Category: feminism

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From the mouths of trolls: Rape is unneccessary if you’ve got “game.”

bad_reason

So my Mighty White of You post — about the demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit — drew the attention of Obsidian, a longtime Manosphere blogger who has been described by some of his comrades as “the Blackest Man of the Manosphere” (not that this is much of an accomplishment in that lily-white world). He stuck around for some not-terribly productive discussions of race and feminism, pickup artistry, and I can’t remember the rest because I just sort of stopped caring after a while.

But there was one thing he said — a passing remark in a long comment — that stood out to some of the commenters here, and which I thought was revealing enough to warrant highlighting in a post:

I don’t support rape for a very simple reason – because it’s not necessary. A Man with Game doesn’t need to rape anyone.

That … is not a good reason to “not support” rape.

Really, that’s probably the worst reason to “not support” rape besides “I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to rape anyone today” or “I might muss up my new suit raping someone.”

Do you really need to search for reasons to “not support” rape beyond, you know, the idea that violating other people for your own selfish pleasure is wrong?

PUAs: Even the ones who aren’t directly advocating sexual assault have some pretty fucked up ideas about rape.

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On Slate, daddy blogger Andy Hinds guiltily wrestles with his sexual fantasies, wants us all to watch

Ogling: People do it.
Ogling: People do it. They just don’t all feel the need to write about it on Slate.

In Slate, writer Andy Hinds has provided us all with one of the most cringe-inducing “unsolicited penis updates” since our old friend Paul Elam filled us in on which “fuckmuffin” body parts make his Little Elam happiest.

Hinds starts off by assuring us he’s one of the feminist Good Guys, a stay-at-home-dad who respects the heck out of the ladies:

Continue reading “On Slate, daddy blogger Andy Hinds guiltily wrestles with his sexual fantasies, wants us all to watch”
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Question Time: Backlash, Frontlash, The End of Men?

0ec3a9a89c78353d45759ee2ce4eda19

It’s Question Time again. I’ve been reading through Susan Faludi’s Backlash and her more recent book on men, Stiffed, as well as some of the discussion surrounding Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and Kay Hymowitz’ Manning Up. Faludi, writing in 1991, obviously saw the 80s as a time of antifeminist backlash.

My question is how you would characterize the years since she wrote her book. A continuation of that backlash? A time of feminist resurgence, from the Riot Grrls up to Rosin’s predicted End of Men? A mixed period of progress and regression?

I’m wondering both what your general assessment of the situation is, and also what specific evidence you have — either hard data or personal experience — that underlies your overall view. This could be anything from data on employment segregation or the prevalence of rape to your sense of how media representations of women and men have or haven’t changed, or even how people you know have changed the ways they talk about gender. What do you think are the significant data points to look at?

The question isn’t just what has changed for women but what has changed for men as well — with my underlying question being: what if anything in the real world has changed that might be making the angry men we talk about here so angry? I think we can agree that most of their own explanations are bullshit, but could there be a grain of truth to any of them? Or something that they don’t see that’s far more compelling?

In the interest of spurring discussion and providing some data to work with, here are a bunch of articles responding to (or at least vaguely related to the issues raised in) Rosin’s End of Men, including a link to her original Atlantic article.  In addition, here are some posts by sociologist Philip Cohen challenging many of Rosin’s claims, as well as more general posts of his on gender inequality. (Feel free to completely ignore any or all of these; I just found them useful resources.)

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a woman is always to blame all about the menz awesome feminism funny imaginary oppression incoherent rage men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misandry misogyny MRA nice guys video

Funny Men’s Rights Video Time!

Don’t worry, it’s not a video BY an MRA. It’s a video ABOUT MRAs. A little cartoon, to be specific, by Scott Benson, who has this to say about it on his Vimeo page:

A quick editorial cartoon about the intersection of self-pity, entitlement, rape, territoriality, misogyny and fear of women. You see it all over the place online in the form of Men’s Rights Activists (of whom there are a few reasonable non-misogynists), Men Going Their Own Way, Pick Up Artists, and dudes touting the “Red Pill”, because The Matrix is a good movie. Look any of these up if you have the stomach for it. These are extreme examples, but watered-down forms of these ideas are everywhere.

In lurking their blogs and youtube channels for a while, I’ve noticed that beyond the standard patriarchal chauvinism there is this deep fear of women – what they will do to me, how they will reject me, how they will use me, how they are changing society in a way that does not favor me, how they are making men into something I don’t like, how they are making themselves into something I don’t like, that they won’t give me what I want, and that they won’t give me what I think is rightfully mine. This goes beyond fear of feminism- this is fear of women at its purest. And that, to quote a puppet, leads to anger and hate. It’s sad.

Naturally, Benson had to close the comments to the video because of, you know, too much MRA.

He wrote more about it all on his Tumblr.

