Dude against dude. Not sure why the dogs are floating in midair.
Manosphere drama is always a bit surreal. You may recall my post the other day about the feud developing between two sites that are regular sources of material for us here at Man Boobz: MGTOWforums and A Voice for Men. As you may recall, the folks at MGTOWforums were working themselves into a lather because AVFM was committing the cardinal sin of allowing women – sorry, “cunts” – to post articles and comments. The horror!
Now AVFM has fired back. In a thread on AVFM’s relatively new forum, head cheese Paul Elam lashes out at the “MGTOW Forum Fuckwits,” declaring them a bunch of shit-stirring “piss ants” and announcing his plans to turn the AVFM forum into MGTOW central.
Just a quick update on pledge week, the most important part of which is: THANKS! I’m impressed with your generosity, and grateful for the support. Every donation makes a difference.
If you haven’t yet donated, and want to, or you’ve already donated but suddenly decided that I need even more of your money, here’s the magic button:
Special commendation to the people of Australia for going above and beyond the call of duty. I had no idea I had so many readers down there. Good on ya!
Operators are standing by. (Pic from The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee website. Click on the pic to see the full photoshoot.)
Welcome to the 2nd twice-annual Man Boobz Pledge Drive!
I’ll keep this brief: If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below and sending a few bucks my way. Or, if you’d prefer, a massive quantity of bucks. You don’t need a PayPal account to donate; you can use a credit card, and I think there are other options as well.
Things are still a bit lean here at Man Boobz manor, so any donations you can spare will be enormously appreciated by me and the kitties, and (indirectly) by my landlord.
If you can’t afford it, I completely understand; so many of you already contribute enormously to Man Boobz with your awesomely hilarious and smart comments, and strange drawings, and links to videos of kittens, and the like. At the time of the last pledge drive, back in March, you all had left a little more than 125,000 comments here; the total has just now gone over 200,000. Which is amazing to me.
So, congratulations, and thanks.
If you really want to get into the proper Pledge Drive mindset, watch the clip below from a KCTS9 Seattle PBS Pledge Drive sometime in the 80s (presumably) in which a slightly addled Pledge Wrangler gets some of her facts about the station a little confused. Including what channel she’s on.
If you want to get into a slightly different state of mind, watch this video instead, from eccentric (and extremely indie) musician R. Stevie Moore. I think this is what ELO would have sounded like if all their songs had been recorded in a basement in New Jersey.
EDITED TO ADD: I found the kitty pic atop this post on the web, uncredited. But a reader points out it’s actually from a photoshoot from The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, a website set up by foster cat parents which uses its adorable pictures of kittens to find homes for said kittens as well as to raise money for the Tacoma/Pierce County Humane Society, from whence the kittens come. They’ve actually done a whole bunch of fundraising photoshoots over the years with new batches of kittens and an ever-more elaborate set. Check them out and maybe send them some $ too.
Have you heard about the big debate in Vancouver? In the wake of the recent hubbub over Men’s Rights posters in that fair city, one woman thought it might be a good idea for there to be a public debate over some of the issues raised by the posters.
I’ll let A Voice for Men’s JohnTheOther explain it, in his adorably poncy way:
Has feminism gone too far? …
That is the question asked in September of 2012, by a woman of integrity and courage. She posited this question as the premise of a public debate. It was to be discussed by three individuals from the contention that yes, feminism has gone too far, and three individuals arguing that no, feminism has not gone too far.
So I’ve been mostly avoiding writing about the whole Men’s Rights postering controversy in Vancouver, because it’s such a tempest in a teapot. The tl;dr: Some posters got torn down, and some of the people tearing them down yelled at the blabby MRA videoblogger and A Voice for Men second fiddle known as JohnTheOther.
MRAs: Given that virtually none of you have any experience as actual real world activists, you may not be aware of this, but POSTERS GET TORN DOWN. It’s annoying, and I don’t support it myself, but it happens all the time. Sometimes, you may actually run across people tearing down your posters, at which point there is usually some sort of awkward confrontation that may include yelling.
