My cats in their earlier days, unaware of the internet fame that awaited them. (Greasy fur courtesy of eardrops that were supposed to have remained in the ears.)
My kitties and I are humbled by the response this little blog is getting!
Scratch that bit about the kitties; they’re never humbled by anything.
But I am. Confused Cats Against Feminism has picked up more than 2000 followers in the two days since I announced the blog to the world, and my various inboxes are overflowing with dozens of pics of adorable cats who are very confused about feminism indeed.
So far Confused Cats has been featured on Buzzfeed — thanks, Rachel Zarrell! — The Frisky, and SFWeekly, and the cats and I are preparing for a major interview with an important publication in the cat world. Well, the cats are sleeping, mostly, but it is good to be well-rested.
This amazing response clearly shows that it is not only humans who can be really, really confused about feminism.
And if your cats (or any of your animal friends) are confused antifeminists, SEND MOAR PICS PLEASE! You can submit them here, or by emailing me at futrelle [at] manboobz.com.
Granted, I’m still sorting through all the pics I’ve gotten so far, but like cats I can always use more good things delivered to me. If your pic isn’t up yet, it may well be in the queue.
Oh, and if you like this blog, you might also like my other blog, We Hunted the Mammoth, a slightly less cat-centric look at confused antifeminists, Men’s Rights Activists, and misogyny in general on the internets.
Thanks!
David, Sweetie Pie, and Pantz
PS: If you see this blog mentioned in the media or on website you frequent, could you drop me a note with a link? Thanks!
So two of the females in my household have decided, sadly, that they want to get in on this whole Women Against Feminism thing. Yes, that’s right: they want to publicly declare their opposition to feminism.
Against my better judgment, I agreed to take pictures of them with signs spelling out their objections. None of their arguments make much sense to me, but, hey, they’re entitled to make their case on the internet if that’s what they want.
There’s just one little complication: the two antifeminist females in my household are not, you know, human females. They’re cats. Not being, strictly speaking, women, they can’t really post their pics to the Women Against Feminism blog.
So in the interest of free speech and fair play, I’ve set up a Tumblr blog where my cats, and other cats who share their beliefs, can take their stand against feminism – no matter how ridiculous their arguments are.
There’s just one rule: your cats must be genuinely confused about why they oppose feminism, and generally unclear about what feminism is.
And the ideas expressed on their signs must be their own. In other words, I don’t want any Men’s Rights Activists paying cats on Fiverr to hold their signs for them. That shit won’t fly in this litterbox!
All that said, blatant photoshopping is perfectly fine. This is the internet, after all.
And if your animal friend is something other than a cat, that’s fine too. As long as it’s possible that they might think that they’re a cat.
Also, feel free to put the word “Poland” or the Polish flag on your pictures. A lot of the women on the Women Against Feminism blog do that, for some reason.
But the important thing here is that I’m starting up a new series of (barely) animated videos to explore the one part of online misogyny-land I have generally avoided up until now: YouTube.
Well, internet “radio” shows, podcasts and so on are fair game as well. Basically anything that involves these people talking into a microphone and putting it online.
My videos will be highlight some of the best of the worst of this stuff, and, as I say in the video, distil it into bite-sized morsels instead of the half-hour ordeals that MRAs and men going their own way and girls who write WTF tend to put forth with such alarming regularity.
Plus they’ll be animated in amusing and possibly slightly disturbing ways.
I’m also serious about needing some help.
Like I said, I hate watching their stupid fucking videos. I mean, reading this stuff I can handle. But listening to these assholes blathering on interminably, so full of anger, in their smug, ignorant voices is about as entertaining to me as dental work. I’m going to force myself to do it, but I’m not going to like it.
But I know there are a few of you out there who are actually willing to subject yourselves on a regular basis to this crap. And so I ask of you: if you’re one of them, and you run across something in one of these videos that is so astoundingly terrible that you would like to see it rendered in cartoon form, drop me an email (my last name at manboobz dot com) or leave a link in the comments below.
It’s especially helpful if you can include a rough time-stamp so I can find the particularly egregious bits. See, I’m not interested in analyzing their entire videos here. Only the brief revealing moments where they let something truly astounding slip. I’m also looking specifically for contradictions: if one of these guys or gals says something in one video that directly contradicts something they say in another.
Also, and I didn’t mention this in the video, but this may be your great chance to become a talking kitty, or some other interesting and/or adorable animal!
If you want to volunteeer your voice talents for a future video, let me know! I may come back to some of you who already helped with that last video project, and reach out to some of the rest of you who volunteered after all the slots were filled. I’ll post more about this when I get into making these videos.
This could also be your kitty’s great chance to become a talking kitty! If you have adorable pics of your cat or some other animal that might work well for a video, send me your pics, or link me to them online, and I may use one or more of them in a future video! I’m also looking for interesting photos to use as backdrops. And weird pics in general.
Oh, and if any of you have experience running your own channels on YouTube, I’m interested in any advice you can give on promotion, handling comments, and all that jazz. The last time I put videos on YouTube I sort of felt that they could, and should, have had a lot more viewers than they ultimately did.