I was alerted to the video by various people, including Cloudiah, which reminds me to remind you all to go look at Cloudiah’s excellent Artistry for Feminism And Kittens blog.

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Should men be allowed to vote?

alicemiller1915

Mocking misogyny: It’s not just for the present day. Here, from 1915, a pointed parody of misogynistic anti-Suffrage arguments by writer/poet Alice Duer Miller. (Note to extremely literal-minded MRAs: She was not actually advocating that men have the vote taken away from them. Nor are we.)

You can find many more examples of Miller’s sharp wit in her 1915 collection Are Women People? The whole thing is available online and in various ebook formats on Project Gutenberg.

Graphic via Roqayah Chamseddine (@iRevolt on Twitter).

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A Voice for Men: we’ll support women in combat only if the proper percentage of women get killed.

womannotincombat
Woman officially not in combat role.

As everyone reading this blog no doubt already knows, feminists have hailed the Pentagon’s decision to open combat jobs to women, which will allow women the same opportunities to serve as men. The decision is also a backhanded acknowledgement that, for all intents and purposes, women are serving in combat today already. (Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth lost both of her legs in combat in Iraq – but officially, what she was engaged in wasn’t combat.)

Continue reading “A Voice for Men: we’ll support women in combat only if the proper percentage of women get killed.”
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This Just In: Reddit MRAs don’t know crap about rape prevention, but still have strong opinions about it

So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the top post at the moment (with more than 370 net upvotes) is a link to this image:

PcRHQ

If I might hazard a guess: that’s because IT HAS YOU NUMBSKULLS.

Sigh. Let’s look at a little chart showing the striking decline in the incidence of rape we’ve seen in the last 30 years.

rapedecline

This is based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Some have criticized the survey’s methodology and say that it undercounts the incidence of rape, but even if that is true, the trend is clear: Rape has declined significantly over the past three decades, and I think it’s fairly obvious that increased awareness and understanding of rape, largely the result of feminist anti-rape campaigns, has contributed significantly to this decline.

Naturally, those who tried to point this out in r/mensrights found themselves downvoted.

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Hey, It’s Some Men Against Assholes and Misogyny!

Jen Kirkman (Men Against Assholes and Misogyny Not Pictured)
Jen Kirkman (Men Against Assholes and Misogyny Not Pictured)

With all the assholery that I’ve been writing about lately, I wanted to highlight something that wasn’t assholish. That is, in fact, anti-assholish. And that’s comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” – MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men – not afraid to call themselves feminists – to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”

Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.

Here’s how she explains it:

Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun – as we all should be.  And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me.  Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.

So far she’s gotten a lot of followers — she picked up a thousand in the first 48 hours — and a ton of submissions, some from fellow comedians (Greg Proops, Michael Ian Black), some from regular dudes, one from her dad.

The submissions are, I suppose I should say, a mixed bag. Some of the essays are great. Some are a bit mansplainy, or White Knighty, or otherwise a bit problematic.

But that’s kind of inherent to the project. Jen is challenging guys who don’t spend all day every day thinking about feminism, but whose hearts are basically in the right place, to stand up against the asshole misogynists of the world. And a lot of guys are responding to her challenge.

Oh, BTW, while we’re on the topic: Jen is also pretty fucking hilarious.

Here’s some of her standup:

And here she is narrating some Drunk History. (She really was drunk.)

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Comics Break: All girls are good for is knittin’ an’ neckin’ and SATAN

 

I‘m feeling a bit poorly today, so in lieu of an actual post, here’s an old comic I found on a blog called Grottu. I’m pretty sure this is what our old friend NWOslave sees when he looks at the world.

Slightly more on topic, here’s a frame from an old romance comic; you can find a discussion of the somewhat, er, problematic story it’s from on Sequential Crush.

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antifeminism feminism FemRAs MRA reddit

Is Reddit’s Feminism subreddit run by MRAs?

Oh, Reddit, where the demographics are so skewed that virtually every discussion amongst and/or about women ultimately gets taken over by dudes doing the old “what about the dudes” routine. It’s no secret that the TwoXChromosomes subreddit has long been overrun with MRAs and FeMRAs. And now it’s become pretty clear that the Feminism subreddit has gone MRA as well.

If you want all the details of the drama, here’s a thread in the subreddit in which the feminists who’ve stuck with the subreddit take on the MRAs and MRA-symps amongst the mods.

Check out the Feminisms and SRSWomen subreddits if you want to discuss feministy stuff on Reddit without having to deal with endless derailing from MRAs and other shitlords.

EDITED TO ADD:  More links:

SRS takes on the whole mess (lots of useful links).

SRS links to r/feminism mods defending MRAs

An r/feminism thread about the recent Captain Awkward posts about creeps that is, naturally, full of endless hang-wringing about the evils of “creep-shaming.”

(Thanks, Cliff, for the links.)