We Hunted The Mammoth
Sometimes I wonder if we’re being unfair to Men’s Rights Activists by allowing them to handle their own publicity. I mean, it’s pretty clear that they’re terrible at it. Worse than terrible, really. Terribler. Possibly the terriblest.
I mean, just this week we saw the official social media director of A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit announcing the conference’s new venue with this:
It’s the eternal question: do misogynists spend their entire lives looking for excuses to get mad at women, or are they so naturally enraged by any evidence of female autonomy that they can’t help but erupt in rage over the tiniest of things?
We may never know the answer to that question. What we do know: almost anything can provoke them, no matter how trivial it is, no matter how misguided their anger might seem to anyone who doesn’t actually, you know, hate women. Let’s look at some of the latest things to cause women-haters to lose their shit.
Anyone who reads the Men’s Rights subreddit on a regular basis knows that when you see the username DavidByron2 you are in for a treat. Well, a “treat” in the sense that discovering a flaming bag of dog poop on your doorstop is a “treat.” Like many Men’s Rightsers, he’s both smug and ignorant, a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
But somehow he manages to be more than just another insufferable mansplaining rage-baby who spends all of his spare time ranting about a subject — feminism — he knows less than nothing about. No, there’s a kind of daft genius to his comments; I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
And so I thought I’d wind up this week with a small collection of the best –that is, worst — comments he left in the Men’s Rights subreddit this week. In choosing the top 5, I have confined myself mostly to those that got more upvotes than downvotes, because, seriously, the thought that there are actual human beings out there upvoting this crap is almost as amazing as the fact that there’s an actual human being posting it. And thinking himself quite clever and righteous for doing so.
Let’s work our way to the top starting with …
Oh, Reddit! Need another reminder that on Reddit, whiny lady-hating man-babies can be found outside the Men’s Rights and Red Pill subreddits? Take a look at this lovely comment from occasional Red Pill commenter purple4th in Change My Views, which (the last I checked) had garnered nearly 150 net upvotes from the crowd there. Here’s the money quote:
[S]ocietal laws are so filled with misandry that in 99% of societal contexts such as going to office, going to the supermarket, going to the movies, etc;, it is men who have to be continually afraid of women.
That’s right, fellas. Women who worry about men harming them are all a bunch of big sillies. It’s MEN who should be worried Oh, sure those gals may look innocent, but don’t let your guard down for a minute lest one of them misander you with a false accusation of being too much of a dude! con
Purple4th continues:
As my investment banks’ Sexual Harassment presentation says, “It is harassment if she says so”. Period.
Really? I decided to look online to see if I could find any Sexual Harassment literature making that argument. A search for “It is harassment if she says so” in quotes returns only one hit on Google: Purple4th’s comment on Reddit.
In fact, the legal standard for sexual harassment — in the US at least — is not “whatever the hell a random woman wants to call harassment.” It’s whether or not a “reasonable person” would see the behavior as harassment.
But that’s how it works in the real world. MRAs and the MRA-adjacent don’t live in the real world.
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Thanks, AMRthroaway on Reddit for pointing me to this lovely quote.
Most of those in the manosphere, whatever their real feelings, have been relatively circumspect about expressing sympathy with, or support for, Elliot Rodger. Sure, many manospherians – from MRAs to PUAs to MGTOWs – have long been half-warning, half-threatening those of us in the “blue pill” world that angry young men are going to rise up and take a sort of self-styled revenge upon their supposed female and feminist oppressors.
But when one man actually launches a “Day of Retribution” intended to punish the “blonde sluts” of the world (as well as any man who roused his ire or got in his way), most manospherians have tried to change the subject, denying any connection between his ideas and theirs, and in some cases even trying to pretend that the man who wanted to watch all women die in concentration camps wasn’t even a misogynist at all.
That’s not the case over at the CoAlpha Forum, a self-proclaimed “Reactionary Free Speech Forum” given over to a strange and scary patriarchal variant on manosphere ideology.
The main thing keeping the CoAlphas from celebrating Elliot Rodgers as an Incel Hero? He killed too many men – and didn’t “butcher” enough “sorority girls.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
After all of the depressing stuff from recent days, here’s something a little lighter: A heartwarming story of misogynist gullibility, and yet another reminder that the evil feminazi double standards that the manospherians think they’re fighting exist only in their own fevered imaginations.
So last night, as a result of a rather nasty contretemps in the comments here, I was going through some old comments, and I discovered that one recently banned troll has a little blog of his own. Curious, I went and checked it out, and discovered that the obnoxious fellow, one “Ronnie Libra,” fancies himself a “dating coach.” And he’d just posted a rant defending pickup artists from accusations of being the creepy, manipulative predators that we know a lot of them are.
Here was his defense:
Pickup Artists are widely considered people who use tactics and techniques to try and “manipulate” members of the opposite sex into bed. Predatory, manipulative, rape culture, creepy…
Where else have we seen that before?
Popular Women’s Magazines perhaps?
As proof of this matriarchal manipulation, he posted the covers of three women’s magazines, adorned with pictures of sexy celebs and covered with headlines promising women guidance on how best to enslave men with their sexy sexiness.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.)
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
Pickup artists, classy fellows that they are, are using Elliot Rodger’s killing rampage as a marketing ploy. In the comments to one of Rodger’s videos on YouTube, a company called Strategic Dating Coach offered their solution to prevent similar shootings in the future: send disturbed young men who can’t get dates to one of their coaching sessions!
While this response to Rodger’s mass killing is uniquely crass, the argument that “Game saves lives” is hardly new. To PUAs like Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh it’s practically an article of faith.
Pickup artists, classy fellows that they are, are using Elliot Rodger’s killing rampage as a marketing ploy. In the comments to one of Rodger’s videos on YouTube, a company called Strategic Dating Coach offered their solution to prevent similar shootings in the future: send disturbed young men who can’t get dates to one of their coaching sessions!
While this response to Rodger’s mass killing is uniquely crass, the argument that “Game saves lives” is hardly new. To PUAs like Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh it’s practically an article of faith.
