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Atheist Elevator Redux, Part Deux: The Return of the Nice Guy

You wouldn't want him propositioning you on an elevator at 4 AM either.

So now it’s all about the “nice guys.” It’s not just that mean, mean Rebecca Watson slandered the good name of all men in the world by suggesting that one amongst their number had committed a somewhat creepy act in an elevator at 4 AM. Now some commenters are accusing her of something like a hate crime against the Nice Guys of the world.

According to cranky sometime-Men’s Rights blogger The Damned Olde Man, the woman he refers to only as “Rude Elevator Bitch” has publicly humiliated a man whose only crime was that he was a little bit shy. Embroidering liberally on the scant few facts we know about the case, Olde Man sets forth a brand new narrative of the incident — based largely on his own imagination –with the mysterious man at the center of the story now transformed into a sweet, awkward fellow he calls Nice Elevator Guy:

By all accounts, NEG appears to be a rather shy, somewhat unconfident nerd or geek who appears to be lacking in the social graces.

When Olde says “by all accounts” he actually means “by no accounts.” We have no idea what sort of personality this fellow has, only that he apparently propositioned Walker in an elevator in Dublin at 4 AM.

It was probably not a good idea to ask REB for coffee just after she finished a lecture on how she is offended by men who sexualize her, especially late at night in an isolated elevator. That would be her point of view which she and all of her supporters have stated quite eloquently. So if one only accounts for REB’s feelings, it was the wrong thing to do. But how about looking at the situation from NEG’s point of view?

That is, from the imaginary point of view of the imaginary character Olde has simply superimposed on a real man we know almost nothing about.

A shy, socially awkward nerd who lacks confidence is likely to feel uncomfortable in any situation where he intends to proposition a woman. But he is likely to be terrified of doing it in a public setting with plenty of people around to witness his humiliation when she turns him down. So from his point of view, an isolated elevator in the middle of the night is probably the ideal location, especially since he was probably never going to have this opportunity again.

Note to shy guys of the world: this is not a good idea. It’s not going to work out well for you.

I’m not quite sure if that’s necessary. I’m a shy guy, and I’m pretty sure most of us shy guys already know that propositioning a woman when the two of you are alone in an confined space is a bad idea.  Many of us who sometimes feel awkward in social settings have what is known as “empathy” towards other people and thus are aware when something we do might just make someone else feel awkward. Olde Man continues:

His fear of humiliation is probably not as irrational as her fear of rape and in hindsight, it was definitely more justified. He didn’t rape her, she did reject him. She not only rejected him, she humiliated him, publically, for all the world to see.

Yeah. She “publicly” humiliated a guy she never named.  According to a guy who has just written a long post in which he repeatedly refers to her — a blogger who posts under her real name — as a “bitch.”

It’s bad enough to read this bullshit in MRA blogs, where it’s irritating but hardly surprising.

It’s a bit more troubling to find much of this dumb argument repeated – in somewhat more polite language, admittedly – in Psychology Today.  In a post entitled “What’s a Shy, Geeky, Nice Guy to Do?” cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman offers a very similar version of events, in which

a nervous, presumably geeky, socially awkward guy gets on [the elevator] ]with her … [his] heart probably beating fast and palms sweety as heck … .

“Presumably,” “probably” – in other words, these details are simply invented.

While Kaufman acknowledges that the mysterious (alleged) Nice Guy’s approach was “lame,” he, like Olde Man, turns the story into one in which Nice Guys are the real victims:

many entitled, narcissistic males have commented to the effect “what an ungrateful bitch, she should be grateful for being complimented!”,  and quite a few feminists have commented “good for Rebecca for scolding men, they need to be put in their place!” All the while, shy, geeky, genuinely nice guys have sat there, reading these extreme comments, no doubt scratching their heads and wondering what in the world they are to do.

What is a shy, geeky, nice guy to do?  

Then Kaufman gives some advice on how the Nice Elevator Guy could have handled the attempted pick-up better:

Don’t be creepy. Asking a girl to your hotel room in an elevator at 4 in the morning when the girl has already announced she is tired shows very poor mating intelligence. …

Well, yeah. He continues:

Look for indicators of interest. Any dating coach will tell you how important it is to look for signals of interest. Pay attention to her state. Does she look exhausted?

Generally speaking, when a woman gives a talk about how she hates being hit on at atheist conferences, then later announces that she’s tired and wants to go to bed, these are what you might call “Indicators of Leave Me the Fuck Alone.”

