We Hunted The Mammoth
Ladies, we need to talk. About farting.
It has recently come to my attention that women sometimes fart. And that some of you even do it in the presence of men – including the men whom you allegedly love.
This is a gigantic no-no, a sign of disrespect for your man’s manliness. Also, never criticize his farting, because that too is a sign of disrespect for his manliness.
At least according to the douchebags of the Manosphere and the women who love them, farts and all.
I don’t often write about Alison Tieman – the eccentric FeMRA videoblogger known better as Typhon Blue – in large part because, well, have you ever watched one of her videos? Her arguments and assertions bear so little relation to what the rest of us know as reality it’s as if she lives in some weird inverted world of her own making.
It’s rather difficult to address the arguments of someone when virtually everything she says is wrong – logically, historically, morally – in some fundamental way.
But I’m going to have a go at her latest video anyway, because, well, it’s only 4 minutes long, which will make unpacking its fractal wrongness a little less of a daunting task. Also, there’s a kitty in it.
Christina Hoff Sommers is an old school faux-feminist who’s devoted the last several decades to trashing feminism. Lately she’s apparently decided to appeal to a younger audience — or at least a more immature one — by pandering to the #GamerGate crowd.
That’s probably worth a post or two in itself, but in the meantime you might enjoy this excellent song that deftly rebuts the, er, arguments in her recent video about sexism in video games and why she thinks that’s somehow not a real issue because, you know, dudes like to look at boobies when they play games. No, that’s really her argument — though I’m not sure it even qualifies as an argument, technically speaking.
Anyway, enjoy!
And here’s her original video, if you’re feeling masochistic and would actually enjoy sitting through six and a half very long minutes of simple-minded, patronizing, disingenuous, evidence-free pseudoarguments delivered by someone desperately pandering to terrible, terrible people.
When I saw this quote from our old friend, A Voice For Men’s repeatedly-banned-from-Twitter Social Media Director Janet Bloomfield, it seemed to me to be so extravagantly confused that even the most confused cat against feminism would be embarrassed to have said it. So I made a new meme for it. Ta da!
Here’s the whole paragraph the quote comes from:
I am often accused of simply not understanding what feminism IS when I dare to criticize it, especially on Twitter. Get a dictionary, blah blah blah whatever. See, here’s the thing: I know exactly what feminism IS and the claim that feminists stand for gender equality is not only outright laughable, I’m beginning to see it as a calculated, deliberate, malicious lie. Feminists damn well know they are seeking superiority and the wholesale destruction of society as we know it to be replaced by a brutal matriarchy in which all women and the remaining men will be subject to totalitarian controls that would make Stalin green with envy.
Not all the remaining men! I have been assured I will be guaranteed a spot in Women’s Country with the other male servitors.
Anyhoo, if anyone else feels inspired to do any meme-ing, there are certainly any number of quotes about feminism from MRAs that might work well for similar graphics. No need to stick with cats. There are any number of animals that might better symbolize confused MRAs, from dung beetles to snakefish to bat guano. Ok, that last one isn’t strictly speaking an animal, but you get the idea.
So our old dear friend Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield — you know, the A Voice for Men PR gal best known for her habit of calling people “whores,” including the underage victims of the late, disgraced British “entertainer” Jimmy Savile — has been suspended from Twitter, for reasons unknown.
Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:
So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.
Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”
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.
A Voice for Men’s “social media director” Janet Bloomfield is proving to be quite the innovator in the world of public relations. You may recall her cheeky approach to publicizing the recent AVFM conference, which involved awarding herself “whore points” for calling critics of AVFM “whores.”
Now she’s moved on to straight-up libel, making up fake quotes in order to make feminist writer Jessica Valenti look bad, and then bragging about it on her blog.
This whole sordid episode began several days ago when Valenti, on vacation, decided to send a message to “all the misogynist whiners in my feed today” in the form of a photo of her on a beach wearing a t-shirt saying “I bathe in male tears.”
The AVFM social media attack squad seized on this at once, with Bloomfield telling her followers, wrongly, that the picture had been posted in response to a question about male suicide. When Valenti corrected her on this point, Bloomfield offered a half-assed apology (“My bad”).
Then Bloomfield, demonstrating just how insincere her apology had been, decided to up the ante, concocting four “quotes” from thin air and attributing them to Valenti.
[EDIT: JB’s Twitter account was suspended, so here’s a screenshot of the tweets; I’ll keep the original links up in case she’s ever unsuspended, though that seems unlikely.]
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495366752168329216
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367262187302913
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367996337295360
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495374177013346304
Naturally, as you’ll see if you follow any of these Tweets back to their original context on Twitter, many of Bloomfield’s fans assumed that these quotes were real.
