Arthur Goldwag, the author of the SPLC’s recent report on hatred in the Men’s Rights movement, has now responded to some of the hysteria his article provoked amongst MRAs. As Goldwag notes, contrary to what most MRAs seemed to conclude from the report,
the SPLC did not label MRAs as members of a hate movement; nor did our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites – false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like – are all without merit. But we didcall out specific examples of misogyny and the threat, overt or implicit, of violence.
Thomas James Ball, for example, who was hailed as a martyr on so many men’s rights forums, called for arson attacks on courthouses and police stations. The Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik wrote extensively about the evils of feminism. We included as much as we did about Register-Her.com because it is so intimidating to its targets, not all of whom are criminals. When Elam accused Vliet Tiptree, a pseudonymous contributor to RadFem Hub, of “calling for extermination of half the human race; the male half, that is,” he offered a cash reward for her real identity. The names and locations of several candidates were publically aired.
Goldwag also takes a look at some of the radical feminists that have become boogeywomen for so many MRAs, and deals with other MRA complaints.
Obviously Elam and other MRAs will respond to Goldwag’s latest as well. Post links in the comments below as you find them, and I’ll add them to this post.
EDITED TO ADD: And, right on schedule, AVfM responds to Goldwag’s response. It’s a John the Other post, so be prepared to read a lot of words saying not very much.
What’s the best way forward for the Men’s Rights movement today? About the only thing I’ve been able to conclude from this discussion in the Men’s Rights subreddit is that it will more than likely involve heavy use of the word “cunt.” Men’s Rights redditors sure do love the word “cunt.” (See here for the rest of this particular discussion.)
This next bit follows directly from the above:
Yep, you heard it right:
To be classified as a hate group by such a large organization is the first step to gaining wider recognition.
If that’s the case, Men’s Rights Redditors, why are you so mad at the SPLC? Why aren’t you sending it thank-you notes?
Also, just a point of fact: The SPLC report didn’t actually classify the Men’s Rights subreddit as a hate group. It just pointed out that r/mensrights is full of misogynists. But apparently a lot of Men’s Rights Redditors want to take that whole hate group thing and run with it. You go, boys (and sometimes, oddly, girls)!
Several days ago, angry-MRA-dude hub A Voice for Men ran a guest post from someone identified only as Phil in Utah entitled “How I became an MRA: Domestic violence advocacy.” After Phil’s post in question drew some criticism from some of the AVfM regulars who didn’t see it as radical enough, site founder and head cheese Paul Elam felt it necessary to take Phil to task for one of the statements he made in the post.
So let’s have a quick quiz. Here are three quotes taken from Phil in Utah’s post. Which of them is the one that drew Elam’s ire?
“[F]eminists only support the rights of women who agree with them, and have no qualms throwing disagreeing women under the bus.”
“[T]he idea that women are hurt more than men by being abused is a load of crap.”
“I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.”
ANSWER: Did you guess #1? Wrong. While this statement isn’t actually true, Elam didn’t object to it. How about #2? While this statement is also untrue – numerous studies show that women are far more likely to be seriously injured by domestic violence than men – Elam didn’t object to it either. Nope. He objected to statement #3. That is:
I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.
How could any decent human being possibly object to this? Here’s Elam explanation:
I admit I flinched a little when I read this. Clearly these are words rooted in old world sexist notions about violence; that somehow men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men. It is old programming that tends to swim around in the unconscious even after the first few rounds of red pills.
Now, I should note that Phil didn’t actually say, or imply, that “men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men.” Indeed, he spent most of the essay arguing that DV against men needed to be taken more seriously. If anything, he minimized violence against women, by denying the fact that women are indeed more likely to be seriously injured by their male partners than male partners are to be seriously injured by women.
Evidently, for Elam and others on AVfM, straightforward expressions of enmity against men who brutalize women are a form of “latent misandry.”
But we’re only just getting started here. As it turns out, Elam was less troubled by Phil’s “misandry” than he was by some of the nastier attacks on Phil and other
new MRA’s who are ‘getting it’ but have not had the time or opportunity to fully refine their understanding of the modern zeitgeist.
