Here’s a meme posted recently to A Voice for Men’s Facebook page. I know, a graphic suggesting that any man who enters into a relationship with a woman is bound to end up “miserable, or divorced and broke” is pretty darn misogynistic.
The creator of this graphic, who has imaginatively picked “John Galt” as his pseudonym, explained his thinking thusly in several comments on the Facebook page:
In making it I was in fact thinking of the Nash Equilibrium in Game Theory, popularized by Russell Crowe in the Movie ‘A beautiful mind’. In a society where the hypergamous instincts of many women are driven to cruel extremes by feminism It is ever more relevant to highlight to men that being shamed or encouraged to compete for something that is repeatedly demonstrated as worthless is not only important but very healthy. …
[I]t is in fact Marriage I had in mind but these days cohabitation is the same as marriage under the law. Effectively it is impossible for men to trust even a purportedly good woman simply because of the law, but then it is up to women to change that – all we can do is defend our own freedoms and rights and that is what is most important to me. Of course competing for the right to be treated like garbage is the main point and intentions mean nothing without actions…for men that action must needs be self interest first – ironically the one thing we have been trained and bred to ignore.
So, yeah, in addition to being nearly incoherent, this is pretty much misogyny turned up to 11.
But I think we can do better. Let’s consider this graphic a challenge. I invite any readers here who have graphic talent — and those completely lacking graphic talent whatsoever — to come up with a fake AVFM meme that’s MORE misogynistic than this. BONUS POINTS if you can incorporate an actual quote from an AVFMer in the graphic.
To inspire you, here are some completely unrelated gifs of tiny animals being adorable. (I found them all here.)
Sometimes it seems like the internet, or at least huge portions of it, is essentially a giant harassment machine, directed primarily at women.
This week, the target of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine is game developer Zoe Quinn. Quinn, best known as the creator of the text-based Depression Quest, faced down two previous waves of harassment from gamer dudes who were angry about her game, for some gamer-dude reasons I can’t claim to understand, and who grew even angrier after Quinn spoke publicly about being harassed.
Her harassers claimed that she was lying about being harassed previously, and apparently figured there was no better way to prove that she hadn’t been harassed in the first place than by harassing her about her claims of harassment. I’m sorry if that’s confusing, but the “logic” of internet assholes tends to be a bit circular.
The latest wave of harassment is on a whole new level of viciousness. Because this time her haters have what they see as proof that she is indeed the evil [insert favorite anti-woman slur] that they’ve always claimed her to be. Their alleged smoking gun consists of a series of excruciatingly detailed blog posts by a vengeful ex-boyfriend describing how she allegedly cheated on him and lied about it; at roughly 10,000 words in all, not counting all the screenshots of online conversations presented as proof of his claims, his story is nearly the length of a novella.
You might ask: why is any of this any of our business? It’s fucking not. Some have tried to claim this is about “ethics,” accusing Quinn of trading sexual favors for a positive game review. But the journalist she allegedly slept with never actually wrote a review of her game.
Of course this has nothing to do with any real ethical concerns on the part of her attackers. As Quinn has pointed out herself, the people who are gleefully sharing her personal information, posting nude pictures of her, sending her threats, and otherwise trying to destroy her life don’t have any fucking ethics.
No, this is just another excuse to go after an outspoken woman on the internet, and a chance for misogynistic gamer dudes to score a symbolic victory against any and all women who are trying to enter what these guys want to see as a clubhouse where girls aren’t allowed. Anita Sarkeesian has been dealing with the same sort of shit ever since she first set out to examine sexism in the gaming world.
I honestly don’t have the psychic energy to collect together examples of the horrible shit people are saying about her; just type her name into Google along with your favorite anti-woman slur and you’ll have more proof than you need. Or go to Reddit and make your way to any of the numerous subreddits devoted to gaming and/or misogyny, where many people will be thrilled to tell you all about how “the video game industry is being fucked over because of these women.” (Actual quote.)
I am not going to link to, or address anything having to do with the validity of the specific claims made by an angry ex-boyfriend with an axe to grind and a desire to use 4chan as his own personal army. This is not a “she-said” to his “he-said”. The idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business.
What I *am* going to say is that the proliferation of nude pictures of me, death threats, vandalization, doxxing of my trans friends for having the audacity to converse with me publicly, harassment of friends and family and my friends’ family in addition to TOTALLY UNRELATED PEOPLE, sending my home address around, rape threats, memes about me being a whore, pressures to kill myself, slurs of every variety, fucking debates over what my genitals smell like, vultures trying to make money off of youtube videos about it, all of these things are inexcusable and will continue to happen to women until this culture changes. I’m certainly not the first. I wish I could be the last.
