The Honey Badger Brigade — the (mostly) all-gal A Voice for Men spinoff group that got booted from the Calgary Expo yesterday — would like everyone to know that they refuse to see themselves as victims, you know, like feminists.
Indeed, they are so devoted to not seeing themselves as victims that they and their allies at A Voice for Men have put out roughly 4 1/2 hours of videos about their expulsion since yesterday, including three videos that are longer than an hour each. No, really: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (I’m not including the two additional videos by Mundane Matt that AVFM has posted on its site.)
We here at We Hunted the Mammoth would like to respond to these videos with a video of our own:
So our old friend Paul Elam has launched a new cooking column for Men Going Their Own Way. I mentioned it yesterday but hadn’t gotten around to reading his first installment. Intrigued by the quotes some of my readers were posting in the comments here, I actually went over to A Voice for Men and read it.
Alas, there were no recipes, but Elam wasn’t shy about dispensing some RED PILL WISDOM about the fine art science of eating stuff.
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!
As you may have heard, #GamerGate booster and alleged journalist Milo Yiannopoulos is writing a book! About #GamerGate!
Looking through his announcement of this project, though, I didn’t notice any mention of an actual publisher. Nor did I see one mentioned on Twitter. So unless I’m missing something, it appears Mr. Y hasn’t yet lined up a publisher.
So let me make this offer: MILO — I WILL PUBLISH YOUR BOOK.
I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye on all issues in the past — or on any issues, actually — but I’m willing to set that aside and I hope you are too. Because I think this is a great opportunity for both of us.
Granted, I am not, strictly speaking, a book publisher. But I do live within walking distance of a UPS Store with two xerox machines and a working stapler. And I’ve already designed a book cover as a sign of my good faith.
I can’t give you a big advance, but frankly, with #GamerGate losing steam by the hour, I can’t imagine any real publisher will either. I do promise you a portion of any profits I make from the book, less my standard fees and the usual allowance for cat food and other cat-related expenses. Plus another 40% to cover the exasperation of having to work with you, which I can’t imagine is pleasant for anyone. And another 10% for whatever.
So how about it? In all honesty, I don’t think you’re going to get a better offer than this.
Have your people contact my cats, and let’s get this train rolling!
NOTE: If any of you think you can design a better book cover than I have, please post it in the comments below.
NOTE 2: My original book cover design used a title I borrowed from a #GamerGate meme. I have been informed that the phrase was a reference to a rape joke, because, of course, #GamerGaters are terrible shits who think rape jokes are funny. So I took it down.
Let’s take a quick break from all that gamer aggro to take a quick peek at the CreepyPM subreddit, where we find this lovely little Grindr exchange, posted by Jacob of rniraclewhip.tumblr.com, featuring a man with a strange question:
I think our questioner was just being kind here, pretending that he actually was asking about ass size. No, his question was actually a very clever literary reference that went over Jacob’s head but which I picked up right away because I am so very, very smart.
It’s a reference to a famous scene in Death of a Salesman. Biff Loman is telling his brother Happy about a job interview that didn’t quite go as planned.
BIFF (breathlessly): I did a terrible thing today, Hap. It’s been the strangest day I ever went through. I’m all numb, I swear.
HAPPY: You mean he wouldn’t see you?
BIFF: Well, I waited six hours for him, see? All day. Kept sending my name in. Even tried to date his secretary so she’d get me to him, but no soap.
HAPPY: Because you’re not showin’ the old confidence, Biff. He remembered you, didn’t he?
BIFF (stopping Happy with a gesture): Finally, about five o’clock, he comes out. Didn’t remember who I was or anything. I felt like such an idiot, Hap.
HAPPY: Did you tell him my Florida idea?
BIFF: He walked away. I saw him for one minute. I got so mad I could’ve torn the walls down! How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there? I even believed myself that I’d been a salesman for him! And then he gave me one look and — I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We’ve been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk.
HAPPY: What’d you do?
BIFF (with great tension and wonder): Well, he left, see. And the secretary went out. I was all alone in the waiting room. I don’t know what came over me, Hap. The next thing I know I’m in his office — paneled walls, everything. I can’t explain it. I — Hap, I took his fountain pen.
HAPPY: (Angrily.) Is u ass, bif?
Is you ass, bif?
This is truly the question of our time.
EDIT: Ok, I changed the Death of a Salesman quote. Dammit, this dopey joke is funny to ME.