Indeed, one commenter had even gone so far as to call poor Phil “pussy-footed.” And yet another called him a “mangina/white knight.” This, Elam announced, would not do!
MRA’s name calling and shaming other MRA’s is not constructive. It is petty alpha-gaming … .
In other words, it’s the sort of thing that guys do to try to impress the chicks. And that’s bad.
[A] significant part of the dynamics that hinder progress in the MRM is the innate friction between men which is driven by an undercurrent of sexual competition. Our unfortunate programming is to apply downward pressure on each other in order to vie for sexual selection.
On MRA blogs, this is often described with the scientific term “pussy begging.” Elam continued:
Feminism is an outgrowth of chivalry. It is dependent on male sexual competition to thrive. In short, misandry, feminism, the stinking lot of it, is a human problem rooted in men’s mindless competition for women. We don’t get out of that competition by simply rejecting women or Going Our Own Way. We get out of it by identifying and respectfully challenging the elements of that competition when they prove dysfunctional, as in going after MRA’s for blood any time we imagine they are not 100% on message. This conduct, when distilled down to its essence, is just a tell-tale artifact of pussy-centric masculinity.
So, in other words, MRAs who call other MRAs pussy-begging manginas are themselves … pussy-begging manginas.
MRAs, by and large, aren’t big fans of chivalry, and complain bitterly about the terrible injustices forced upon them by this archaic concept, like having to hold doors open for ladies from time to time.
But perhaps they are not considering the many fine benefits of chivalry. In the comments section of Alcuin’s pro-patriarchy blog, our traditionalist friend fschmidt recently set forth the case for chivalry in a way that even the dullest misogynist could appreciate:
In early western culture around the time of the Renaissance, chivalry meant that ladies should be honored and sluts should be raped. This is a totally sound concept and encourages good behavior on the part of women. You cannot expect women to behave if they are not rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior.
Fschmidt’s opinion inspired a lively discussion. Caeser’s Ghost argued that fschmidt had gone a bit too far with the whole rape thing:
Women who dress and behave like whores shouldn’t be raped. They should be prostitutes and treated as such.
Fschmidt replied:
Caesar’s Ghost, I have the greatest respect for prostitutes. Prostitutes provide a valuable service. But sluts provide no value and undermine morality. This is why sluts, identified as provocatively dressed women outside of areas of prostitution, were regularly raped around the time of the Renaissance.
CG argued that prostitutes deserve only the most limited sort of respect:
I respect prostitutes in so far as they fulfill a lowly but necessary function in society. Outside of that function, I have no respect or value for them.
Promiscuous women who are not prostitutes should be treated badly, but I don’t believe that they should be raped. I regard the Renaissance as a great era, but I would have to disagree with their way of handling the problem of sluts.
The mission of Alcuin’s site is, as he states at the top of every page, is to “Promot[e] the Intellectual Renaissance of the Western Tradition.” Apparently you can’t have a real renaissance without sorting out whether or not sexually active women should be raped, or just treated like shit.
Stop the presses! Noted counter-feminist bloviator Fidelbogen has an announcement: He no longer wants to be known as an MRA. In a shocking and stunning post on his blog, Mr. Bogen informs us:
I am an agitator against feminism, and in favor of a Male Renaissance.
But I am not an “MRA”.
That is not a word which I apply to myself as a label. I formerly did, but I no longer do.
He likes these one-sentence paragraphs.
But why, oh, why would you turn your back on those three little initials, Fidelbogen?
That word has picked up more baggage than I can honestly claim to be carrying. I mean that it has picked up other people’s baggage. And it would place an unwanted burden on me personally, to carry a shitload of baggage which I do not own — or which is worse, to have other people assume that I am carrying such baggage.
Huh, what kind of baggage might that be? Could it be that MRAs have picked up the “baggage” of being labeled a bunch of histrionic woman-hating angry dudes – perhaps because ( I would hypothesize) so many of those calling themselves MRAs just happen to be historionic woman-hating angry dudes.?
But what shall we call you now, oh Man Who Will Not Be Called an MRA? He’s got some suggestions:
A counter-feminist….
