We Hunted The MammothToday, a guest post from Etelka, the blogger behind the hilarious Wretched Refuse blog, which you all should read every day.
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Thanks for letting me sit in, David! As I was telling you, I recently did some rooting around in a unique cranny of pre-manosphere media: sexist vintage cartoons. In the late ’40s and ’50s there were a lot of them published in books like this. (Some of the book covers that follow have been borrowed from the Vintage Sleaze blog here.)
So over on The Spearhead, the fellas are discussing journalist Daniel Bergner’s sexy new sex book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. It’s a book that challenges many conventional wisdoms, both scientific and popular, about sexuality and, as Salon puts it, portrays female sexuality as essentially “base, animalistic and ravenous.”
So we learned the other day from that Man Going His Own Way that male violence was, like, totally the fault of evil sexy ladies. Now, from this Men’s Rights Redditor, we learn that homophobia — or at least homophobia directed at gay men — is all the fault of straight women and their desire for macho dudes. Because straight men don’t ever express any sort of hostility towards gay or effeminate men — it’s just those darn ladies!
But, huh, what about all those straight dudes who are always calling other dudes “gay” and, you know, that other word that starts with an “f?”
Well, apparently that’s just playful joshing. No harm, no foul! If anything, it shows how wonderfully tolerant of gayness these guys are. I mean, come on, if you can’t see this, you must be stupid, or something. Or so says this other Men’s Rights Redditor:
They’re just having a little fun. You’re not against fun, are you?
Thanks to the AgainstMen’sRights subreddit for pointing me to these quotes.
It’s always a little distressing to see manosphere-style dumbassery outside the manosphere. Today’s offender: Charlotte Allen at National Review Online, explaining how the deaths in Newtown are the result of the school’s “feminized setting.” Had the school been filled with manly men (and manly boys), Adam Lanza could have been stopped in his tracks!
No, really, that’s what she says. Except that what she wrote is somehow even more egregious than my sarcastic summary. Read for yourself:
Until recently, Michael Calleri was a movie reviewer for the Niagara Falls Reporter. Indeed, he’d been reviewing movies for the weekly paper for more than 20 years. But then the paper got sold to a new owner, and Calleri found that many of the reviews he sent in weren’t making their way into print. He contacted the new publisher, who was also the new editor, and after several surreal conversations and a number of emails, he received this explanation from his new boss:
i have a deep moral objection to publishing reviews of films that offend me. snow white and the huntsman is such a film. when my boys were young i would never have allowed them to go to such a film for i believe it would injure their developing manhood. if i would not let my own sons see it, why would i want to publish anything about it?
Yeah, I think we can all see where this is going.
snow white and the huntsman is trash. moral garbage. a lot of fuzzy feminist thinking and pandering to creepy hollywood mores produced by metrosexual imbeciles.
I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.
where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.
i believe in manliness.
not even on the web would i want to attach my name to snow white and the huntsman except to deconstruct its moral rot and its appeal to unmanly perfidious creeps.
i’m not sure what headhunter has to offer either but of what I read about it it sounds kind of creepy and morally repugnant.
with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these.
they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs.
Dude,”eunuch” is not the preferred nomanclature. Mangina-American, please.
Oh, but the new boss made clear that he was open to some sorts of reviews from Calleri:
If you care to write reviews where men act like good strong men and have a heroic inspiring influence on young people to build up their character (if there are such movies being made) i will be glad to publish these.
i am not interested in supporting the reversing of traditional gender roles.
i don’t want to associate the Niagara Falls Reporter with the trash of Hollywood and their ilk.
it is my opinion that hollywood has robbed america of its manliness and made us a nation of eunuchs who lacking all manliness welcome in the coming police state. …
In short i don’t care to publish reviews of films that offend me.
if you care to condemn the filmmakers as the pandering weasels that they are…. true hyenas.
i would be interested in that….
So, yeah, apparently the Niagara Falls Reporter is now being edited by a barely literate misogynist who seems like he just stepped out of the comments section of The Spearhead.
You can read the rest of Calleri’s story over at the Chicago Sun-Times.
(Thanks to several alert Man Boobz readers for pointing me to this story.)
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?
Longtime Friend of Man Boobz Ozy Frantz, cofounder of the No Seriously What About teh Menz blog, is writing a book with fellow NSWATMer Noah Brand about men and feminism titled, naturally, What About the Men. The first chapter, written by Ozy, is up on the Good Men Project web site, NSWATM’s (sort of) new home. It’s even got footnotes, and illustrations by Barry Deutsch!
Ozy explains the book’s central aim:
We live in a sexist society, one where gender programming starts at birth (though the advent of the sonogram has allowed parents to get a head start by painting the nursery pink or blue and stocking up in advance on gendered toys and clothes) and is so pervasive as to be inescapable. Feminism has done an excellent job analyzing and challenging the ways that these assigned and enforced gender roles damage and deform the lives of women. The same tools of analysis can be applied to the damage and deformation that men suffer. And that damage, sad to say, is severe.
