personal appearance in the comments below. Be gentle!

Given Adams’ intense narcissism, I can’t help but get the song “Biggest Fan” by the Martini Brothers stuck in my head every time I read any of this posts. Listen a bit, and you’ll see why.

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drama manginas MRA the spearhead Uncategorized

>The Spearhead: You don’t have to be crazy to post here, but it helps. Scratch that: You DO have to be crazy.

>

Don’t ever say this to the guys at The Spearhead

These days I mostly ignore the people who attack me and this blog online, because I’m sick of internet drama and have no interest in stirring that particular sort of shit. But there’s one discussion going on at the moment that I think is worth mentioning, because it provides as interesting snapshot of the manosphere at the current moment.

Over on The Spearhead, a certain MRA who used to comment here at great length is suggesting that Spearheaders tone down their rhetoric so that “a site called mamboobz.com” won’t quote them and, by exposing their crazy talk to the light of day, possibly make the men’s rights movement look bad.

Never mind that the regulars at The Spearhead aren’t all MRAs and I don’t identify them as such. That’s not the point. The point is this:

The person making the suggestion is Eoghan. And his mild and in fact quite sensible suggestion has not gone over well with the locals. Indeed, one of the regulars, SingleDad,compared him to “a Jewish person in Germany telling all the others who are complaining about their fears as they are loaded on the trains headed for the concentration camp to quiet down or the Nazi’s might get angry.” Another added, “I won’t make you wet your panties by calling you a mangina, especially since you seem to be either a doofus or a cunt.”

After a bit more back and forth, SingleDad came back with what can only be called a direct threat:

You sir are a traiter to your gender. ..  You would hold our hands as they lead us into the gas chamber.
Your a collaborator. You know what men do to collaborators, right?
Expect the same from me. Count on it.

Again, SingleDad isn’t talking about me. He’s talking about Eoghan. Eoghan! As anyone who has been reading the comments on this blog for any length of time is well aware, Eoghan is about as far from a feminist as you can get; indeed, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool MRA ideologue, and I actually banned him here some time ago because of his consistently disruptive behavior. But because he challenges not what they say but the way they say it, the guys at The Spearhead evidently see him as some sort of fem-symp if not the equivalant of a Nazi collaborator.

Naturally, all of Eoghan’s posts have been heavily downvoted by the regulars, and the attacks on him, including SingleDad’s threat, have gotten multiple upvotes. 

I’m not going to post a bunch more comments from this surreal “debate.” Obviously you all can head over and read the whole thing if you like. But I thought this one, from Poester00 and actually directed at me, was kind of telling:

Mr Manboobz is a low down slime, using comments posted here by third parties and NOT articles to attack this site.

Since I don’t think he is stupid and he’s extremely persistent at what he’s doing, it’s highly probable that he is either:
– being paid to continue by some interested third party with deep pockets, or
– is a victim of systematic child abuse by his mother or other female relative(s), so has been “Joe Bidened”
OR BOTH.

It may be just a “job” to him but his words are supporting the hurting of real people. People will remember his words and what goes around comes around.

What goes around comes around?

Poester99, I’m not quite sure you understand the concept of karma.

Here’s what I did: I quoted some repugnant shit some dudes said on a web site, and made some sarcastic remarks about these comments.

Here’s what you did: you falsely accused my mother of child abuse.

I’m having a really hard time seeing how I’m the bigger asshole in this scenario.

Also: the paid shill thing? Not true. But if some “interested third party with deep pockets” wants to empty these pockets into my bank account, and won’t interfere with what I write in any way, I’d like to suggest that  they contact me, like, right now.

—

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Categories
debate drama hypocrisy lying liars paul elam Uncategorized violence against men/women

>Debate Drama: Dalrock is a Lying Liar

>

Debating Men’s Rights Activists can be a lot like arguing with a kid who puts his hands over his ears and shouts “la la la I can’t hear you!”

During my abortive debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence, I had a hard time getting him to respond to my arguments; instead, he devoted much of his energy to arguing against experts I never cited and arguments I never made.(EDIT: See all my debate posts and some commentary here.)

Now the blogger “Dalrock” has decided to weigh in on the debate — despite the fact that by his own admission he didn’t actually read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, he completely misrepresents my argument:

His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right.

Either he didn’t read more than a paragraph or two of what I wrote, or he’s incapable of understanding logic, or, well, he’s a lying liar.

At the moment I’m leaning towards the first explanation; I’m being generous here.

But it’s hard to see the next bit as anything but, well, that lying liar thing.

Mentioning my post responding to Elam’s disgraceful “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post, which was not even part of the debate proper, Dalrock ignores Elam’s obnoxious provocation and brings up a similarly obnoxious, similarly disgraceful Jezebel post from several years back, in which several Jezebel staffers and a host of commenters there gleefully admitted to beating up boyfriends. (Elam and I both mentioned it in our posts; it was Elam’s excuse for writing his post in the first place.)

According to Dalrock, my response to the Jezebel post went roughly as follows:

The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count.  He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.  Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.  And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway.  Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.

Even aside from the dopey boxing metaphor, this is simply fiction. Let’s break it down.