A non-feminist. . .
An activated non-feminist. . .
These are his actual suggestions; I swear I’m not making them up.
A non-feminist partisan. . .
A partisan of the non-feminist sector. .
A pro-male agitator. . .
A pro-male partisan. . .
And last but not least:
A Male Renaissance Agitator. . .
Uh, really? Male Renaissance Agitator? Mr. Bogen, I hate to break it to you, but “Male Renaissance Agitator” has the exact same set of initials as “Men’s Rights Activist.” In other words, you want us to stop calling you an MRA, and start calling you an … MRA?
[I]f you still insist on calling me an ‘MRA’, it is in contravention to my own stated wishes.
But you just said to call you a Male Renaissance Agitator!
It’s the SAME THREE INITIALS.
But Fidelbogen is off and running again:
I invite others to crystallize around the suggested list of terms above, in order to create a distinct brand that will gradually come to be differentiated from the ‘MRA’ brand. We ought to create many, MANY such distinct brands if we wish to claim the liberty of the non-feminist sector.
Or for short: the Liberty of the Sector.
The what of the who?
Fidelbogen imagines a glorious future for this new brand of activism:
Some day, I hope to organize “Non-Feminist Be-ins” at such venues as college campuses. It might be nothing more than a crowd of silent people at some popular location, standing stock still like the guards at Buckingham Palace and wearing identical t-shirts that say, “I am not a feminist”. And maybe holding up signs, too.
Yeah, the signs and the shirts would be nice touches. Otherwise you’ll just look like a bunch of dudes waiting for the bus.
Does anyone want to think of more things to call the guys who now call themselves MRAs?
Let’s make it a little game. It has to be three words. Double your points if it can be acronymized into MRA. Triple points if it’s an anagram of Men’s Rights Activist. No using terms that already exist, like Magnetic Resonance Angiography, Maritime Reconnaissance Aircraft, Michigan Restaurant Association, or Magneto-Resistive Asymmetry.
What happened was a tragedy, and he absolutely should be honored for his fight. But at the end of the day, I still think his methods, and advocacy for violence (see the Molotov cocktail section) are wrong. The only thing violence breeds is more violence, and I am not going to excuse that, just because he proves a point I stand by. This was not an act of self defense, it was not an act of selfishness, it was an act of self destructive protest and it is a great tragedy.
I don’t often agree with what’s posted at Zeta Male – I’m not sure I’ve ever agreed with anything he’s said previously – and there are things in this comment and the rest of the post that I think are problematic. But I have to give the blogger credit for taking a principled stance on this issue, and one that is distinctly unpopular amongst MRAs online.
If it weren't for this guy, there would be no pedophiles.
Today, a trip down memory lane to revisit an until-recently lost classic of modern misogyny: Jay Hammers’ “The Age of Consent is Misandry.” The piece, originally published on Jay Hammers’Men’s Rights blog, inspired some heated discussions amongst MRAs online, with some harshly criticizing the piece as an apologia for pedophilia and others hailing it as a “politically incorrect” masterpiece. Stung by the criticism, Hammers ultimately took his blog down. But the piece has since been resurrected on the Human-Stupidity blog – another blog that seems rather unhealthily obsessed with the supposed injustice of men not being allowed to fuck underage girls.
Here are some of its highlights (that is, lowlights); the headlines are mine.
ALL ABOUT THE MENZ
The arbitrary age of consent is not about protecting women/girls. It is about valuing females and their virtue over males and their freedom. The intent of the laws is to stop older men from having sex with younger women and that is how it is enforced. It was never intended to stop younger men from having sex with older women.
MORE BETA BLUES
Age of consent laws are designed to punish beta males. A beta male in his 20s, unsuccessful with women his own age who are infused with a sense of feminist entitlement and deride all but the top alpha males who take interest in them, who seeks companionship with a younger, sexually mature female who desires him, should not go to prison for acting on that which is normal male sexuality.