Kaufman goes on:

Does she cringe when you start talking? That’s probably not the right time to put your arm around her.

Can’t argue with that one, really. Cringing: never a good sign.

Kaufman barrels ahead with this mixture of the obvious and the creepy:

Build some sort of rapport first. The guy in the elevator was a complete stranger. There was zero connection. What could the guy have done to increase his chances of receptivity in this particular situation, when she clearly was not in the mood? It’s hard to imagine he could have done anything, but at the very least he could have tried to make some sort of connection.

Or, here’s a radical notion: he could have just LEFT HER ALONE.  This one tired lady in the elevator is not the only lady in the world. There will be other chances. Stand down, dude.

But Kaufman, who can’t leave well enough alone himself, goes on to imagine a scenario in which Nice Elevator Guy manages to charm Watson utterly.

RUPERT: Oh, hi Rebecca! I’m a huge fan of yours. I really liked your ideas earlier about skepticism…feminism…blah…blah…And I totally hear you about the guys here. They really are creepy, aren’t they? [Insert witty joke here about how if you were a female at this conference you’d become a lifelong skeptic of geeky men]

WATSON: [Laughs] Yea, thanks for understanding. You were really listening to what I said earlier. What do you research?

Ungghhhh. Excuse me, but I have to go lie down for a moment. The stupid here is too much.

After a bit more of this imagined witty banter, the charmed WATSON is inviting HIM to HER room!

It was at this point that I discovered that there was another whole page worth of this shit. I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

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MGTOW Out Loud

You may not have realized that you wanted to hear dramatic readings of comments from NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum. But, trust me, you do. And so here you go, courtesy of the folks behind Troper (a series of dramatic readings of terrible shit from the TV Tropes message boards). There are two episodes of the NiceGuy series so far, with more (eventually) on the way.

 

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drama idiocy misandry misogyny rape rapey scott adams white knights

Scott Adams: Self-proclaimed Misunderstood Genius, Part XVIII

Scott Adams contemplates his favorite subject (artist's conception)

Oy. Scott Adams won’t shut up about that execrable “Pegs and Hoies” piece of his that I (and quite a few other people on the internets) wrote about the other day. Naturally, he’s being willfully obtuse about the reaction his piece caused, and blames it all on the “low reading comprehension” of everyone in the world who is not him and/or one of his sycophantic fans. So he’s decided to interview a number of those who wrote about it. (Not including me. Aww, Scott, but we had such good times together!)

So far he’s interviewed Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon (a great writer and lovely person, by the way) and Irin Carmon of Jezebel. Naturally, the interviewees offer cogent explanations of just what was wrong with his idiotic post, and he responds by completely and utterly missing the point. (Or pretending to; it’s always hard to tell with Scott.)

Scott Adams is so relentlessly irritating – he’s a bit like Eoghan in his stubborn refusal to get the point – that I can’t bring myself to write any more about this idiotic manufactured controversy.  So you’ll have to go check out the posts yourself.

EDITED TO ADD: Adams has put up yet another post on the  subject, entitled “Maybe it’s me?” in which he decides ” to take a step back and seriously consider the hypothesis that the reason people disagree with me is that I’m an idiot and I don’t realize it.” Scott, your hypothesis is correct.

EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: And … Mr. Adams has now made a personal appearance in the comments below. Be gentle!

Given Adams’ intense narcissism, I can’t help but get the song “Biggest Fan” by the Martini Brothers stuck in my head every time I read any of this posts. Listen a bit, and you’ll see why.

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idiocy marriage strike men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny

Fun with charts, or why MGTOWers don't understand marriage trends

As we’ve seen again and again on this blog, misogynists love to talk about how much better men are than women when it comes to things like math, logic, and scientific thinking generally. Unfortunately, their posts and comments online – filled with breathtaking failures of logic, absurd unsourced assertions and magical thinking — do not seem to bear out this hypothesis.  I would compare the scientific thinking of most manosphere misogynists with that of the creationists, but frankly that would be insulting to creationists.

A case in point: a graph – provenance unknown – posted in a recent MGTOWforums discussion of marriage. The standard line amongst the lady haters is that marriage is on the way out , because men are “waking up” to the evils of marriage in an allegedly feminist state and deciding to, well, go their own way. The reality: while the marriage rate has been falling fairly steadily for the last quarter-century or so, for a variety of reasons, most people do marry at some point in their lives; it would be silly to assume that a trend over the course of several decades heralds the death of a social institution that has lasted (and has had many previous ups and downs) for millennia.