Meanwhile, over on The New Statesman, Helen Lewis looks at the continuing harassment of Anita Sarkeesian, the women who dared to ask people to donate money for a video series on sexism in video games and thereby unleashed a misogynistic shitstorm.
One of the most disturbing examples of harassment: an online game in which players are invited to “beat up Anita Sarkeesian.” Lewis censors some of the images, but not others, so let me just put a TRIGGER WARNING for depictions of violence against women, including a grotesquely photoshopped “beaten up” Sarkeesian. Anyone who thinks Sarkeesian and her supporters were making too big a deal of the harassment needs to go look at these images in Lewis’ article here. (The game itself, posted on Newgrounds.com, has now been removed.)
Again, this is all because Sarkeesian asked people to donate for a video project. If they felt like it was worthwhile. That’s all she did. And this is what she got in return: someone so angry that Sarkeesian was pointing out sexism in video games that he literally sat down and made a game inviting angry internetters to “beat this bitch up.” Irony doesn’t even begin to cover it.
On Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg underlines why we need to take this kind of harassment seriously:
[A]nyone who thinks that feminists who push back hard against online harassment are being oversensitive needs to understand that we’re all trying to keep ourselves from becoming Anita Sarkeesians. No matter how strong you are, and no matter how much support you have, this kind of concentrated campaign of harassment affects the targets of it. And the goal of these campaigns is to terrorize people into silence. It’s not disagreement. It’s not creative trolling. It’s deployment of a weapon.
But it’s just as important to point out that Sarkeesian wasn’t silenced; in addition to helping her raise much more money than she had originally asked for, those who attacked her simply reinforced (and helped to further publicize) the argument she was making — in the case of the “beat up Anita Sarkeesian” game, quite directly indeed. The cowards and assholes who try to shut down feminists online with this sort of harassment are not only losers — they’re losing.
If you want even more proof that the denizens of A Voice for Men live in Imaginary Backwards Land, let me draw your attention to a recent posting from FeMRA TyphonBlue and JohnTheOther. The post’s bland title, Men, and patriarchy in the church, belies the loopiness of this particular bit of theological argument, the aim of which is to prove that Christianity is and always has been about hating dudes.
Oh, sure, TB and JTO note, it might look like Christianity in its various forms has been a tad dude-centric. I mean, it’s based on the teachings of a dude. And there’s that whole “God the Father” thing. Oh, and Christian religious institutions have been almost always headed up by dudes. There has yet to be a Popette.
But apparently to assume that the people running something actually run that something is to indulge in what MRAs like to call “the frontman fallacy,” by which they mean that even though it looks like men run most things in the world it’s really the sneaky ladies who call the shots, somehow. TB/JTO, citing the aforementioned faux “fallacy,” ask:
Because Christianity has a male priesthood, is headed by a man and uses masculine language to refer to the God and humanity’s savior, does it necessarily follow that Christianity is male favoring?
Bravely, the two decide not to go with the correct answer here, which is of course “yes.” Instead, they say no. And why is this? Because Jesus didn’t go around boning the ladies.
Seriously. That’s their main argument:
[Christ] had no sexual life. This absence leaves no spiritual connection between the masculine body and the divine.
The Christ is sexless; presumptively masculine, but never actually engaging in any activity unique to his masculine body. …
The implicit stricture of making the female body the vessel of Holy Spirit while offering no corresponding connection between the divine and the male body creates a spiritual caste system with women on top and men on the bottom.
Also: Joseph didn’t bone Mary, at least not before she gave birth to Jesus.
The birth of Christ is without sin because, quite simply, it did not involve a penis. The entire mythology around the birth of Christ implicitly indicts male sexuality as the vector of original sin from generation to generation.
Uh, I sort of thought that the notion of Original Sin had something or other to do with Eve and an apple in the Garden of Eden. But apparently not:
Forget Eve. Forget the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the Serpent. If all human women, tomorrow, conceived and gestated and gave birth without ever coming into contact with a penis, our race would be purged of original sin.
Pretty impressive theological revisionism from a couple of blabby video bloggers who apparently don’t know how to spell “canon.” (ProTip: “Cannon” refers to one of those tubey metal things you shoot “cannonballs” from.)
The two conclude:
Our culture’s war against masculine identity, male sexuality and fatherhood is an old one. That war arguably began as we adopted a faith which marginalizes the role of men in procreation, idolizing a story that removes them completely from the process. The exemplar of male virtue in this theology is a man who had no natural sexual expression, although his character is designated as male. And his primary purpose was to be flogged, literally tortured for the “crimes” of others, and then bound and nailed through his limbs, still alive to an erected cruciform scaffold, to die from shock and exposure on a hilltop. And we somehow manage to claim that this religion elevates men over women?