FEMINISTS WHO SUPPORT AGE OF CONSENT LAWS ARE TREATING WOMEN LIKE CHILDREN
If we are to treat women as children then we should be consistent. Young women who have sex with older men are as much victims as women who have sex with a pick-up artist after meeting at a club. In both cases, feminists are angry because the woman has been “fooled” into having sex with a less than ideal mate in terms of value. …
This is what makes feminists angry and this is why age of consent exists still today, because it is assumed women are not mentally mature enough to give consent AND because older women want to limit men’s options to increase their own value in the sexual marketplace.
BUT WOMEN ARE CHILDREN, BASICALLY
Older women … are generally not of a much higher intelligence level than teenage girls. The big difference between the two is that older women are less attractive and that is what makes them so damn angry. …
Females generally do not significantly mature mentally past puberty so it should always be illegal for any woman to have sex or it should never be illegal for any woman to have sex. There is no arbitrary age where females suddenly become self-aware, realizing the consequences of their actions, and stop seeking out alpha males. Thus there must not be an arbitrary age of consent for sex.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
If anything, it should be illegal for women to have sex with men until men have been educated on the truths of women, Marriage 2.0, Game, feminism, and men’s rights.
Benedict Arnold: Don't let your dick be like this guy!
There are a lot of manosphere misogynists and MRAs who think that “Game” (pick-up artistry) offers a sort of liberation for guys who heretofore have been at a horrible disadvantage to stuck-up bitches in the dating arena. But there are others – and the blogger at Omega Virgin Revolt is one of them – who think that spending so much time trying to figure out how to impress women is not only a waste of time but a sort of capitulation to the evil that is women. To put it in the parlance of the manosphere: If women are just a bunch of cunts, why waste your life chasing pussy?
Men have so much power that they literally give it away… [by] chasing tail. Biological impulses my ass. Humans have this thing called the ability to think and the power to choose. It’s why we are at the top of the food chain yet there are much larger and stronger creatures that exist. Apply that to women and sex as well. If [men would] go on a sex strike like the MRM should have [done] as one of it’s primary objectives … .
It’s like Lysistrata, only with penises.
Which makes men who chase after women sexual strikebreakers. Scabs. Traitors. Collaborators. BeneDICK Arnolds who are quite literally sleeping with the enemy.
Who in their right mind thinks that fraternizing is going to get them anywhere? First off it makes men in general look like … out of control [scum] who only want sex and gives women even more reason to view us all like that. Well I myself am not manipulated by sex and once men get to that point, women simply can’t overcome that. And you know why? Because they have to bring something else besides it which many unfortunately don’t comprehend.
Yep. We’re back to the MRA misogynist theory – discussed here previously – that the only thing women bring to the table, as possible romantic partners and humans, is the vagina. And that when men “call them on it,” as it were, they will collapse in a heap, realizing they can’t lord it over men with the power of their vaginas any more.
Our anonymous philosopher then makes what he evidently sees as a highly cutting remark about feminism:
Isn’t that actually being a true feminist and the basis to which we should all hold women up to?
Um … yes? Feminism does indeed suggest that the worth of women does not inhere entirely in their vaginas, at least not any more so than the worth of men inheres in their dicks.
What do we want? Genital equality!
When do we want it! Now!
But back to our anonymous friend and his manifesto:
You go to war, the first thing you do is try to embargo or blockade your enemy’s means of getting supplies to keep their own war effort going long before the firs[t] shot is fired. But these days, men are giving women all that and much more just to turn around use on them.
That’s right, fellows. He’s talking about a cock blockade. Cut off their dick supply at the source!
Urk. Let me reword that last bit:
Keep your dicks locked down, far from the grasping hands of desperate women. Starve them out.
Soon enough they’ll surrender, and come out waving white flags. And, presumably, their panties.
Profit??
EDIT: I changed the title to one that darksidecat recommended. It’s really a much better title.
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.
As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of Men’s Rights Activists aren’t really activists at all, if by “activists” you mean people who occasionally get off their asses and try to engage in political activity in the real world. As I put in in my piece for the Good Men Project on misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement,
Men’s rights activists aren’t much like any other activists I’ve ever run across. For one thing, for supposed activists they are almost completely inactive. Sure, they complain endlessly about things they see as terrible injustices against men. They just don’t do anything about them. While some of those who consider themselves fathers’ rights activists—a slightly different breed from your garden-variety MRAs—try to influence laws and legislatures, MRAs do little more than cultivate their resentments.
