We Hunted The Mammoth
Let me take a moment to ignore my regular readers and speak directly to the Men’s Rights Activists who might be reading this blog. I suspect there are a few.
What I would like to talk to you about it ironic humor. Because, here’s the thing, sometimes people say things they don’t actually believe in order to make a little fun at the way other people see them.
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.
All of Roosh’s bits in this video come from his recent video “The Men’s Rights Movement Is Making A Huge Mistake.” I’ve indicated all my edits with beeps.
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.
Attention tiny ladies! Paul Elam wants you to know that if you attack him, he will totally punch you right back. And not in a satirical way, either. With his actual, non-satirical fists.
A Voice for Men’s maximum leader has long insisted that his notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was nothing more than misunderstood “satire.” That is, when he argued that men who are abused by women would be totally justified if they “beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall,” this was somehow a “Juvenalian” satire of some sort. There’s a famous quote from The Princess Bride that might be appropriate here.
Well, now Mr. Elam has announced to the world that every month is a potential “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” for him. Even if the “Violent Bitch” in question is less than half his size. In a post that he insists is super serious, he writes:
I found this amazing pic of “Husband Libber” Harry Britton posted to the Blue Pill subreddit; it was taken in 1972 by the father of Blue Piller smileybird.
According to Cape Girardeau History and Photos, which has another pic of him,
New York Magazine wrote that he was a fixture who had been supporting himself wearing placards, carrying signs and selling his leaflets for 25 cents each for several years. “Harry makes only $2,000 a year [roughly $12,000 today –DF]. He’s not in this for the money, though; he says his only goal is reconciliation with his wife, from whom he is, not surprisingly, separated.”
Another account said he was the “president (and probably sole member) of the National Association of Dissatisfied Husbands subsisting on sales of publications extolling ‘Husband Lib.(‘It’s not men’s lib,it’s Husband Lib. The Bachelors are not oppressed yet’).”
Here’s that pic, and a couple of others; thanks to SquashedBananas in the Blue Pill for tracking all this down. (And thanks to the reader who emailed me about all this.)
I have a confession to make: I don’t always read the comments on posts by Men’s Rights Activists.
I realize this might come as a shock to some of you. I mean, one of the main, er, critiques I get from MRAs is that I “cherry pick” comments from MRAs to make them look bad — never mind that it is the comments that make them look bad, not me. But the embarrassing fact is that I often don’t read the comments at all.
In my defense, I have a hard enough time making it through the posts themselves. Life is short, and MRAs are long-winded. And by the time I get to the end of a lot of MRA posts, I’ve pretty much lost my patience with their nonsense. The last thing I want to do at that moment is to read the fawning word-vomit of a bunch of irritating fucks whose comments are likely to be as bad or possibly even worse than the original post.
So today I decided to do a sort of penance for my sins — and to actually read through a week’s worth of comments on A Voice for Men to see what I could learn about the world, and (perhaps more to the point) about the sort of people who actually enjoy reading posts on that terrible site.
I tried my best to do this little experiment as scientifically as possible. But I cheated a little. I didn’t read the comments to every post. And I didn’t read every comment on the posts that I did look at. I mean, what the hell. There’s a limit to my masochism. Seriously, you try reading a week’s worth of this shit in one sitting.
Anyway, here are the Top 7 Insights I’ve learned from a week’s worth of comments at AVFM. In choosing the following, I stuck with comments that were either upvoted or unchallenged by the site’s regulars, or both.
So it turns out that Red Pill Redditors aren’t the only ones in a tizzy about Marvel comics’ plan to replace Thor (the superhero, not the actual Norse god, all praise him) with a woman. All over the manosphere, jimmies are rustling at the news.
The proudly racist, woman-hating pickup artist guru known as Heartiste is not only outraged by the “gelding” of Thor but also, and even more vehemently, by Marvel’s decision to make Captain America black, which he bizarrely describes as a kind of racial cuckolding:
Liberals are gloating over the recent editorial choices to geld Thor and race cuck Captain America. The former will become Whor, the female Thor, and the latter will become Captain Gibsmedat, the numinous negro who saves the right kinds of white people from the wrong kinds of white people.
“Gibsmedat” – I had to look it up – is a term that ridiculous racists like to use to describe welfare checks and other “goods, services, or material … given predominately to minorities, in exchange for their tacit agreement to reciprocate by not burning down America’s cities.” It’s short, you see, for “gibs me dat.”