The human rights visionary looked down at what he had just written and smiled. Would these be the words he was remembered for?
Thomas Jefferson had that line about all men being created equal. It was bullshit, of course, but people ate that crap up. Martin Luther King had that thing about his kids not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That was pretty good, he had to admit. People love cute stories about kids.
Gandhi had that thing, how did it go? That thing about everyone laughing at you, and fighting, and then you win something? That wasn’t quite it, but Gandhi was kind of a wuss, anyway. Would people even remember that dopey skinny dude in a diaper in a hundred years?
He chuckled quietly to himself.
They would certainly remember him, he thought. And they would remember the words he had tapped out on his laptop shortly before midnight that fateful summer night, on the eve of the historic conference that would, he knew, change the world forever.
One day, he was sure, these three sentences – well, two sentences and a sentence fragment, to be more precise – would be etched in stone.
So anyway, just a reminder: if you missed me on Al Jazeera America’s The Stream on Tuesday, facing off against AVFM’s Robert O’Hara, they’re rerunning the show today at 12:30 PM ET.
It’s only on TV, though, not online. Click here to see if you get Al Jazeera America on your TV provider.
I was skimming through the A Voice for Men forum the other day and was stunned to find, hidden away amongst the other posts in the “rants” section, an absolutely blistering critique of AVFM itself:
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. … Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability … and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of [misandry], ad hominem attacks, constant contempt … public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets … going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Nailed it, huh?
Ok. SPOILER ALERT. I kind of lied. This comment wasn’t aimed at AVFM. It was aimed at “bitches.”
Here’s the opening wall-of-text paragraph that I left out:
I think manipulative, catty, conniving, calculating females are pure evil. Applying indirect, covert aggression as a power play, manipulating men to get in their good graces and climb up the pecking order, before aggressively attacking those who don’t “fit in” for their own sadistic pleasure, to aggrandise their own ego and to raise their own status. Playing the victim to stir white knights to go on the attack at their target, when they are the aggressor. Having utter contempt and disdain for anyone they sleep with. Expecting males to be Teflon and always shifting the blame when anyone else gets hurt – it’s always the other person’s fault for being hurtable, for not being Teflon – they always have zero accountability for any harm caused, deny any role in it, and tell themselves it’s not them to feel good and look good. Deluding people, by putting on a cute demeanour, that “she wouldn’t do that”. Using charm to beguile, while calculatingly lashing out at anyone who dares to reveal their true colours or who even sees through their mask at what they really are. Totally void of empathy or sympathy, while putting it on purely fakely to gain an advantage.
And here’s the bit I quoted at the start, though this time I’ve put all the bits I carefully reworded or ellipsed away the first time through back in again; they’re in bold.
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. Seeing their own cuntish wiles as meritous. Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability, being placed on a pedestal and feeling they belong there, sneering down their noses in contempt at those who respect them (the latter being pawns in their power play), and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of misogyny, ad hominem attacks, constant contempt and a complete disregard for other people’s boundaries, malicious back-talk, public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets, an opportunistic use of political correctness, going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Yeah, it sounds a lot more AVFMish that way.
Even after four years of reading this bullshit, I’m a bit amazed at just how much of MRA, er, philosophy seems to be little more than projection.
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:
Well, I’m still sick, and at the moment my cough is more productive than I am, so instead of a full post let’s take another trip down memory lane with this important document from the early years of second wave feminism. In this 1972 pamphlet, the radical feminist collective known as the “Marvel Comics Group” spelled out their five-point program for feminist revolution.
As you can see, it consisted of:
Smooching
Accessorizing your protest ensemble with a kicky scarf
Late-night typing
Making young men jealous by dating older pilots, or policemen, or mailmen. (I’m not completely sure what job that guy’s got.)
So the other day some of the fellas over on Chateau Heartiste — one of the internet’s top destinations for racist, misogynist pickup artist wannabes — ran across a little graphic celebrating some of the lesser-known “[w]omen in science that you should know … and probably don’t.”
Apparently offended by the reminder that, yes, women have actually had some influence over history, one of Heartiste’s readers decided to make a graphic similarly celebrating the men of science. But while the original graphic contained pictures of only 12 women, this new graphic featured a vast sea of male faces, as if to rub in just how male dominated the world of science has been, and still is.