Of course, that’s not the way the MGTOWers in question see it. Their proof that marriage is doomed – doomed, I say – lies in this little graph which charts with mathematical precision the exact date range within which marriage will vanish forever from this good earth:

That's not right.

Now, there are many problems with this little graph. For one thing, what happens AFTER the projected marriage rate goes to zero? Does the marriage rate bounce like a rubber ball back into the positive realm? Or does it go below zero, with unmarried couples divorcing one another – just in case?

Second, this chart is based on a tiny number of data points – a mere 25 year sliver of the millennia-long history of divorce. If you go back a mere century and a half – see the chart below, taken from a paper you can find here — you’ll see that the marriage rate doesn’t conform to any neat mathematical formula; it jumps up and down, affected not only by slow-moving cultural changes but by events in the real world – look at the gigantic spike in marriage after World War II.

But the main issue here is that there is simply no way you can come up with a neat equation to predict the future of marriage because THE WORLD DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. History isn’t math. It cannot be predicted in advance, and any attempt to do so — especially one based on a tiny sliver of data — is doomed to failure. (Well, certain aspects of reality can be predicted — like when Halley’s comet will next return (assuming it’s not eaten by a giant space monster we haven’t discovered yet). Orbits can be calculated with mathematical precision; social trends cannot.)

To illustrate the dangers of extrapolation, let’s consider the little chart below, prepared by a helpful assistant (who happens to have access to a scanner). The chart provides some interesting data on the age of a hypothetical cat named “Fluffy” and her projected life expectancy. As you can see, Fluffy was hypothetically born in 2001, making her ten years old today, with her age increasing by one every year. (Just pretend that the numbers line up properly; my assistant, despite her many other charms, is not big on precision, and may have been drunk when she prepared this chart.) Based on this data (which show Fluffy’s age increasing by one every year), we could project that by the time the next century rolls around our dear little cat will be 99 years old.

If projecting the future were as easy as drawing little lines on graphs, the world would be a much simpler, and much less interesting, place to live. Most of us realize this. MRAs and MGTOWers, not so much.

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antifeminism evil women I'm totally being sarcastic idiocy men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny MRA oppressed men reactionary bullshit the spearhead Uncategorized

"No I won't read your literature … bitch!" and other thoughts on female fiction from the dudes of The Spearhead

This better not be written by some dame!

So Esquire magazine recently posted a list of “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read” on their website.  Esquire being Esquire – that is to say, a men’s magazine that had its glory days in the era of Mad Men and that seems to be aimed mostly at old farts (and aspiring old farts) —  only one book of the 75 was written by a woman.  (That’s 98.67% male, for those of you with lady brains who can’t do the math.)

The internet being the internet, some people noticed that the list was a wee bit heavy on the dudes, even for a men’s magazine, and pointed this out. The bloggers at the Joyland Publishing blog suggested that while the books on Esquire’s list were “mostly fantastic,” it might behoove men to pick up a book or two written by a woman once in a while. And so, with the help of some of their readers, the two assembled a list of “250 Books By Women All Men Should Read.” (Why 250 and not, say, 75? Because they got a lot of suggestions.)

Here’s a little one-question quiz for you all: What title did W. F. Price at The Spearhead give his post on the controversy?

A) “Some Great Suggestions for Books by Women You Guys Might Want to Read.”

B) “Did You Know There Are Female Authors Besides The Chick That Wrote Harry Potter?”

C) “Feminist Publishers: Force Men to Read Women’s Lit”

Yep, the correct answer is C, of course.  Apparently a couple of bloggers suggesting some books by women that men “should” read  is some kind of Gestapo-like imposition upon men by “Feminist Publishers.” Price grouses:

[I]it strikes me as rather mean-spirited of females in the publishing industry to denounce even ineffectual efforts to introduce men to literature. By all accounts, publishing has come to be dominated by women, and men are reading far fewer books than women these days. Given this state of affairs, you’d think that the women in the industry might be a bit gracious and let the boys pick and choose which titles interest them.

But of course that won’t do, because feminists must find fault with any and everything men are involved in. …

The implication [of the Joyland Publishing blog post] is that men should be forced by political pressure to read female writers (sometimes these feminists come off as whiny, annoying girlfriends complaining that “he just won’t listen to me!”).