Hilarious, huh? The term seems to be especially popular on Chimpmania.com, a site so ludicrously racist it makes Stormfront look tame.
Heartiste continues, lashing out at a “fat white liberal quasi-male named Devin Faraci” for publicly supporting Marvel’s decision to (at least temporarily) give the Captain America costume to The Falcon, another public-spirited superhero who happens to be black:
Jessica Roy, a reporter for Time magazine covering A Voice for Men’s recent :”Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, found herself the target of a vitriolic tirade from AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam before she even sat down to write her account of her time amongst the MRAs.
Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.
Roy’s “What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s Rights Conference” appeared on Time.com on Wednesday. Far from the hack job Elam and pals were predicting, her piece turned out to be a long, thoughtful and nuanced account that, while skeptical of AVFM and its brand of hateful nonsense, displayed considerable sympathy for some of the troubled men she met at the conference, men who could benefit from a movement that truly tried to offer solutions for men in difficulty instead of encouraging them to scapegoat feminists and women.
Reflecting on her discussions with several conference attendees, Roy wrote,
Fox News host Jessie Watters: seemed to be channeling Warren Farrell with some particularly obtuse remarks he made recently on the Fox show “Outnumbered” on the “single ladies” vote.
Hillary Clinton needs the single ladies vote. I call them ‘The Beyoncé Voters’ — the single ladies. Obama won single ladies by 76% last time, and made up about a quarter of the electorate. They depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands. They need contraception, health care, and they love to talk about equal pay.
If we ignore the implicit racism of his castigating “Beyonce voters” for being welfare “takers,” Watters is more or less rehashing an old, bad argument that Farrell made in The Myth of Male Power. In a section of the book called “Government as Substitute Husband,” Farrell wrote that “when divorces left women without husband-as-savior, many women looked for substitute saviors … .”
Welcome to the second installment of Misogyny Theater! In other news, I’m enjoying making these videos, and may do a couple more this week.
Today’s thoroughly horrifying monologue stars the megalomaniacal libertarian-MRA philosopher guru Stefan Molyneux, who is, as many of you already know, one of the scheduled speakers at A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit later this week.
The audio is an excerpt from his long-as-hell video “The Matriarchal Lineage of Corruption” in which he explains why, in his view, women are essentially responsible for all the evil in the world. It’s basically the director’s cut version of the quote from him in this video, which I posted about a couple of days ago.
I have taken the liberty of editing out a brief and inconsequential comment from a caller Molyneux had on the phone with him; and adding a few seconds of silence at each end of the clip. The rest is pure, unedited Molyneux.
Oh, ok, I added the Justin Bieber poster and the lamp.
Thanks to YouTuber Tru Shibes for posting a slightly longer excerpt from Molyneux’ 2-hour video; that’s where I got the audio. Tru Shibes has a bunch of videos up featuring some of the worst of Mr. M. And thanks to Mancheeze and Sam Sederfor pointing me to this quote in the first place.
Note: The sound clip of the murmuring crowd in my video came from FreeSFX.co.uk.
Welcome to the first episode of Misogyny Theater, our new animated series, bringing you the best of the worst of YouTube misogyny.
In today’s episode, we revisit an old video from John The Other, also known as John Hembling, a fellow most of you already know pretty well. The monologue in this video is an unedited excerpt from a YouTube rant of his, minus some of the distracting background music that was included in the original.
Content Note: The misogyny in this one is pretty bad, even by John the Other standards.
I will try to produce at least one of these a week. There’s plenty of misogyny on YouTube, so it’s doubtful I’ll run out of material any time soon. I will also be doing a series based on Creepy PMs. Big thanks to everyone who’s pointed me to interesting candidates for future videos, as well as to those who’ve volunteered to do voice work or who’ve sent in pictures of their pets. Thanks as well to the anonymous Friend of the Mammoths who put together the snazzy title sequences here.
In my post announcing my video plans last week, I offered some suggestions on how to help; I’m going to write up a most detailed FAQ on this shortly.
John’s original video is no longer up on YouTube, but you can see clips from it — including the portion I used in the video above — in this more recent video from him in which he tries to explain away the horrible things he said. Apparently it was just a big joke! All in good fun!
EDIT: Removed an embedded video that was no longer functioning because it’s been removed from YouTube.
EDIT 2: For a mashup of Hembling’s original video, along with another video of his in which he pointedly refuses to apologize for the original video, see here, courtesy of Mancheeze.