Needless to say, some responded to Bloomfield’s dirty tricks with all-too predictable harassment of her target:
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559012449267713
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559068841680896
After brazenly libeling Valenti, Bloomfield went on to boast about it on her blog. In a post with the smug title “Jessica Valenti is not having a good day,” she wrote:
Now, these fake quotes may have been “utterly plausible” only to those who are ignorant of Valenti’s work, but in the hothouse world of the Men’s Rights movement there are people who would probably believe that Valenti eats babies. As I noted, JB’s followers had no trouble believing them.
Later in the post Bloomfield added, with more than a hint of maliciousness:
It’s not clear how having made-up quotes attributed to you counts as “owning your shit,” but I guess I just don’t understand Bloomfield’s higher morality.
Needless to say, in the real world, deliberately publishing false information about someone in order to harm their reputation is libel.
When confronted with this on Twitter, Bloomfield offered some inventive excuses:
@JudgyBitch1 @JessicaValenti JB, "I didn't like her shirt so I lied about her maliciously to harm her" isn't an acceptable defense for libel
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014
Later on she attempted to prove that her libelous fake Valenti quotes didn’t matter … by making up things about me:
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495684048237633536
As I noted,
@Alzael1 @virtuarat @JudgyBitch1 I'm pretty sure that "well, I lied about David Futrelle too" is not an acceptable libel defense either.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014
Of course, I’m no lawyer. I can only hope that some people who are lawyers are taking a good hard look at Bloomfield’s lies.
I would encourage you all to screenshot or otherwise archive Bloomfield’s self-incriminatory blog post, as well as her tweets, just in case she decides to talk to a lawyer and take them all down.
At this point, I think it’s probably safe to assume that anything and everything anyone from AVFM says should be taken not with a grain but with an entire shaker of salt.
One last AVFM Conference update, with links to two more stories about that historic event.
The first, a gently skeptical Washington Post story by Monica Hesse titled, with a certain irony, “Men’s rights activists, gathering to discuss all the ways society has done them wrong.”
The whole thing is worth reading. My favorite bit:
One presenter, a military veteran speaking on the treatment of veterans returning from war, put up a PowerPoint slide alleging that 70 percent of men returning from war get divorced, and 90 percent do so within five years. When asked about the source of this statistic, he said, “That particular statistic is from my personal observations. I’m just speaking here as a dude.”
Ah, the prestigious Journal of Statistical Dudeness!
The second, well, it’s a bit more disturbing. DarkHorseSwore – a regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit who raised money to go to Detroit to cover the convention only to be turned away at the door – managed to finally get an audience with some of the conference attendees and organizers – after the convention, as they celebrated at a bar and then in a hotel lobby. She got this access because none of them knew who she was. (Eventually Dean Esmay showed up and had her escorted off the premises.)
Now DarkHorseSwore has set up a website – DarkHorseSwore.com – and has started posting about the strange 5 ½ hours she spent amongst the AVFMers. She tells the tale of a strange encounter with one of the Honey Badgers and then an even stranger tale of an even stranger encounter with an old man and his camera. You’ll have to go read it. Be warned: It’s creepy as hell.
Oh, and she picked up some amazing conference swag as well. And by “amazing” I mean “possibly the worst conference swag I’ve ever seen, I mean, what the hell, and also why are they all beige?”
You’ll all be glad to hear that Paul Elam has returned to normal. Well, normal for him.
After several days of doing his best impression of someone who isn’t a rage-filled attention misogynist, he’s back to his old woman-bashing self. You’ll also be happy to learn that he’s found a brand new woman to hate: Time reporter Jessica Roy, who is apparently quite stinky.
I’ve heard rumors that most females are stinky, actually.
Roy, who is covering the conference for Time, hasn’t even published her account yet. Her crimes so far? She tweeted some appalling quotes from some of the talks at the conference and made clear that she was not having a good time amongst the assembled assholes human rights activists. A selection:
At A Voice for Men’s conference yesterday, antifeminist crusader Erin Pizzey was given “a special award for her tireless work with ALL the victims of domestic violence.” Due to the amazing public relations work of AVFM’s spokeswoman for the conference, I don’t know what the award was called, so let’s just assume it was the World’s Greatest Erin Pizzey Award.
Whatever the award was called, the notion that Pizzey works, tirelessly or otherwise, on behalf of “ALL the victims of domestic violence” is demonstrably false. Indeed, she has argued vociferously against extending DV protection to all victims.
In an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Mail in 2011, Pizzey declared herself “horrified” that the British government would consider extending domestic violence protection to those subjected to “emotional bullying and ‘coercive control’” as well as actual physical abuse.
Her “argument” may be triggering for abuse survivors, so I’m putting all of her quotes below the jump.
