So A Voice for Men has finally responded to Jaclyn Friedman’s masterful takedown of the Men’s Rights movement:
No, sorry, my mistake. AVFM didn’t respond to her article by farting. It responded with an article accusing her of farting. No, really.
In an article with the fart-referencing title “Gone with Jaclyn’s wind,” AVFM “Honey Badger” Diana Davison tries to rebut Friedman with some really, really strained fart metaphors:
So a fella on the Men’s Rights subreddit made this poster, which he’s planning to post in the vicinity of the Women’s Studies Department at his school, assuming he can find it.
Since I know that a lot of females read this blog, I thought I’d ask you all just which of these Unchecked Female Privileges (There’s Nothing “Benevolent” About Them) are your favorites. You can pick more than one! (I know how inherently greedy you feemales are.)
Has he missed any important ones?
Non-women are allowed to post in this thread as well, but only if they preface their comments with “If it may please the feemales, might I humbly suggest that … .”
Matt Forney is desperate for attention; it’s as glaringly obvious as the giant MATT FORNEY that adorns the top of his blog, creatively named MATT FORNEY. And like some caricature of an emo teen “acting out,” the misogynistic manosphere blogger has decided that any attention — even bad attention — is better than no attention.
And so, perhaps at least dimly aware that his ideas are and his prose are both too lackluster to command much attention on their own, he seems to be trying to rile up as much of the internet as possible with posts that are deliberately designed to offend liberals and feminists and pretty much anyone who is not a woman-hating douchebag. He had a minor hit a this spring with a post entitled Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved, which did in fact live up — that is, down — to its title.
But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.
Pity the poor Men’s Rights activists. The real civil rights movements that MRAs like to compare their, er, “struggle” to may have faced many obstacles that MRAs haven’t — from legal prohibitions on voting to fire bombings and assassinations — but at least they haven’t had a hard time explaining just what it was, and is, that they’re seeking redress for.
When Martin Luther King so famously dreamt of a world in which “my four little children will … not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” he was not only speaking eloquently; he was expressing an idea that was, well, pretty easy to understand.
So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
The Pax Dickinson Crisis seems to have abated somewhat, with postings on the #standwithpax hashtag on Twitter slowing to a trickle and the production of manosphere rants on the subject more or less grinding to a halt, at least for the moment.
But there is one manosphere ideologue who hasn’t given up the fight for injustice, and that’s the despicable “game” guru Roosh Valizadeh, who seems to have embarked on a crusade to ruin the life and career of the Valleywag/Gawker writer who first brought Dickinson’s terrible tweets to the attention of the wider world.
He explained his strategy, which he suggests will work on all liberal writers who might criticize men for racism or misogyny:
Unless she’s applying for a position at Jezebel, no respectable company will touch a toxic individual who has been linked to racism. They don’t want anyone who may cause controversy for them, and behind rape, nothing says controversy like race. …
It’s a slow-burn attack that will effectively punish these writers and scare their co-workers , whose income is low enough that they need to depend on corporate employment indefinitely, unless one day they get an original thought and can stay away from their iPhone long enough to write a book. It won’t work on the big liberal writers like Jessica Valenti or Naomi Wolf, since any attention they get just helps them sell more books, but it does work on the young girl out of college trying to win feminist brownie points by denouncing a man for being “creepy” based on a bad joke.
And then he compared it with something he seems to have a certain amount of experience with:
Having your name destroyed on Google is the internet version of getting raped.
Lovely.
There are more than a few practical problems with Roosh’s little plan, the most notable being that if some hypothetical hiring manager comes across Roosh’s attack on Tiku — or on any writer he’s tried to tar — all this manager will have to do is spend a minute skimming Roosh’s post to see that the charge is bullshit and that Roosh is himself a raving bigot.
And Roosh, if you’re trying to smear someone, it’s generally not good form to announce this plan publicly in a post that at times reads like the monologue of some cartoon supervillain.
In his piece, Roosh notes that “[n]ot long ago, Buzzfeed insinuated I was a rapist.” Well, it did more than that: It quoted Roosh admitting quite frankly that he’d had sex with a woman who was too intoxicated to consent.