Because I’ve had a small degree of success in a specific subculture, every aspect of my life is suddenly a matter of public concern. Suddenly it’s acceptable to share pictures of my breasts on social media to threaten and punish me. Suddenly I don’t have any right to privacy or basic dignity. Suddenly I don’t get to live out normal parts of life, like going through a bad and ugly breakup in private. I have forfeited this by being a blip in a small community, while those who delight in assailing me hide behind their keyboards and a culture that permits it, beyond reproach.
My life and my body are not public property. No one’s life and body are public property.
Sexuality is one of the most personal, hurtful, and easy things to demonize a woman over, and also has nothing to do with my games. Yet large swaths of the gaming community are either unable or unwilling to separate the two. I’m convinced that my ex chose 4chan as the staging ground for his campaign of harassment and character assassination because he knew this; he knew that someone claiming to be “from the Internet” has shown up at my house once already, and he is counting on the most reviled hubs of our community to live up to their sordid reputations. This is another example of gendered violence, whereby my personal life becomes a means to punish my professional credentials and to try to shame me into giving up my work. I’m still committed to doing my small part to create a world where no woman is at risk of experiencing this.
I don’t have anything to add.
This is a NO TROLLS, NO MRAS thread. Anyone posting any doxxing shit in the comments below, or adding to the harassment against her in any way, will be banned.
Actually, some gals are afraid that people are going to laugh at them.
Listening in on conversations amongst Men’s Rights Activists is often like taking a brief journey into an alternate universe, where cats are dogs and water is dry and men are the most oppressed creatures on planet earth.
Over in the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, some of the regulars seem to have just discovered a famous feminist quotation, a paraphrase of something Margaret Atwood once wrote:
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
A number of the Men’s Rights Redditors were indignant that anyone could possibly suggest that women have more to fear from men than the other way around. And so, collectively, they came up with a rebuttal of sorts.
In this edition of Misogyny Theater, we hear from pickup guru Roosh V, who has some thoughts about the female Men’s Rights Activists – FeMRAs – that we’ve seen so much of in the media of late.
He doesn’t much like them. Not because they’re hateful nitwits like their male comrades in the Men’s Rights movement. But because, you know, they’re women, representatives of what Roosh so memorably calls “a gender who has no loyalty to men.”
He accuses them of pandering to men for attention, and accuses male MRAs, in turn, of being too easily ensnared by their feminine wiles. It’s a mirror image of the accusations that MRAs like to throw at male feminists, and likely to infuriate more than a few MRAs, both male and female.
We may be seeing more from Roosh in Misogyny Theater in the future. For the dating-guru-cum-reactionary philosopher, from his secret lair located somewhere in Siberia – no, really, he has literally exiled himself to Siberia — has announced in another video his plans to take over YouTube over the course of the next year or so.
Will he be able to do it? On the one hand, he’s a reactionary woman-hating piece of shit, which means that he should be able to appeal to YouTube’s vast reactionary woman-hating piece of shit demographic. And he has managed to build up his Return of Kings blog into a must-read site for terrible people; a quick check with web traffic monitor Alexa shows that, trafficwise, ROK is trouncing the most popular Men’s Rights site, A Voice for Men.
On the other, as you may have gathered from this video, he has about as much charisma as a sack of potatoes. Stay tuned.
I‘ve been trying to avoid reading, much less writing about, the human stain and pickup guru who calls himself Roosh V. But I couldn’t keep myself away from his most recent post, an appalling little exercise called The Most Reliable Way To Tell If A Girl Is A Slut,which turns out to be even more appalling than its title.
Roosh, you see, has figured out a simple one-question test to determine the sluttiness of any woman. Let’s let him explain:
Many girls go to great lengths to hide their slutty past, knowing deep down the low value it conveys for being a suitable long-term partner, but there is one easy indicator that should tell you beyond a reasonable doubt whether she is a slut or not.
Has she lived on her own?
I believe my response to this is best illustrated by the following video of Don Draper saying “what?”
Let me just add:
HAS SHE LIVED ON HER OWN?
Are you exclusively dating high school girls?
If she’s an adult, or at least an adult somewhere in the vicinity of your own age, OF COURSE SHE’S LIVED ON HER OWN.
Yes, yes, I know, given this economy it’s true that some young people – mostly young men – are living at home a little longer these days than in the past, but the overwhelming majority have moved out by their mid-twenties. You’re 35 years old, dude.
Roosh continues:
If she has lived away from her parents for more than a year, she has—at the minimum—slept with many men whose last names she did not know, including one-night stands that did not involve condoms.
Dude, do you even know the first names of the women you sleep with? And haven’t you bragged endlessly about how you “raw dog it” with women? Weren’t you “raw dogging it” even when you were afraid you had AIDS? (Those are rhetorical questions; I already know that the answers are yes, and yes.)
