On May 7th, as I noted here yesterday, Men’s Rightser Mike Buchanan only managed to score a humiliating 153 votes in the UK election. This brought the total number of votes cast for Buchanan’s Justice for Men and Boys Party to — let me doublecheck the math here — 216 votes. 216.
The Labour Party, by contrast, won a total of 9,347,326 votes. But this was considerably less than the victorious Tories, and was seen as such a disaster for the party that Labour leader Ed Miliband resigned in disgrace.
But Men’s Rights Activists can never admit defeat. And so huge loser Mike Buchanan has declared his total drubbing to be a victory of sorts, telling the world — or whatever tiny portion of it that was paying attention — that his party had “achieved what we set out to achieve.”
Hmm. What rhymes with “I’m an insufferable douchebag?”
I interrupt this blog for a moment for some breaking news: Pickup Artists have started writing poetry.
And it’s glorious. By which I mean, of course, that it’s gloriously awful.
Yesterday, while poking around the internet in my usual manner, I ran across an amazing little discussion on MPUAForum.com, an online hangout for PUAs who have for some reason added an M to their usual acronym.
A PUA going by the name bob2 announced to his Comrades in Sarging that he was planning on starting a “a pickup poetry blog.” That is, a blog providing PUA wisdom to the Average Frustrated Chumps of the world in the form of little poems. As he explained:
A few minutes with Google image search reveals that two of the images are photoshopped versions of photos documenting or depicting racial segregation in the Jim Crow era in the United States; one of the signs was originally directed at … hippies.
November 25th is White Ribbon Day in Australia, a day devoted to ending domestic violence against women. This year – the 25th has already drawn to a close in Australia – there were reportedly hundreds of White Ribbon events held across the country, including a massive march in suburban Sydney that drew thousands of participants.
[UPDATE: The real White Ribbon Campaign has responded; I’ve added excerpts at the bottom.]
Apparently, A Voice for Men is just itching to be sued.
Paul Elam and the gang over at everyone’s favorite Men’s Rights hate site have just launched a new website — WhiteRibbon.org — that seems pretty clearly designed to undermine and co-opt the real White Ribbon campaign, a long-running international initiative to fight violence against women.
The REAL White Ribbon campaign has a number of websites, reflecting its international reach — in Canada, where the initiative originated, as well as in the UK, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand. and other places. But apparently the organization didn’t buy up all the related domain names.
Is Anita Sarkeesian secretly trying to hypnotize us all with her videos? Like, literally hypnotize us, in the “now you’re a chicken” sense?
That’s the central insinuation of an inadvertently hilarious video by YouTube blabber Jordan Owen, one of the guys behind that Sarkeesian Effect “documentary” that’s allegedly in the process of being made.
Owen’s video isn’t a particularly new one – he put it out in January – but it’s been recently resurrected by the good folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted it earlier this week, saying that it offered “very thoughtful, erudite” criticism of Sarkeesian that’s “particularly enlightening and full of information a lot of people don’t know.”
So that’s a good enough excuse for me to talk about it. Also, did I mention that the video is hilarious?
Janet Bloomfield’s antifeminist smear campaign continues apace. Yesterday I wrote about her disgraceful attack on feminist writer Jessica Valenti, in which Bloomfield made up offensive statements and attributed them to Valenti in a malicious attempt to malign her reputation. Bloomfield, the “social media director” for A Voice for Men, then went on to boast about this on her blog.
Now she has decided to libel me as well, declaring on Twitter
She followed this up with a post on her blog full of outright lies and weird insinuations. Her allies at A Voice for Men jumped on board the defamation train, with Paul Elam devoting at least part of one of his “radio” shows to the topic “Is David Futrelle a Perv Apologist?”
This morning, the AVFM Twitter crew was out in force peddling this bullshit, with “operations manager” Dean Esmay leading the charge in his typically addled way.