I thought, in the interests of openness, it would be worth quoting that passage from Roosh — it’s in his e-book Bang Iceland — once again. Heck, I’ll even give the bit Buzzfeed quoted a little more context. I’ll let you decide if Roosh is a rapist or not.
I hooked her arm and off we went. The best thing that possibly could have happened was a “failed” afterparty. There had to be a moment when she realized that all her friends are gone and the only reasonable option left was to go home with a strange man she had just met.
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.
I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do. If a girl is willing to walk home with me, she’s going to get the dick no matter how much she has drunk. I’ll protect myself by using a condom (most of the time), but I know that when it comes to sex, one ounce of hesitation or a feeling of morality will get me nothing.
Emphasis mine.
At this point even Pax Dickinson may want to distance himself from this creep.
Roosh V and the other human skidmarks who make up the reactionary “game”-centric wing of the manosphere have finally found something to rally around beyond their shared hatred of women and gays and trans* folks and fatties and people with skin colors different from theirs: they’re taking up the cause of a dude who recently got forced out from a high-profile position at news site Business Insider for loudly expressing his own hatred of … woman and gays and trans* folk and people with a different skin color than him.
Really, about the only manosphere prejudice that former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson doesn’t seem to share — and enjoy sharing with the world on Twitter — is a hatred of fatties.
Dickenson found himself the center of a Twitter tempest earlier this week after Valleywag’s Nitasha Tiku wrote a brief piece calling Dickinson a “Tech Bro Nightmare” and quoting some of his more noxious tweets. Among them:
So the other day the fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit were having another thoughtful and nuanced discussion about OMG WOMEN PLAYING VIDEO GAMES GET OUT GIRL GERMS EWWWW GAMING IS FOR MEN ONLY HELP HELP WE’RE BEING OPPRESSED and the always insightful IHaveALargePenis offered this little suggestion to the “feminists/women” of the world:
Mr. Penis also gets bonus points for explicitly conflating women and feminists — most MRAs do this only implicitly, and then pretend they haven’t — and wins this month’s “Really? You Really Just Said That?” MRA Irony Award for declaring in his second paragraph that “people don’t actively insult [women] or tell them they can’t [get involved in nerdy pursuits] for simply being women” after he JUST DID EXACTLY THAT ONE PARAGRAPH EARLIER.
One brave commenter responded to Mr. Penis’ screed with a detailed list of infliential women in the gaming industry. Amazingly, this comment wasn’t downvoted into oblivion, though it is worth noting that it got considerably fewer net upvotes that Mr. Penis’ masterpiece.
The thread, naturally, is full of poop from other contributors as well. Cthulusbaby not only doesn’t want women playing or expressing opinions about games; he doesn’t even want imaginary women in his games. No Manic Pixel Dream Girls for him!
Also, he seems to be under the impression that there are no men in romance movies.*
Acolmiztli, meanwhile, sheds a tear for the nerds that came before him:
Evidently the only way to rectify this past injustice is to do the same thing to women today? It’s the MEN’S RIGHTS WAY!
And hey, if women don’t like it, well, they can always just hide their gender identity. (On the Internet no one knows you’re George Eliot.)
PROBLEM SOLVED!
Sometimes all it takes to solve these silly lady problems is some good old-fashioned male ingenuity,
H/T to Againstmensrights on Reddits for pointing out Mr. Penis’ lovely remark, and making the same point about science fiction.
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* Note to extremly literal-minded readers: I am not actually suggesting that Cthulusbaby thinks there are no men in romance movies. It is just that the way he is framing the issue is so ridiculous he might as well think that.
So the Red Pill subreddit, as you may recall, is a place for dudes to discuss the devious and possibly not altogether ethical or even consensual strategies they’ve come up with to … have sex with anyone they want. But their real goal is not just to have sex, but to control other people’s opinions and thoughts of them doing so. They want to silence all critics, and then even demand praise for their morally reprehensible or at least morally questionable actions.
Woah. It feels like my brain was just taken over for a second. Did I even write that? I don’t think I did. I swear I’ve read most of that paragraph before.
Oh wait.
Oh yeah. That’s where it came from. I must have been possessed.
The Red Pill subreddit, where lying to women to get them into bed is perfectly acceptable but a woman having consensual sex is a reprehensible, narcissistic slattern with a gymnastic hamster for a brain.