He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. 

I didn’t say that.

Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.

I didn’t say that.

And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway.  Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.

I didn’t say that. He’s simply making shit up. Or, as some might put it, lying.

If you want to know what I did say, you can see it here.

When I pointed all this out in Dalrock’s comments, he responded with:

You mean you weren’t really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?

Yeah, the fact that you made a dumb boxing joke means it’s totally ok to lie about what I said.

To my regular readers: Sorry about all the drama here. To paraphrase Bob Dole, I’m just trying to get these guys to “stop lying about my record.”

Also: Elam himself poked his head up in the comments to Dalrock’s post to offer a response of sorts to my final debate post; needless to say, it’s pretty feeble. You can read it here, and if you skip down a few posts you should be able to read my response to it; I will also be appending it to my original post.

Categories
drama feminism internal debate marriage strike

>The Men’s Rights Movement Vs. The People’s Front of Judea

>

One of the strangest things about the Men’s Rights Movement is how little actual debate there is within it. Oh there’s plenty of discussion, to be sure, and plenty of arguments about what sort of strategy is most effective in dealing with MRA opponents and the rest of the world in general (see, for example, “Pansygate” and the ongoing sniping between Manhood101 ubermilitants and pretty much everyone else in the MRM). But actual substantive disagreements over major issues? Very few. With most key issues the MRM deals with, there’s a party line, and few within the MRM fold deviate very far from it.

This sort of ideological conformity is far less common outside the insular world of the MRM. Among leftist political groups, of course, internecine battles are so common that Monty Python satirized them in Life of Brian — you no doubt remember the bits about the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. And such battles are hardly confined to the left: just consider the battles between the teabaggers and the Republican party, not to mention the much more substantive battles you see between the various factions that make up the contemporary right, like those between Ayn Randian libertarians and bible-thumping social conservatives.

Among feminists, of course, there have been giant, bloody battles between anti-porn and sex-positive feminists, battles over “difference” feminism, over race and class, and on and on. (For a quick look at a dizzying array of different ideological tendencies within feminism, see here.) I’ve participated in these battles myself: see this piece of mine critiquing anti-porn feminism in general and Andrea Dworkin in particular.

These kinds of battles are inevitably frustrating, sometimes massively silly, and often distract activists from “real” political work. But they’re also necessary, a way to work out and work through issues that are inevitably more complicated than the political slogans with which most movements make their case to the world at large. Within feminism, for example, the “sex wars” have pushed anti-porn feminism from the center of the movement to the margins — a good thing for feminists, and for everyone else. Debates challenge dogmas; they’re symptoms of political health, not signs of weakness.

Indeed, if the Men’s Rights Movement is to have even a small chance of transforming itself from an insular, largely reactionary movement that’s actually harmful to men, into one that actually does men, and the world at large, some good, it’s going to have to have these kinds of debates. Right now the Men’s Rights Movement turns legitimate concern and legitimate anger at real problems faced by men into bitterness aimed at feminist bogey-women and women at large; it’s as destructive for the real cause of men’s rights, and for the world at large, as the Dworkinite branch of feminism was for feminists and for everyone else.

So it’s always interesting to me to see an actual substantive debate break out in the angry-manosophere. The latest: an honest-to-goodness debate over the notion of a “marriage strike” that has recently become an MRA shibboleth.  In a series of posts, the blogger who calls himself Dalrock asks

whether or not there really is, or will be, a marriage strike.  My first answer is that it depends on how we define the term.  If those using it are thinking of a classical strike where men would eschew marriage out of a sense of male solidarity in an effort to extract a better social bargain, this isn’t happening and won’t happen any time in the near future.

Looking over the stats used by MRAs to provide evidence that men in general, not just Men-Going-Their-Own-Way MRA types are, in effect, boycotting marriage, he argues

that the metric published by The National Marriage Project is being widely misinterpreted, and show[s] that the vast majority of current white men and women in the us in their mid 30s have married at some time. … We may yet see a marriage strike by white men in the US, but the data simply isn’t in yet.

As a result of his posts, Dalrock has gotten a lot of what he calls “push-back” from the MRM community, some of it quite personal, so much so that he felt he had to clarify that

For those of you who are refusing to marry, I’m not denying your existence or equating you with UFO conspiracy theorists.  As I’ve said before, we won’t see men banding together against their immediate interests to form a better social bargain longer term.  But this doesn’t mean individual men won’t decide that marriage isn’t a risk they want to take. 

This kind of “push-back” from your ideological allies is actually a sign that you’re moving forward. 

I’ll weigh in on the whole marriage debate in a future post or few, but in the meantime I’m just going to watch how this plays out.

Categories
debate douchebaggery drama MRA paul elam Uncategorized violence against men/women

>Paul Elam’s continuing childish and unethical behavior

>

When I agreed to debate Paul Elam on domestic violence on his web site, I clearly underestimated how childish, and unethical, he really is.

After I bowed out of the debate — see the details here — he decided to run the whole thing under a childish, gloating headline, and with an introduction labeling me a “fucking moron.” (EDIT: See here for my posts without Elam’s editorializing.)