An “independent” girl, removed from the constraints of a nuclear family home and its rules, curfew, and the concern of good parents, will allow the slutty dick gobbler within her to be released.
Women engaging in consensual sex that they enjoy … with someone else? THE END OF THE WORLD. Raping women who are too drunk to consent? According to Roosh himself, it’s “what I do.”
In other words, a natural-born slut who lives on her own will have far more sexual partners than if she lives with parents of average skill who require their daughter to be home by midnight.
Amazing deduction, Sherlock. And if she’s a nun, she’ll probably be having even less sex. The question is: why are you, as 35 year old man, regularly pursuing women young enough to live with their parents?
Give a man leeway in living life and he does great things, but give a woman this same freedom and she fully embraces the whore lifestyle, unable to stop from getting her fill of cock.
Really? Here are some young men who have recently started living on their own; I’m not sure that what they are doing could really be described as a “great thing.” (Content Warning: Drunk dudes hitting each other in the head with boards.)
If you want to estimate a girl’s notch count, simply multiple the number of years she has lived on her own by the number 3. If she has lived on campus in college for four years and then moved to a large city for two more, you can rest assured she’s had over 15 cocks in her vagina, and god knows how many more in her mouth.
Not that anyone’s worth is determined by how many penises they’ve had in their vagina, or anywhere else, but I feel I should note that these figures, clearly pulled from the Journal of Roosh’s Own Ass, are completely wrong.
According to people who’ve actually studied human sexuality, his number is just a teensy bit high. And by “teensy” I mean they’re off by an order of magnitude. According to one 2005 study, women in their 30s and early 40s report that they’ve had only 4 male sexual partners, on average, not the 36 to 78 that Roosh’s formula would predict for women who move out on their own at the age of 18 to go to college.
There are definite exceptions for girls who are relationship minded and had boyfriends of more than one year in length, but unless she mentions this, you’re interacting with a slut and should proceed accordingly by escorting her home and asking if you can use her bathroom. Then you must fornicate with her like so many other men.
Yeah, that’s really … creepy. You lie to get into her home, then proceed as if, as a slut, she’s already consented to sex?
You may be thinking the following: “Many Western girls live alone, at least 50%. Does that mean that over 50% of American girls are sluts?” That’s exactly what it means. Independence in women drives them to disempowering sexual behaviors that oppose motherly or wife behaviors. You must be skeptical of girls who have lived alone if you want a serious relationship.
At least if you want a relationship with a creepy, judgmental asshole who thinks like Roosh.
[T]here is absolutely no need for a girl to be independent by living alone without a husband unless you want her holes to be used as a real-life enactment of 50 Shades Of Grey by many strange men.
Well, that is, if you assume that 1) all women can magically find men, whether their father or a husband, who will pay all their bills and 2) Roosh’s opinions about any given woman’s sexual life matter more than the opinions of the woman herself.
If you end up having a daughter of your own, I highly recommend you limit her financial independence before she finds a husband. Refrain from giving her Think & Grow Rich advice that would be better suited for your son. Otherwise, she’ll become a slut who gives it up to any man who dances a good clown jig.
So: prepare your daughter to be dependent for her very existence on dudes who think like Roosh.
That may be the worst parenting advice I’ve ever heard. Then again, it’s from Roosh.
#FeministsAreUgly is confusing a lot of people, misogynists included. The Twitter hashtag – which took off yesterday and is still going strong, if not quite so strong, today – was originally started not by misogynistic trolls but by two feminists, @LilyBolorian and @Cheuya, who intended the hashtag to be a way for feminist women to celebrate their own beauty, whether it conformed to conventional (and generally white-centric) standards or not. As Bolorian put it,
Women responded at once by doing just that, and the hashtag was quickly flooded by feminist selfies. This being the internet, it was also flooded with comments from misogynists and trolls. Given how many of the latter were posted, many feminists on Twitter initially assumed it was just another outburst of internet misogyny; it took a little while before the feminist origins of the hashtag became widely known.
So how did the devoted antifeminists of the manosphere and the Men’s Rights movement react to the hashtag? Some responded with unabashed glee. The regulars on Roosh V’s forum reposted the selfies of some in women posting in the #FeministsAreUgly hashtage, mocking them as fat, lazy “cunts.”
If you paid any attention to A Voice for Men’s recent conference in – well, near – Detroit, you probably heard about the guy who was ejected from the conference after reportedly “petting” a reporter and a number of other men. (You can read about him here.)
In this episode of Misogyny Theater, we return to the Man Going His Own Way who calls himself Sandman to hear his highly speculative theories about this gentleman and his activities.
Sandman also warns Men’s Rightsers and MGTOWers that if they get together in large groups, they will inevitably attract opportunistic sex-seekers eager to take advantage of the man surplus for their own perverse ends. Apparently, angry dudes who hate women are like catnip to gay men and straight ladies alike.