Or, you know, it might just be that the writers of the blog post, and those who wrote in with suggestions, really enjoyed the books in question and thought that dudes might just enjoy them too.  Sort of like when a friend tells you that you should totally watch the movie Dogtooth, because it is so fascinating and creepy and awesome. Or when I tell you right now that you should go watch Jane Austen’s Fight Club on Funny or Die.

Naturally, the comments from Spearheaders were even more ignorant and obtuse than Price’s post. The basic theme: Bitches can’t write for shit (as far as I know).

In case you think I am offering an unfair characterization of the, er, debate, here’s one Spearheader’s contribution to the discussion:

when a man says “no, I won’t read your literature”, you have to respect that, bitch.

And another’s:

I basically do not read anything a wimminz has written, not even in my favourite genre of science fiction, because every single time I have tried they have been unmitigated fucking crap full of feminazi girl power bullshit and emotional baggage and basically very little hard SF…

And still another’s:

I never read anything written by women unless it happens to be instructional and related to work. Pretty much all the fiction I’ve ever read is by and for males. If I read some non-fiction for fun it’s always got a male author. I realized a while back that my cd collection is about 98% male. When I was a kid I never thought about it, it just came naturally. Now that I’m older I intentionally avoid anything by women.

It’s always,er, instructive to see what some random guy who apparently reads mostly instructional manuals has to say about the literary controversies of the day.

There were, of course, more thoughtful analyses, like this earnest comment from the excitable, exclamation-point-happy David K. Meller:

Women write for an audience of their own level–to wit themselves! Most men are simply too intelligent to be interested in what passes for literature scribbled by women! …

Correct me if I am wrong, but is most woman’s “literature” one more kvetch klatsch of women–or girls–getting together to complain about, to defeat, or to evade the workings of us evil, letcherous, abusive, horrible M-E-N! There is no point in men reading such drivel …

There may be better days coming; when women are once again taught the arts of pleasing men, in their creating a comfortable environment for the chosen man in their lives, and when they again will use their ability to read to discover new and better ways to do this, and their ability to write to communicate these truths to others of their sex! Until that happens, literacy for women, much less dominance in authorship, editing, and publishing has been, and is, a BLOODY MESS for everyone, especially men!!

PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller

Yes, women should really only be allowed to read and write if they are reading or writing instructional manuals on how to cook and give better blow jobs, possibly at the same time.

PEACE AND FREEDOM!! to you too, good sir.

Speaking of which — the blowjob bit, not the PEACE AND FREEDOM!! — the commenter calling himself dragnet suggested that young men such as himself were simply too busy to read much of anything. They have other priorities:

The vast majority of my reading is for work, research, and classes. …

Frankly, I’d rather be getting laid than reading a novel after a grueling work week. The three or four hours I sometimes have free on the weekend when I’m not working or working out or sleeping or eating, I’d rather be out with my friends or getting serviced by whatever girl I’m with at the time.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a penis, must be in want of some girl to service it.

PEACE AND FREEDOM!!1!!

Anyway, ladies and manginas, any good lady books you want to suggest for the dudes of the world?

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evil women idiocy MRA PUA rape reactionary bullshit violence against men/women

MRAs respond, predictably awfully, to the arrest of IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn

There have been some strange, but hardly surprising, reactions in the MRA-verse to the arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on attempted rape charges.

On The False Rape Society blog, Pierce Harlan seems bothered that the police would arrest such an important man, citing an assortment of articles saying that Strauss-Kahn’s arrest will likely have a big effect on markets and on the global economy.

Harlan titles his piece: “So rape claims aren’t taken seriously? Reuters says the claim against Strauss-Kahn could impact “the well-being of the global economy.”  After quoting from an assortment of news stories that suggest that, yes, Strauss-Kahn’s arrest has already affected markets and could affect the global economy, Harlan ends with this petulant conclusion:

All because of a disputed rape allegation. Right now, that’s all it is. I have no idea if a crime was committed, and neither do you.

But I know one thing: the entire world is taking very seriously — and perhaps way too seriously — the word of an unnamed maid it knows nothing about.

First of all, just as we don’t know whether or not Strauss-Kahn is guilty of this alleged attack, we also don’t know what evidence the police have. What we do know from other media accounts suggests that there is more to go on than the “word of an unnamed maid” – including DNA and other evidence at the scene, footage from the hotel’s security cams, injuries suffered by the maid, who was treated at a local hospital. There may well have been witnesses too; we simply don’t know. (Also, the maid has now been named in the French press. Wonderful.)