Well, yeah.
Rather than supremacy, Christianity provides to men the role of asexual stewards of women’s benefit, and sacrificial penitent, preaching the gospel of a female-deifying, male-demonizing faith. It is true that women have not historically been allowed to front this farce, but mostly because that would make the message too obvious.
What?
While some kinds of Christianity get rather worked up about the evils of premarital sex and/or birth control, I’m pretty sure married and/or procreative sex is a-ok with all Christians this side of the mother in the movie Carrie. Even — well, especially — if it involves dudes. (I’m pretty sure the church fathers were never big proponents of lesbianism.)
And if women really run the show, despite men “fronting” the church, could you perhaps spell out just who these all-powerful women are? Like, some names perhaps? Who’s the lady puppeteer behind the pope?
They of course don’t offer any real-world evidence for this secret supposed matriarchy. Instead, they ramp up for a sarcastic ending:
But we continue to ignore all of this, and we entertain the farce that our religious institutions constitute a male-elevating, female oppressing patriarchy.
Yeah, tell us another one.
No point in telling you guys anything any more. Clearly you can twist any and all facts about the world to fit your increasingly weird and baroque fictions about men always being the most oppressed, past, present and future.
A Voice for Men is slowly but surely disappearing up its own ass.
“Men’s Studies” has existed as an academic discipline for several decades now. Not surprisingly, most of those involved in it identify themselves as feminists – as people interested in studying gender tend to do. But not all of them: A couple of years back, a group of mostly anti-feminist academics and popular writers with an interest in gender decided to try to do a sort of end run around the discipline of “Men’s Studies” by conjuring up a whole new, altogether un-feminist discipline called “Male Studies.”
Recently, The University of South Australia announced that it would start offering postgraduate courses in Male Studies sometime in 2014; our old friend Eoghan/Sigil1 brought this earthshattering news to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, where it was greeted with … suspicion and hostility.
GotMyFrogHatOn wrote:
Great, now men have the same opportunity as women to waste their time and money on a worthless degree!
Liverotto was even blunter:
YES, because the cure to bullshit is… MORE BULLSHIT! /s
That’s right: Men’s Rights Redditors hate Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies, and apparently every academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it so much that they’ve transferred this hatred to a new academic discipline that could well have been (and sort of was) designed just for them.
But don’t worry, they still hate Women’s Studies the most:
What was I saying the other day about projection?
You know how in Cosmo they have all those little guides on how to spice up your relationships? Well, now the douchebag PUA guru Heartiste has helpfully prepared a guide of his own.
[T]hanks to the wonders of game, men can limit their relationship energy requirements while maximizing the impact each unit of spent energy has on women’s interest levels. In layman’s terms, men can easily spice up relationships (and dates) with almost no effort by employing the drive-by tease.
Here are a few of his tricks. I am not making these up. These are actual suggestions as to ways to “spice up” relationships written by a man who is reportedly in his forties. He starts off fairly mild:
Flush the toilet when she’s in the shower.
Then he starts getting mean:
Put a “pinch my butt” post-it note on her back as she’s heading out for work.
Slip her car into neutral when she’s driving. (Note: not recommended on women with exceptionally bad driving skills.)
The rest of the list is a mixture of the stupid:
Paint a picture of her. With great fanfare, unveil a stick figure drawing.
Replace her cosmetics with crayons.
The puerile:
Draw smiley faces or penises on her tampons.
Honk her tits. Make loud honking noise. Bonus points if you use an air horn.
Dutch oven. Shower oven. Car oven.
The surreal:
Put her panties on her cat (Don’t put them on the dog if the dog is yours. There are some lines not meant to be crossed.)
And the just plain assholish:
Pretend to throw her cat out the window. (A full throwing motion accompanied by frantic mewing will boost dramatic effect.)
Place a giant stuffed animal or clown doll in bed, facing her. When she wakes up, she’ll freak.
Heartiste then explains the SCIENCE behind all this idiocy:
The drive-by tease is, typically, the non-verbal equivalent of the cocky/funny neg. … The DBT subliminally asserts male dominance as well as creativity, both of which are catnip to women. Dominance assertion is telegraphed in any act where the subtext is “I don’t care if you’re offended by this.”
Really? Drawing a smiley face on her tampon “asserts male dominance?” Farting demonstrates creativity?
In any case, I have a few suggestions for women whose boyfriends actually do any of this shit in an attempt to show what awesome dudes they are:
Take a shit in his underwear drawer. Claim it was the dog, even if you don’t have a dog.
Throw his Xbox360 out the window. (A full throwing motion accompanied by frantic mewing will boost dramatic effect.)
Make him a BBQ sandwich, using menstrual blood instead of BBQ sauce.
Leave him.
Actually, you’d probably do best just to skip directly to that last one.