Ironically, the AVFM crowd is cribbing their attacks on me from a REAL pedophile apologist who blogs under the name theantifeminist. Indeed, Elam, Bloomfield and AVFM ally Angry Harry all linked to theantifeminist on Twitter this morning to back up their assorted smears.
The supposed case against me is based on two articles I wrote nearly twenty years ago for the magazine In These Times.
The attack on me is absurd on its face, but I think it’s worth addressing if only to show the depths of their dishonesty, and just how desperate they are to smear me.
A guy calling himself Humansplaining w/ Jarred starts off the thread — titled “HuffPo tries – and fails – to politicize ‘Cats Against Feminism'” — with this little rant. (I’ve bolded some of the especially silly stuff.)
So, being that ‘Women Against Feminism’ is an internet phenomenon, through Tumblr as well as Twitter, the internet inevitably took this thread in the direction it takes EVERYTHING nowadays – cats.
If you read through all the ‘Cats Against Feminism’ memes, you’ll notice that they pretty much all revolve around, well…CATS. Go figure, huh? References to food, tuna, shedding, and biting predominate these posts. The references to ‘Feminism’ are basically incidental, since this is just piggy-backing on the viral success of ‘Women Against Feminism’. Those posting these memes never really express whether they are in favor of, or against Feminism. It’s clearly not meant to appeal to EITHER side of the issue. Rather, it’s simply a silly meme meant to produce a few chuckles for ANYONE that happens to run across them. Just like every other stupid cat meme on the internet, of which there must literally be TRILLIONS.
But HuffPo apparently sees things differently …
You know what? I think those CATS are smarter than the people at Huffpo that produced this article. THEY think that Feminism is a stupid and pointless human concept, and they wish you’d stop talking about it and fighting amongst each other, because they need you to FEED them! Seriously HuffPo, learn to take a joke, and give the ideology a rest for 5 FUCKING SECONDS already.
Because the cats are laughing at YOU now…
AVFM forum dudes, I hate to break it to you, but the cats aren’t laughing at the Huffington Post. They’re laughing at you.
Maybe I need to start up a new blog: Confused Cats Confused by Confused Cats Against Feminism.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that you run a site that appeals to raving misogynists given to launching into violent anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat. And let’s just say that you have gone to great trouble to organize a conference that is designed to play down the fact that a significant amount of your fanbase is made up of raving misogynists given to launching into violent anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat.
Well, you probably shouldn’t post a public announcement warning the raving misogynists who will be attending your conference to refrain from launching into violent anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat because someone might hear them. Because the fact that you feel it necessary to issue such a warning is kind of a giant clue that a significant number of the conference attendees are raving misogynists given to launching into anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat.
So, hoping to find out any more information I could about those threats the A Voice for Men gang has apparently been getting lately, I forced myself to listen to 45 minutes worth of a regular AVFM YouTube show with the highly ironic name Intelligence Report. The topic of the show was ostensibly the “Death Threats in Detroit.” But somehow, AVFM’s Paul Elam, Dean Esmay and Tara Palmatier managed to reveal much less about this subject than they did about their own obsessions and insecurities.
At one point in their rambling conversation they began talking about how unfair it was that the Southern Poverty Law Center had profiled the AVFM gang as a bunch of woman-haters, when really the SPLC should be putting mean feminists on their Hatewatch list instead. And somehow this segued into a discussion of gendered slurs against women, and why it was just fine to use them, so long as you didn’t use them to refer to every single woman on planet earth.
And yes, I’ve saved a sound clip of this edifying discussion for you. You’re welcome!
Oh, just a little FYI, when Pauly says they never ever ever ever use the words “cunt” or “bitch” to describe women as a group — as if using those words is totally fine otherwise — he’s lying. At least when it comes to “cunt.”
feminism, consumer products, psychology, media, advertising, politics and social custom [have] all merged into one Great Big Bitch Machine; [and] the modern female psyche is nothing more than a product of that machine
But technically he’s not calling all women bitches there. Just saying that “modern female psyche” is the product of a “Great Big Bitch Machine.”