Second, and more importantly, why should the fact that the arrest has affected world markets have any bearing whatsoever on the case? By this logic, no important political or financial figure should ever be arrested for anything.

To make myself perfectly clear here:  Harlan does not say explicitly that DSK is too important to be arrested on the word of a lowly maid, but that seems to be the implicit suggestion of his post, the whole reason to quote several articles about the effect this is having on the world economy, all because of  “the word of an unnamed maid [the world] knows nothing about.”  I have asked him to clarify what exactly he did mean, and he has refused. In a followup post he asks rhetorically “Have we handed an unnamed maid too much power to destroy a presumptively innocent man?” and answers himself by saying “The question scarcely survives its statement.” Which I will take as a “yes.” He goes on to say:

We reported yesterday what the world press is saying about the sexual assault claim against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. About how it could impact not only the IMF he heads, and France where is a presidential hopeful, but the global economy itself.  It is widely believed that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s reputation has been marred beyond repair, regardless of the outcome of this affair.

To say this is morally grotesque does not capture the evil of what is happening to a presumptively innocent man. …

If there is a running theme in this blog, it is this: we have handed anonymous women and children far, far too much power to destroy the lives and reputations of presumptively innocent men before even a scrap of evidence has been introduced to prove their guilt.

If I am reading this correctly — and please correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Harlan — he is saying that ALL men are too important to be arrested on sexualk assault charges based on the word of “anonymous women and children.”

Again, let me ask you, Mr. Harlan, is this what you mean? I invite everyone here to read the two posts in question —  the first one here; the second one here — and tell me what you think he is trying to say.

Mr. Harlan, if you want to clarify what you mean here, I will put that clarification up without comment as a post, under a neutral headline (Pierce Harlan clarifies what he meant in his posts on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest”).

I would also like to point out, again, that the police seem to be going on a lot more than the “word of an unnamed maid,” including surveillance tapes, statements from those who spoke to the maid immediately after the alleged incident, DNA evidence in the room. There may also be DNA evidence on her clothing; that we don’t know. But it seems fairly clear that there is evidence beyond the maid’s testimony.

Meanwhile, over on In Mala Fide, a guest blogger from Human-Stupidity.com, an MRA site that devotes a lot of its attention to railing against child porn laws, attacks the accuser and dismisses the charges. It’s hard to know what in the post is sarcasm and what is simply astounding stupidity. But as far as I can figure it, Mr. Stupidity is far more distressed by reports that the maid accidentally walked in on a naked Strauss-Kahn than he is by the possibility that he sexually assaulted her:

The story is very strange, and dominated by clear mistakes and screwups committed by the accuser. A five-star hotel maid trespasses into a naked client’s room?  Unforgivable. …

This is not supposed to happen in a high-class hotel. Were the sex roles inverted, were a male employee to walk in on a prominent female guest, like Mrs. Hillary Clinton, the male employee would be fired and arrested for sexual harassment.

Mr. Stupidity then goes on to suggest that such a powerful man would never try to rape anyone because, you know, powerful men don’t do that sort of thing.

A hitherto well behaved, civilized man, suddenly goes crazy? Just because he was naked, he wanted to take advantage of her and rape her?

A man pictured on the covers of magazines, admired by millions of women, who could get any woman he wanted with a snap of his fingers. A man from a country with legalized prostitution who could afford two luxury prostitutes per day, if he happened to be a sex addict. And this guy, exactly the moment the woman walks in, illegally, incorrectly, grabs her and rapes her?

Never mind that other women are coming forward with stories of assaults by Strauss-Kahn, suggesting that he may not be quite so well-behaved as Mr. Stupidity assumes.

So what does Mr. Stupidity think really happened? After raising the possibility that this is all some political setup, he ends the piece suggesting that the maid – who, he says “committed a serious professional lapse, almost a crime” by accidentally walking in on Strauss-Kahn – simply made up the story in order to protect her job. Because maids are instantly fired for accidentally walking in on guests? Because never ever in the history of hotels has a maid walked in on someone naked? (A quick Google search suggests not only that this is relatively common, but also that it’s a sexual fantasy of quite a few men.)