You know what you do when this happens? You put your posters up again. You know what you don’t do? Compare the experience to rape. Because, on the list of the grand injustices of the world, having posters torn down is pretty far down the list, somewhere around “stubbing your toe” and “kitten farts on you.”
The manly men at A Voice for Men do love their manly music! You may recall the asskickingly asskicking asskickery of “Go My Own Way,” the A Voice for Men anthem, as performed by Jade Michael and the Fuck Their Shit Up Singers Crew. And the “red pill honesty” of Slumberwall’s emo-folk (but totally not wussy) meditation“The Hatred of Women.”
Now, in a post with the dopily macho title “The weekend’s here. Swagger, brothers. Swagger,” AVFM contributor Skeptic presents a new video from his band Dark Star Disco.
No, it doesn’t quite match the terrible grandeur of either of the earlier MRA anthems. The music is utterly unexceptional testosterone-heavy rock-tronica that sounds like it just escaped from the nineties. And it’s 15 minutes long. But Skeptic is quite proud of it, nonetheless. As he describes it, in phrases as clichéd as the song itself:
We are sonically in your face – wall of sound — chainsaw wailing guitar, piercing electro synth and pounding rock rhythms.
Skeptic contributes the guitar – sorry, the “chainsaw wailing guitar” – to the sound. He apparently prefers guitars to women, as they don’t talk back:
I strut on guitar and love it. Nowhere do I feel more alive. Swagger.
I’ve been playing guitar for many years – self-taught. Swagger.
My guitars have helped me cathart during times of feminist insanity more times than I can recall. I truly don’t know how I would have made it this far without playing guitar. For my guitar doesn’t make maddening “man up” BS demands and treat me with misandry as a disposable utility.
The video, even less original, consists of pilfered stock footage of an assortment of putatively manly things, starting with, yes, a missile. (Oh, hello, Dr. Freud1) Let’s let Skeptic describe his creation:
It’s chock full of images men can relate to – a guided missile, eagle and cheetah hunting, jet aircraft and a high powered motorcycle at full throttle, runway dance swagger, military teamwork and bravery, high tech playfulness, raw wilderness, cutting edge scientific research, urban spaces constructed and running at full tilt and moving at a blistering pace into a future city of lights. It’s what men do. It’s cram packed with stuff feminists shit their pants over – unapologetic swaggering masculinity.
I dig it. It’s ballsy.
Just so you know, the “runway dance swagger” in question refers not to a fashion model shaking his or her stuff in a runway show, but to some dude doing a little victory dance on an runway for, like , airplanes.
Of course, Skeptic is making some assumptions here. We don’t actually know the gender of all those flying the planes (or driving the cars, or riding the motorcycle like an asshole) in the video. For the sake of argument, let’s just assume they are all male.
But the cheetah? Either Skeptic thinks all cheetahs are boy cheetahs, or he thinks that girl cheetahs sit on their fat asses eating cheetah bon bons and living off of Cheetalimony. In fact, of course, both male and female cheetahs hunt for their food. That ballsy swaggering masculine cheetah in his video may well be a gal.
If there are any stray misogynists reading this post who are unwilling to accept that female cheetahs can hunt, skip ahead to 1:30 in the video below to see one cheetah mom chase down a gazelle just like the cheetah in Skeptic’s video.
Here, a female cheetah faces down three hyenas to protect her cubs.
In other words, female cheetahs are badasses. So are male cheetahs.
Skeptic is just a plain old jackass.
If any of you actually listened to Dark Star Disco’s little masterpiece, or any of the other songs I linked to above, and need to clear your ears of all that manly man stuff, might I suggest “Crochet,” by Kathleen Hanna’s side project Julie Ruin?
I am sensing from the comments to my earlier post today that what everyone really needs right now is videos of adorable animals. So here are my kittens in action (well, awake, anyway).
In this video, Professor Murder, aka Pantz, wakes up her sister; cuteness ensues. Sorry about the poor image quality, but I think the cuteness shines through anyway.