You know how they say “smile and the world smiles with you?” Apparently, that’s all wrong, at least according to our dear old friend Vox Day (Theodore Beale). The fantasy author and human shitstain says this old saw needs a rewrite: smile, and the world’s true Alphas laugh at you. As Mr. Day-Beale explains:
Women say they resent it when men tell them to smile. And well they should. An instinctive smile, when one is not expressing pleasure or recognition, is a submissive gesture. This is why attractive women tend to smirk in response to the big goofy submissive smiles sent their way by lower status men.
And then, presumably, those sexy ladies will quickly excuse themselves and make a beeline for the nearest ALPHA fantasy author standing grimly in the corner, quietly judging everyone and thinking unkind thoughts about John Scalzi.
But what if you’re one of those big goofy smiling submissive dudes? How do you capture some of that broody Alpha magic for yourself? It’s simple: Don’t turn that frown upside down.
One easy way to increase your perceived level of alpha is to simply not smile at strangers. Instead, just reply with a nod or a pleasant word. One can be perfectly civil without grinning at everyone like an idiot, and it’s always interesting to see the difference it makes in people’s perceptions.
Just don’t overdo it, lest the ladies think you’re, for example, some sort of weirdo misogynist so filled with fear and loathing for everything female that you’ve actually set up an entire blog devoted to telling the world what an awesome alpha you are.
I’m not talking about walking around glowering; self-conscious anger is much worse than indiscriminate smiling. But women have always been drawn to brooding men, so rather than turning them away with a gesture of preemptive submission, give them something to which they can be drawn.
Somehow, we doubt that MRAs would appreciate this kind of “protection” for themselves and their fellow men.
One classic bad argument against feminism is the disingenuous claim that “we don’t need it any more.” In the bad old days, proponents of this argument would concede, women may have faced some pesky little obstacles, but now that they can vote, and own property, and briefly work as the executive editor of The New York Times, there’s just no need for feminism any more. Problem solved!
But these days the great minds of the Men’s Rights movement have moved beyond this bad argument to a worse one: feminism was never really necessary in the first place, because women have never been oppressed.
The other day a Redditor by the name of cefarix earned himself a couple of dozen upvotes by posting a version of this argument to the Men’s Rights Subreddit.
The problem — well, one of the many problems — with a lot of so-called pickup artists is that they think with their dicks, and then use their relatively underpowered brains to rationalize their dickular preferences as The Way The World Should Be.
By contrast, the problems with Lance Christopher, a so-called pickup artist who hangs out in the comments section on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog, really start when he stops thinking with his dick.
Some dudes roll over and fall asleep the moment after they come; Mr. Christopher contemplates genocide because women don’t want to hear him pontificate about Ukrainian history.
In case you’re wondering, no one else in the discussion suggests that Mr. Christopher’s opinion here might be a teensy bit extreme.
No, the commenters happily share terrible opinion after terrible opinion about the inferior creatures known as women.
Oh, it gets worse.
Cleanup in the pompous misogyny aisle!
You’ll notice that all of these comments have upvotes, by the way.
There may be some even more terrible comments in that thread, but I gave up reading them after a few screens full of this sort of garbage.
Yep, that’s a butt on the cover. He put a butt on the cover. Men are oppressed by women’s butts.
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.
This picture has nothing whatsoever to to with the post. I just like it.
It’s Friday. Why not welcome in the upcoming weekend with a picture of an anarchist cat and a completely unrelated, completely unhinged manifesto from the MensRants subreddit, the Men’s Rights subreddit’s unruly younger brother.
In a post with the somewhat roundabout title “Just posting this publicly gives me an ulcer. But I won’t let it stop me,” an angry fella who calls himself sizzletron set forth his opinions about, well, a lot of things having to do with women. It’s a piece that’s pretty much impossible to summarize, since sizzletron apparently finds it difficult to keep the thread of an argument going from one sentence to the next.
If Jason Gregory were this adorable kitty, it would be hard to stay mad at him
Hey, everybody!
So you remember that post a couple of days ago, that one in which I quoted Jason Gregory’s most peculiar dating advice for angry men? You know, the one in which he suggested that men rebuff women who are interested in them with a long and rather nasty assortment of misogynistic insults? You know, like these:
Tell her that she isn’t interesting, that her soul is dog-shit and that she has nothing to offer other than boobs and booty, that she is a piece of shit and a total failure as a human being, that you don’t find her attractive and that she isn’t even good enough to be a cum-bucket.
Well, it turns out I totally misinterpreted Jason Gregory’s post, according to an unbiased and neutral outside observer named Jason Gregory, no relation to the original Jason Gregory, who’s written a post about it on his blog.
Hold on, I’m being told that this second Jason Gregory is in fact also the first Jason Gregory.
I just wanted to offer a giant, ridiculous, blinking, kitty-filled THANK YOU to everyone who donated in the Man Boobz Pledge Drive this week, whether your donation was big or small. If you didn’t donate, but meant to, here’s another chance — and you can always donate through the button in the sidebar.
I truly appreciate your support; it makes a tremendous difference to me, both financially and psychically, and helps me to keep this blog going. And of course many of you support this blog in many other ways — from contributing to the comments section to emailing me tips on misogyny you’ve spotted in the wild — and I appreciate this dearly as well. You rock. Thanks again!
Here are some more kitties, because it’s Friday night and what the hell. And some dogs. Dogs are ok, too, I guess.