Because of this behavior, I requested he either remove the headline and the obnoxious introduction, or remove my contributions to the debate from his web site entirely. After getting no response from him to this, I sent another email telling him to simply take down my writings from his web site.

Legally, he does not own any rights to my writings, and because of his behavior he no longer has my permission to run them. I may pursue legal action.

Paul, unfortunately, has chosen to escalate the situation, by running an even more childish post titled “David Futrelle- Covered in Pin Feathers and Clucking,” in which he writes:

let it be known now that any blogger in the sphere, MRA or otherwise, has my permission to repost this debate in full on their blog or website.

Obviously he has no more right to do this than I have the right to take his car on a joy ride.

He’s also apparently pitched the idea of reposting the whole debate on The Spearhead. While he doesn’t have the right to do this, and I’ve told The Spearhead that they do not have the right to reprint my writings, I might agree to the proposition provided that I’d be guaranteed in writing by The Spearhead that it would run with a neutral headline, that my latest response to Paul’s “final” post would be included, and a few other conditions.

And I would have no problem continuing the debate with Paul on The Spearhead until we each post 5 posts, as per our original agreement, were I to work out the necessary details with The Spearhead and get an agreement in writing. Or we could finish the debate right here.

I stand by everything I wrote in the debate, and have no problem continuing it, provided it be on a venue not controlled by Paul Elam and with some basic rules to guarantee fairness set forth in writing. (Paul would have to agree in writing to run the debate under a neutral headline on his site as well.)

Oh, and one final note: Paul has also removed the links back to here from the original debate, thus breaking still another condition I insisted on in order to participate in the debate in the first place. And he’s banned me from commenting in the comments section under the debate posts.

This is all very stupid and very petty.

Let me offer a challenge to anyone in the MRM whose ethics are more developed than Paul’s: Stand up and object to his illegal and unethical behavior. Were a feminist to pull this sort of thing on an MRA, I would certainly stand up and object to it.

Categories
douchebaggery drama homophobia paul elam Uncategorized

>Famous all over town

>Apparently, they can’t look away. A couple of days after Paul Elam — the MRA elder I am scheduled to debate on the topic of domestic violence later this week — launched a weird tirade against me on his blog, I’m now getting attention (and some traffic) from Ferdinand Bardamu at In Mala Fide, in a post urging MRAs to, er, stop paying attention to me.

As is generally the case with my MRA critics, it’s basically a bunch of empty insults. But as empty insults go, they’re not half bad. He calls me, among other things, a “twerp,” a “feminist quisling,” and “a miserable mediocrity who’s trying to get famous, an ant in our blog ecosphere.” He somehow manages to avoid the term “mangina” altogether.

There is one bit that’s actually obnoxious. In an attempt to explain something he said in a homophobic post of his I quoted last week, he says this:

radical gay activists, in their obnoxious way of shoving their lifestyles in the faces of the heterosexual majority and demonizing them, are poking and prodding an elephant. Elephants are big, heavy and have sharp tusks, and can gore or stomp you to death without breaking a sweat. If gays don’t clean up their act and stop treating straight people with contempt … they could inspire a violent homophobic backlash. Capisce?

Is it just me, or does anyone else suspect that the people given to “warning” gays about a “possible violent homophobic backlash” would be the first to get in line to stomp gays like an elephant in such a backlash?

EDIT: Oops! Speaking of attention, I forgot to add this actual screen capture. Hey, try it yourself.

Categories
drama evil women paul elam pics

>Cartoon of the Day: Tied Down

>Remember all those outrageously sexist cartoons that used to fill the pages of our popular periodicals back in the good old days before evil feminism brought its blight upon the world? They’re having a sort of second life on the Internet, and apparently some people still find them hi-larious. I found this is on an Indian Men’s Rights site, which offered this little bit of commentary: “So so so true……………….”

EDIT: Apparently my not thinking that this cartoon is hi-larious makes me the “Cartoon Monitor for the Confederacy of Dunces,” or so says the often inadvertently hi-larious Paul Elam.

Categories
drama homophobia idiocy MRA quote of the day

>QuoteOTD: David Futrelle is “a dancing jackass for the matriarchy.”

>

Me, apparently.
Apparently hungering for some attention, the blog No Ma’am has decided to launch a carefully reasoned, albeit un-spellchecked, attack on me: 
David is another typical Western Male Fucktard, thinking that even on-line sucking up to fembots will slather his withering pole. A true SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy) in every dimension.
Reality is not so, Mr. Futrelle, it is not so.
You are anethema to female vaginal lubrication.
Hope you feel proud! You are the reason panties are starting to be modelled without the protective cotten-lined-gussets! Who needs such a thing when the West produces poofs like you?
Oh, there’s more. Rob, the guy behind the blog, is apparently upset that I haven’t written about him yet:
Pleeeease debate me on… something!?! Please Dave, you are picking on commenters in the MRM only… wtf? Are you Chicken? Why don’t you set your sights higher up and pick on me for a while?
Honestly, Rob, I haven’t really found anything on your site that’s coherent enough to argue against. But I’ll keep looking.
You can read the whole thing here.