Meanwhile, Ben Stein – not, as far as I know, an MRA, but a neocon and a bit of a dick – has offered his own highly problematic defense of Strauss-Kahn, which boils down to, well, envy:

this is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that’s what it’s all about. A man pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room? He’s got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.

More on this as it develops. And it’s developing fast.

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antifeminism evil women idiocy internal debate manginas marriage strike men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny MRA oppressed men the spearhead western women suck

W.F. Price: A Daisy Picking Mangina?

I'm onto you, all women!

MRAs and MGTOWers are, as you might have guessed, some pretty acronym-happy people. And one of their favorite acronyms — besides those two – is NAWALT, which stands for “Not All Women Are Like That.” This is a phrase often uttered by people who are not misogynist assholes in response to things said about women by people who are misogynist assholes. Apparently many MRAs and MGTOWers hear this so often that they’ve turned it into a running gag, the “joke” being that in their minds all women really ARE like that.

Now W.F. Price of The Spearhead has caused a tempest in the teapot that is the manosphere by admitting that, in fact, not all women are like that:

We all know that there are good women out there, including some who comment here, in our families, at work and in neighborhoods all over the land, so why shouldn’t we listen to women who tell us this is the case?

Now, Price has not suddenly become a feminist or anything. Indeed he went on to argue that even if not all women are horrible monsters,

a lot of them are, and we have no assurance that the nice girl who is smiling and saying she loves you won’t at some point destroy your life. …

If somebody handed you a revolver with three loaded chambers and three empty ones and said, “go ahead and aim this at your head and pull the trigger — not all the chambers are loaded,” would you go along with the suggestion? Of course not. It would be sheer folly.

And, oh, it goes on. Blah blah blah, men, don’t get married. Blah blah blah, and you good ladies out there better give up some of your rights – sorry, advantages — because the bad ladies abuse them and pretty soon no man will want to marry any of you:

[T]hose women who really “aren’t like that”… are less likely to find a man willing to marry them, and more likely to be used and abandoned at the first hint of commitment. Society at large is increasingly skeptical about the virtues of women, and the word is bubbling up from the grass roots that women are a risky proposition. …

Until the laws are reformed and some balance is restored to relationships, men who care at all about their lives will have no choice but to regard any woman he becomes involved with as a loaded gun pointed straight at him.

So, yeah, this is the same old W.F. Price we know and don’t love.

On The Spearhead itself, the dissenters were at least generally polite. “Nah, sorry Mr Price,” wrote oddsock. “Your well written post cuts no ice with me. All women are like that.”  Herbal Essence also challenged Price’s math:

The argument needs to be rejected because nearly all women are enabling the behavior of the worst of them. And nearly all women stand, arms akimbo, as a bloc to preserve female superiority. ..

 [I]t’s time that men take off their rose-colored glasses and realize that nearly all women are waging a war against us. For god sakes, our own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters support the female hive mind over their own flesh and blood. (us.)

Over on MGTOWforums.com, the judgment was a little harsher. The commenter calling himself fairi5fair reacted as though Price had lopped off his own dick and announced his engagement to the ghost of Andrea Dworkin.

W. F. Price is just a daisy-picking mangina with a chip on his shoulder imo. Even the woman MRA I knew was probably just using it as a slick way to trap a nesting male.

Bottom line: if words are coming out of a woman’s mouth, she’s a lying cunt. Mr. Price probably wants to believe in some romantic fairytale because he just got divorced and wants pussy again, and doesn’t want to face the reality of his options.

Yes, Mr. Price, you’re going to get your sorry ass handed to you again if you keep thinking with your dick and your heart. Use the brain, moron. Next!

Whenever I run across something this idiotic, I have to remind myself that Not All MGTOWers Are That Astoundingly Stupid. NAMGTOWATAS, for short.

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bullying feminism idiocy kitties Uncategorized

>I’m going off the rails on an [ableist slur redacted] train. Also: Cat poll!

>

Well, discussions about my second Scott Adams piece over on Feministe (which was basically identical to my post here) have now been completely derailed by a number of commenters who’ve decided I’m “ableist” because I used the word … “idiot.”  That word, they have decided, is offensive to the “cognitively impaired.” If you want to wade into the mess, here’s the comment that, while polite in itself, started the long slide down this particular rabbit hole. You can see my responses in blue further down in the comments.
I consider this kind of language policing to the EXTREME! to be bad for feminism (and frankly insulting to people with disabilities), and I’m glad a number of others have stood up against it in the comments there.  I don’t think that the language police are in the majority at Feministe, much less in feminism at large. But these debates are so frustrating that many feminists who disagree with the language police end up biting their tongues and/or just walking away. At some point I may post more about this fraught topic here.
In the meantime, I’m am conducting a little poll about cats. Please click the appropriate button in the graphic above. Clicking it won’t actually do anything, but I’m pretty sure what the results are going to be anyway. Go kitties!
— 
If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it. 
*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
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douchebaggery idiocy kitties MRA

>Scott Adams: I meant to do that!

