Pissed off cats: Much more entertaining than pissed-off dudes on the Internet
So yesterday, I appeared (albeit very briefly) on TheStream on Al Jazeera English along with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, social media researcher Alice Marwick, Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson, and others. The topic: online misogyny and harassment of women. No sooner had the show ended than I ran across two perfect examples of precisely the sort of misogynistic harassment we’d just been talking about, courtesy of Reddit and Roosh.
First, Reddit. On Monday, Forbes columnist Kashmir Hill – female, beep boop! – wrote a piece mocking the notion (apparently widespread in some circles) that in these hyper-connected days people without Facebook accounts are a bit suspect. But part way along towards making her point she committed the terrible error of making the following not-to-be-taken-literally remark:
It’s a proud day for the dudes over at A Voice for Men, which is celebrating the landing of the Curiousity rover on Mars by giving dudes everywhere serious dude credit for the event, which apparently involved no women at all. Well, maybe a few. But it certainly didn’t involve any of the women in the women’s studies department at Columbia University!
Actually it would be rather difficult for that to be the case. Impossible, really, as there is no women’s studies department at Columbia. Instead, Columbia has an Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an interdisciplinary center that works in cooperation with the Barnard College Women’s Studies department.
In any case, that once sentence is the entire text of the post, which linked to a live feed of the landing.
But to make sure everyone understands the MAN-significance of this MAN-vent, the AVFM dudes promoted it with this MAN-tastic blurb on the front page. (I mean the blurb on the right, of course, celebrating MEN and their UTTER MASTERYof technology. Just ignore that bit on the left about the technical glitches that AVFM has itself been having lately.)
The comments are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the AVFM crowd. I especially liked these two, from a manly fellow calling himself ActaNonVerba.
His followup is a bit Anthony Zarat-esque in its utopian grandeur:
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, some of the fellas are discussing a recent post from Arthur Goldwag on the Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch blog. Goldwag looks at some of the hero-bashing comments from MRAs in the wake of the Aurora shootings, which we’ve discussed here and here.
This somehow inspires the prolix Men’s Right Redditor Demonspawn to set forth some of his opinions about (most) women and how shitty they are. The whole discussion is worth reading, as a sort of case study in MRA hypocrisy: all this woman-hatred comes in a thread in which Reddit MRAs wax indignant once again that anyone might possibly label them hateful. (Also, how dare women suggest that there’s anything untoward about a dude hanging onto nude pics of an ex, when clearly not deleting them is a sign of “respect.”)
Looks like Demonspawn won himself a convert! Congrats. you beautiful douchebag.
We’ve already heard from the so-called Thinking Housewife on the subject of Sally Ride. Meanwhile, over on The Spearhead, the regulars also have opinions about Ride. Regular commenter Keyster has this to say about Ride’s work in promoting science and technology education for girls:
She was supposed to have inspired a generation of girls to take science and math. While she may have inspired the “Grrl Esteem” movement, very few girls went on to get degrees in math and science as a result of Sally Ride … .
She was frustrated by the fact young girls were very interested in math and science initially, “…but for some reason we lose them around the age of 13.” MMmmm…I wonder why that would be. Because they discovered an interest in boys? Not surprisingly, Sally was able to keep her interest.
That’s right: girls are incapable of thinking about both math and boys. Lesbians are the only women who can sustain an interest in math, because their brains aren’t cluttered with thoughts of Justin Bieber. (Ok, bad example.)
In another comment, Keyster expresses his annoyance at the fact that Ride turned out to be capable of astronautery despite being a woman.
Sally Ride proved that a woman can have “the right stuff”, like Amelia Earheart proved a woman can fly long distances.
OK so now that we know she won’t become hysterical during her period while in outerspace and allow her used tampons to clog the toilet, what do we do with this information? Just because a woman accomplishes something normally associated with men, is this inspiring young girls to spontaneously excel en masse and compete against men in male dominated arenas? Or are women like Sally Ride the exceptions that prove the rule?
You know, “exceptions that prove the rule” aren’t actually a thing. The fact that Ride was a capable astronaut doesn’t actually “prove the rule” that women aren’t capable as astronauts, but instead suggests that this particular rule is not a real rule. You would think that Keyster, as a logical male, would understand this.
Over on The Spearhead, the regulars are discussing the three young men who sacrificed their own lives to save their girlfriends in the chaos of the Aurora theater shootings.
Needless to say, many of them aren’t too keen on any act of heroism that might benefit a woman.
My new favorite terrible Tumblr blog is this is female privilege, a blog that posts user-submitted examples of, well, female privilege. It’s a pretty MRA-adjacent idea for a blog, seemingly designed to be appreciated only by those who can use the word “misandry” without giggling. The woman who runs the blog seems to be fairly MRA-adjacent type herself; she recently responded to one critic with a sarcastic “Wow waahhhh it’s so hard to be a woman wahhhh!” (Literally; that’s an exact quote.)
So it’s hardly surprising that many of the posts seem to have been cut and pasted straight from the Men’s Rights subreddit – at least figuratively, if not literally. (Click on the pics to see the posts in context at this is female privilege.)
But a lot of the alleged privileges are a bit, well, odder than that. The blogger says she posts everything she gets, so either a lot of people have pretty cockeyed notions of just what privileges are, or some feminists are trolling her blog by sending along the dumbest non-privileges they can think of to make the blog even more ridiculous than it already is.
The other day we took a look at some of the more reprehensible opinions of Tom Martin, one of the UK’s most prominent Men’s Rights Activists and a man who evidently believes that child prostitutes are taking the easy way out to avoid having to get real jobs. He returned with even worse stuff, which I highlighted in my previous post.
Happily for all of us, not all of Martin’s views are this reprehensible. Many are merely ridiculous. So, today, let’s look at the Lighter Side of Tom Martin, as evidenced by some of his recent comments here on Man Boobz.
Martin apparently spent last Sunday working on a video project which involved him buttonholing passers-by on the streets of London and asking them questions in order to “prove” his various crackpot theories about gender. Here’s how he explained one aspect of his video research:
After shooting my video experiment tomorrow to discover who is more sexist on the street, women or women, I will be shooting another short, investigating if there is a correlation between unfunny women and prostitution ethic. I believe women could be as funny as men on average if they tried, but instead, invest in whoring strategies. I have a reliable street experiment to investigate this hypothesis also …
If I can establish that women can be as funny as men (in a zero prostitution environment), then this video experiment will be released in a news piece, and used as a springboard to pre-sell the feature-length documentary it will form a part of, on a related topic.
So WF Price and the rest of the fellas over on The Spearhead are doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis of the dreaded “male feminist” in general, and me in particular. It is fairly amusing stuff.
If you observe genuinely feminist men, there’s something a bit off about them, and it’s tempting to chalk their feminism up to a result of some flaw or aberration in their character. Normal men (aside from those whose paycheck depends on it such as politicians and men who work for feminist-dominated institutions) simply don’t go in for feminism unless it gets them sexual gratification, but those days are pretty much over, so the remnants tend to be an assortment of freaks and guys who have a chip on their shoulder.
“But those days are pretty much over?” Evidently, Price thinks there was a time during which women were obligated to reward feminist men with “sexual gratification,” but that this is no longer the case. So “normal men” have stopped being feminists, or at least stopped pretending to be feminists.
So what are these freakish feminist men of today really getting out of it?
I’m not sure where those downvotes came from, since everything GirlWritesWhat says is by definition true.
2) From AskHistorians, I learned that feminists trying to correctly translate ancient Greek are evil man-hating monsters. Check out the downvotes on EggyMc!