MRAs seem to be good at one thing, and one thing only: posting angry comments on websites, whether their own or on those of their many enemies – whether that’s on blogs like this one or in the comments section on various mainstream media sites they consider “misandrist.” (Actually: that’s not entirely fair – on a few occasions, MRAs have been moved to make threatening phone calls as well.) They don’t raise money for anything but their own web sites and their pet projects. They don’t organize demonstrations that involve more than a tiny handful of people. Like, for example, this one, involving one dude dressed like Batman who climbed up onto a highway sign:
Or this one, which involved a dude dressed up as Batman and a dude dressed up as Robin, climbing up on a bridge.
If your protests typically involve fewer people than, say, the line of people waiting to use the Redbox video rental kiosk outside your local supermarket on a Friday night, I think it’s safe to say that yours is not a mass movement, at least not yet.
Am I being unfair in demanding MRAs actually, literally,get off their asses before I consider them to be activists? Perhaps.
But, as it turns out, MRAs aren’t much good at sitting-on-your-ass activism either. Case in point: For quite some time – weeks? months? — MRA elder Paul Elam has been urging readers of his blog A Voice For Men to sign a petition to disbar a District Attorney he and other MRAs have decided is corrupt. But despite his repeated pleas to his readers to sign the thing, it has not yet garnered the required 1000 signatures, even though at least a few of his readers have talked about signing it more than once. [Edited to add: it has now gotten more than 1000 signaturesd.]
Today, this particular example of internet inactivism prompted Elam to lash out at his non-signing readers. Declaring himself “tired and frustrated” and “sick of this shit,” he once again begged his readers to sign. Then he went a step further, suggesting that he might limit commenting on his site to “activists that are contributing to this site in one way or another” as a way of encouraging activism and discouraging those who are “sucking up air and doing little else.”
I don’t think further exhortation on his part – or limiting the comments there to “real” activists only – is likely to make much difference. [Edited to add: Nagging a few more people to spend two minutes signing an online petition is one thing. Actually transforming them into real activists is another.] Elam is running up against the inherent paradox of Men’s Rights “activism” – the fact that most of those complaining the most about alleged injustices against men are not in fact interested in changing anything. Their “activism,” as it were, is little more than an excuse to wallow in their own bitterness, and to blame others for their own problems.
If MRAs really cared about domestic violence against men – as opposed to using the issue as a rhetorical weapon against feminists – they would be raising money and devoting their time to actually building shelters, like the (mostly) women who built the first shelters decades ago, and the (mostly) women who keep these shelters going today. If MRAs were really interested in stopping prison rape, instead of simply complaining about it, they’d be donating money to or working with the advocacy group Just Detention or other groups concerned about the treatment of prisoners. If they were really interested in helping those falsely accused of rape or other crimes, they’d be working with The Innocence Project or some other group fighting for the falsely accused or convicted. Or they would be starting real organizations of their own.
But that’s not, at heart, what the MRM is about. For all but a tiny handful of real activists, it’s not about changing the world. It’s about creating a space where men can kvetch and blame and cultivate their own sense of martyrdom. Actually trying to change the real world would involve , well, going out into the real world, a place where their assertions about the alleged oppression of men are seen as the nonsense they are, a place where their bitterness and hatred of women is seen as bitterness and hatred rather than the righteous anger they like to imagine that it is.
When MRAs do venture out of their self-created bubble they tend to either make fools of themselves – like Batman on the highway sign in the video above – or to reveal themselves to be the angry fanatics they are. Elam, for his part, sometimes even has trouble making his case in the relatively sympathetic environment of the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, and is quickly reduced to sputtering rage when anyone disagrees with him. In the end, sputtering rage seems to be what the MRM is really all about.
Arthur Goldwag, the author of the SPLC’s recent report on hatred in the Men’s Rights movement, has now responded to some of the hysteria his article provoked amongst MRAs. As Goldwag notes, contrary to what most MRAs seemed to conclude from the report,