>

Easier to believe than Scott Adams.

There’s a classic scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in which our hero falls off his bike in a spectacular fashion in front of a bunch of kids. Instead of lying there in misery and shame, he quickly gets up, dusts himself off, and says, somewhat less than convincingly, “I meant to do that.” If you’ve never seen the movie, or simply want to relive the moment, here it is

It’s perhaps the oldest, crudest, and most utterly transparent strategy ever invented to recover from an embarrassing mishap: we either pretend that nothing happened, or that whatever did happen was all part of our super seekret master plan all along. We’re not the only animals that do this. Cats do it. Birds do it. Even drunk squirrels do it.


Now we can add Scott Adams to the list. Recently, as regular readers of this blog will be aware, the Dilbert mastermind caused a bit of a contretemps on the internets by posting a blog entry so astoundingly idiotic, and so patronizingly misogynistic, that it managed to offend Men’s Rights Activists and feminists alike. Adams managed to make himself look like an even bigger idiot by pulling the blog post down in what seems to have been a futile attempt to make the controversy go away, only to find it reposted on an assortment of sites; some have begun to wonder if he actually understands how the internet works. (Things posted generally cannot be unposted.)

I wrote about the whole embarrassing spectacle here, and when I posted a version of that piece up on Feministe, Adams showed up to defend himself– badly – by insisting that his critics were too dumb and/or emotional to understand his oh-so-subtle argument. He then insisted, puzzlingly, that we actually weren’t his critics at all: “You’re angry,” he wrote, “but I’ll bet every one of you agrees with me.” Naturally, this did not advance his cause.“Mr. Adams,” wrote Feministe commenter Sheelzebub, speaking for many, “thank you so much for coming back here and entertaining us with your special brand of epic fail.”

But rather than letting this whole thing die, Adams has come back with even more detailed, and even more transparently ludicrous and contradictory, explanations as to why he wrote the post in the first place, why he subsequently deleted it, and why he decided to defend himself in such an obtuse manner on Feministe and (apparently) elsewhere. The whole embarrassing spectacle wasn’t an embarrassing spectacle at all: He totally MEANT TO DO IT.  As Feministe commenter Laurie sarcastically summed up his new claims, the whole thing was apparently “a form of sophisticated performance art,” and the controversy it generated was all “part of Adams’s master plan in the first place. He’s pulling all the strings. BWAHAHAHAHA!”

Yeah, right. 

So let’s go through his new explanations. Prepare for a bumpy ride.

Adams wrote the original post, he says, in a deliberate attempt to send the Men’s Rightsers into a frenzy:

I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”

This part of Adams’ explanation actually rings true. Originally, you may recall, Adams decided to let his readers pick the topic of his next blog post for him. When he saw “men’s rights” jump to the top of the poll results, he knew, as he put it, that “the fix was in. Activists had mobilized their minions to trick me into giving their cause some free publicity.”

This is in fact true; MRAs on Reddit, and perhaps elsewhere, did indeed flood his site to vote for their pet issue.

And so, even though he agrees with some of the Men’s Rights agenda, Adams says he’s been suffering from a “wicked case of ‘whiner fatigue.’” In a world full of  “financial meltdowns, tsunamis, nuclear radiation, and bloody revolutions,” complaining about men having to open doors doesn’t seem like such a big damn deal.

So far, so good. But it’s about here, as he gets into his decision to take the post down, that Adams’ explanations go completely off the rails. Indeed, he’s got two distinct, and almost completely contradictory, explanations for why he took the post down.

First, he says he deleted the post, even though he knew people would repost it, as a sort of “meta joke” apparently designed to rile up feminists and garner even more attention. As he explains, somewhat less-than-lucidly:

A few people appreciated the meta-joke of removing the post.  If you didn’t get it, read the deleted post, consider the feminist backlash, then think about the fact that I took down my post and ran away.