The audio for this little cartoon of mine comes from Sandman’s video “Men’s Rights Molester.” I have indicated edits in the audio with little scratchy sounds. And I’ve bleeped out the name of the alleged molester. Otherwise it’s all straight Sandman.
My previous Misogyny Theater episode featuring Sandman can be found here.
Hello, m’lady, I trust you have brought your birth certificate?
UPDATE: D’oh! It looks like this Craigslist ad is a fake. A very similar “gentleman” posted a very similar Craigslist Personal a little less than a year ago, as this Huffington Post story at the time reported. That gentleman claimed to be living in California, not Canada. So unless the fellow who wrote this ad just moved to Edmonton, it looks like a big ol FAKE.
But it’s still pretty funny.
Hey ladies! Are you a “worthy” woman between the ages of 18-27? Do you like men who think most women, including possibly you, are terrible? Are you looking for a long-winded, judgmental jackass who is definitely older than you but who won’t specify his age, what kind of music he likes, or whether or not he likes dogs until after you’ve met? Do you enjoy reading giant walls of text on the internet that randomly erupt in ALL CAPS and inappropriate “quotation” marks?
Oh, and do you live in Alberta, Canada?
Well, then, you’re in luck, because I have found the man for you! Correction: the GENTLEman for you. Nestled away in the men seeking women section of Craigslist, Edmonton, there’s a self-described
very nice, mature , “gentleman.” with a higher college degree and education. I have my own house (not apartment), car, motorcycle, income, etc. I am of European descent (Spanish/Austrian). A professional man with a GOOD BACKGROUND. Better than 99% of what you will find, GUARANTEE #1.
And all you have to do to in order to meet this fine fellow is to read through his 3500 word, 28-question FAQ to make sure you don’t disagree with him about anything, from the playing of video games (bad) to the proper age difference between men and women in relationships (“Generally speaking the MAN should be OLDER than the woman because females mature or age faster than males (both physically and mentally). This is a scientific fact.”)
Today, we bring to life (sort of) some audio excerpts from a video by Sandman, a prolific videoblogger and self-described Man Going His Own Way. He addresses such topics as the friendzone, Mr. Big from Sex and the City, and the shelf life of the human vergina. Well, that’s how he pronounces it, anyway.
The audio is taken from his video “Friendzone Revenge,” starting about 3:50 in. I edited his remarks for length and to remove repetition.
As someone who watched a bit of Sex and the City back in the day, I feel that I should note that Sandman’s “analysis” of Mr. Big is pretty much total bullshit. I would also like to note that the show would have been ten times better if Patrick Warburton had played Mr. Big. And possibly painted his face once in a while.
The sound clip of birds tweeting came from freeSFX.co.uk.
I was skimming through the A Voice for Men forum the other day and was stunned to find, hidden away amongst the other posts in the “rants” section, an absolutely blistering critique of AVFM itself:
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. … Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability … and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of [misandry], ad hominem attacks, constant contempt … public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets … going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Nailed it, huh?
Ok. SPOILER ALERT. I kind of lied. This comment wasn’t aimed at AVFM. It was aimed at “bitches.”
Here’s the opening wall-of-text paragraph that I left out:
I think manipulative, catty, conniving, calculating females are pure evil. Applying indirect, covert aggression as a power play, manipulating men to get in their good graces and climb up the pecking order, before aggressively attacking those who don’t “fit in” for their own sadistic pleasure, to aggrandise their own ego and to raise their own status. Playing the victim to stir white knights to go on the attack at their target, when they are the aggressor. Having utter contempt and disdain for anyone they sleep with. Expecting males to be Teflon and always shifting the blame when anyone else gets hurt – it’s always the other person’s fault for being hurtable, for not being Teflon – they always have zero accountability for any harm caused, deny any role in it, and tell themselves it’s not them to feel good and look good. Deluding people, by putting on a cute demeanour, that “she wouldn’t do that”. Using charm to beguile, while calculatingly lashing out at anyone who dares to reveal their true colours or who even sees through their mask at what they really are. Totally void of empathy or sympathy, while putting it on purely fakely to gain an advantage.
And here’s the bit I quoted at the start, though this time I’ve put all the bits I carefully reworded or ellipsed away the first time through back in again; they’re in bold.
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. Seeing their own cuntish wiles as meritous. Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability, being placed on a pedestal and feeling they belong there, sneering down their noses in contempt at those who respect them (the latter being pawns in their power play), and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of misogyny, ad hominem attacks, constant contempt and a complete disregard for other people’s boundaries, malicious back-talk, public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets, an opportunistic use of political correctness, going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Yeah, it sounds a lot more AVFMish that way.
Even after four years of reading this bullshit, I’m a bit amazed at just how much of MRA, er, philosophy seems to be little more than projection.