Looking at the graphic, Heartiste also thought he spotted another demographic anomaly: a preponderance of white faces. “That’s one pale looking pastiche,” he wrote.
“The Men in Science poster. A Snowvalanche of Whiteness,” agreed one of his commenters,”Bwahahaha.”
Huh. That’s weird. because when I look at the poster I don’t see a lot of white. I mean, if you blow it up a little you can see that the spaces between the various squares are white, but the squares themselves are all sorts of colors. Red. Pink. Black. Brown. Blue. Green.
Are a significant portion of the Men of Science from Mars?
And there’s another odd thing about this not-so-pale pastiche: it’s full of repeating patterns. If you look closely, you’ll discover that this isn’t one vast sea of male faces. It’s a small pond, endlessly repeated.
Specifically, it’s this bit (from the upper left-hand corner) pasted over and over.
Also, when you look closely at these alleged “scientists” they turn out to be real blockheads. Yep, if you zoom in a little further you don’t find an assortment of tiny Einsteins and fig-sized Newtons. You get this:
All hail the founding pixels of science!
Heartiste, you may want to get your eyes checked for bigotry.
Thanks to dashapants for bringing this wondrous graphic and its repeating patterns to my attention.
You may remember the embarrassing spectacle a couple of months back when Warren Farrell asked the readers of A Voice for Men to help him pick out a cover picture for a new ebook version of The Myth of Male Power, the 21-year-old crackpot bestseller that more or less provided the, er, intellectual foundation for today’s Men’s Rights movement.
It wasn’t just embarrassing because AVFM is a noxious hate site that regularly calls women c*nts and whores and helps to organize informal campaigns of harassment directed at individual women. It was also embarrassing because all three of the pictures were sexualized images focusing on specific female body parts. You can guess which three, and you’d be right: tits, ass, and vagina (the latter tastefully covered in a merkin made of moss).
Well, Farrell ended up rejecting all of these images in favor of … a different picture of a woman’s butt. Yep, the screenshot above features the actual cover of the recently released ebook version of The Myth of Male Power. (You can see it in its full sized-glory over on Amazon.)
The implicit message of the cover couldn’t be clearer: men may seem to run the world, but women can control and exploit them through the power of their sexuality. Male power is undercut by … butt power.
Am I reading too much into a cover image? Farrell doesn’t really believe this nonsense, does he?
Well, in the introduction to the ebook, Farrell writes:
In case you’re wondering, “genetic celebrity” is Farrell’s term of art for any attractive woman.
But golly, you say, the fact that a dude feels “powerless” because he can’t have sex with every woman with a nice butt that happens to wander across his field of vision doesn’t actually mean that men are powerless or that male power is a myth. Well, Farrell has an answer to this as well. And by “answer” I mean, well, whatever this is:
Got that? I’m not sure there’s anything there to get; it’s nothing more than hand-waving to distract attention from the nonsensical nature of his previous statements. In case any Men’s Rights activist ever brings Warren Farrell up as an example of a respectable, “academic” MRA, you may wish to point out that almost nothing Farrell writes ever actually makes any fucking sense.
In the book itself, Farrell repeatedly suggested that male power can be undone almost completely by the sexual power of women. In one oft-quoted passage, he wrote about the effect that a “secretary’s miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power” allegedly has on their male bosses. (Myth of Male Power, p. 21)
While that statement has earned a certain notoriety for its sheer ridiculousness, Farrell went further elsewhere in the book, essentially arguing that men are as addicted to female “beauty” as drug addicts are to the drug of their choice — and as helpless.
“Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal,” Farrell wrote. “[M]any men feel ‘under the influence the moment they see a beautiful woman.” (p. 320, emphasis in original.)
This sort of temporary “intoxication,” Farrell argued, leads men into shackling themselves to these temporarily sexy tyrants for the rest of their lives — thus agreeing to support them (he suggested implicitly) even after they get old and ugly. (p. 85.)
In Farrell’s original book, this “argument,” such as it is, was merely one of many that he thought undercut the alleged “myth of male power.” Now, with the butt on the cover, he’s put it front and center. Or, more precisely, rear and center.
Warren Farrell, you’re an ass, man.
Oh, awkward segue here, I just wanted to show off the cover to the new edition of my classic book, The Myth of Human Power.
It will soon be available for one million dollars in cash in unmarked bills, upon delivery of which I will sit down and write it for you. It will probably be pretty short and not very convincing.