And to those of you who triumphantly scrounged up a copy of the deleted piece from Google’s cache, republished it, and crowed that I don’t understand how the Internet worked, I would politely suggest that perhaps I do.

Adams goes on to suggest that the seemingly obtuse and arrogant comments he left on Feministe (and, apparently, elsewhere), were part of the same Puckish strategy of provocation:

I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day.

But, he says, this wasn’t the whole story. And so he sets forth his second explanation for why he took down the original post:

I didn’t take down the piece just because I thought doing so would be funny, or because I wanted attention. Those were bonuses. The main reason is that when a lot of drive-by readers saw the piece, and they didn’t know the context of this blog, it changed the message of the post to something unintended. As a writer, unintended messages are unbearable.

You might notice that this new explanation does not so much complement but completely contract his earlier explanation: in the first scenario, Adams portrays himself as a “meta joker,” a deliberate provocateur, trying to rile up readers outside of his normal audience with a puckish prank.

In the second scenario he portrays himself as a writer deeply concerned about being misunderstood, and troubled that his words were being misinterpreted by “drive-by readers” outside of his normal audience, a situation he describes as “unbearable.”

In other words, after telling us that he pulled down the post in an effort to rile people up and garner even more attention, he tells us he that he really didn’t like the extra attention his words were getting, and that he pulled down the post in an attempt to cut the discussion off. As he puts:

Men thought I was attacking men, and women thought I was attacking women. The message changed when the context changed. I saw that developing, so I took down the post.

There is, of course, a simple way for us to cut through this confusion: to recognize that Adams’ talk about “meta-jokes” is almost certainly utter bullshit.

My theory as to what actually happened is much more straightforward, and fairly similar to Adams’ second explanation: Adams wrote a post designed to rile up MRAs, and it did. But once the discussion spilled over beyond the relatively safe confines of his own blog, with its sympathetic – or is that sycophantic? – audience, he had second thoughts, and in a moment of peevishness he took the post down, hoping the whole thing would just go away. It didn’t.

Then the whole debate got a second wind after feminists, myself included, noticed his post, and noticed that it happened to be crammed full of patronizingly misogynistic bullshit. Unable to simply wish away the criticism, Adams waded into the fray. Unwilling to, or simply incapable of either justifying his original post or apologizing for it in front of an audience of non-adoring non-fans, Adams simply asserted that none of his detractors understood what he *really* meant. So far, he has not given us any explanation as to what this might be.

Instead, in his post as in the discussion on Feministe, he simply repeats his assertion that those who have criticized his post are too emotional or invested in the issues to truly “get it.” The culmination of this line of, er, “reasoning” is this bit of passive-aggressive fuckery at the end of his post:

To the best of my knowledge, no one who understood the original post and its context was offended by it. But to the women who were offended by their own or someone else’s interpretation of what I wrote, I apologize.

This sounds like it might be his last word on the subject. No such luck. Like a terrier worrying a bone, Adams still hasn’t quite let this one go. Today, Salon ran a couple of articles on the controversy, including an interesting interview with Men’s Studies doyen Michael Kimmel; Adams urged his minions readers to rush over and defend him in the comments against the “the poorly informed [who] are in full unibation mode over their shared hallucinations of my Men’s Rights post.”

“Unibation?” Apparently they speak a different kind of English up Scott Adams’ ass.

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Categories
idiocy oppressed men self-promotion

>Another post up on Feministe. Also: Scott Adams responds to my post on him

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“We hunted the mammoth”: Always hilarious!

My second guest post has gone up on Feministe. In it, I introduce the Feministe audience to a Man Boobz classic: the “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” quote, in all of its original glory. (By the way, t-shirts are still available, and they’re pretty snazzy!)

Also, Scott Adams himself  has responded in the Feministe comments section to my post about him. Some highlights of his, er, argument:

Is this an entire website dedicated to poor reading comprehension? I don’t think one of you understood the writing. You’re all hopping mad about your own misinterpretations. … 
In this case, the content of the piece inspires so much emotion in some readers that they literally can’t understand it. The same would be true if the topic were about gun ownership or a dozen other topics. As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion. …
You’re angry, but I’ll bet every one of you agrees with me.

Wow. Just, wow. How narcissistic and delusional do you have to be to even type out that last bit, much less post it on the internet for all to see? 

I wonder if Scott Adams would agree with the “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” guy? I’m sort of thinking that he just might.