Categories
antifeminism creepy homophobia kitties men who should not ever be with women ever

"Allow me to unceremoniously offer my view on 'feminism'" is not a good pick-up line

When douchebags go a-courtin, things don’t always go so well, or so suggests this note from an angry dude that was recently featured on the awesome A(n)nals of Online Dating.  Our would-be charmer started out with a bit of a no-no –  a “but” statement.  Specifically:

Honestly, you seem like a sweet girl, and hold many potentially noble ideals, but …

With a start like that, it’s pretty clear that whatever follows that “but” is going to be pretty icky. And our message-sender does not disappoint, going on to suggest that his would-be date’s announced sexual preference (bi) was … illogical.

Your body is designed in a certain way, that is, to receive a man, and this is something you enjoy, but yet, you entertain the notion of artificially reproducing this amazing effect with some kind of gadget operated by another woman? I fail to see the logic in this.

After requesting an explanation, he moves on to this:

Also, allow me to unceremoniously offer my view on “feminism”, in the form of an example. Let us examine the concept of “women’s sports”.

Or maybe let’s not. If you actually do want to read his detailed analysis of this pressing social issue, head on over to A(n)nals.

Categories
creepy douchebaggery men who should not ever be with women ever misandry misogyny penises rape rapey scott adams sex vaginas

Scott Adams: Male Chauvinist Peg

Sexy!

Oh, Scott Adams! Can you write anything about that whole man-woman business without being a creepy douche about it? In a recent blog post titled “Pegs and Holes” – which refers to exactly what you think it refers to — Adams offers his take on the powerful men who have been in the news lately because, as Adams puts it, they’ve been “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.”

After noting that the “current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior” and that this “seems right” to him – gee, ya think? – Adams decides to get all philosophical on us. (When you’re Scott Adams, this is a very very bad idea.) He writes:

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

I’m assuming that Adams doesn’t actually think that baby boys are born with erections, and realizes that it is biology, not society, that hands out penises and vaginas to babies in the first place. I’m just trying to understand the whole pegs and holes metaphor.  Why does he think “round” penises and “square” vaginas are somehow incompatible?  In the context of consensual sex, after all, penises of all shapes and sizes generally fit into vaginas quite nicely.

As far as I can figure it out,  the round-vs-square analogy simply refers to the fact that men can’t simply stick their “round pegs” into any conveniently located “hole” whenever they feel like it. The fact that these “holes” aren’t accessible to any random guy thus renders them “square.”  This seems to frustrate Adams, who goes on to complain that “society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness” and that “society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.”

Looking at  Hugh Hefner’s marital history – he’s been married and divorced and just got stood up at the altar – Adams concludes that:

For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.

What does this even mean? I suspect that over the course of his lifetime, Hef has had about all the sex he could possibly want, and then some. Is it somehow unjust that he couldn’t force his latest fiancée to actually marry him? Or that some women are sexually unavailable – that is, square holes – to him?

It goes without saying that Adams’ notions of human sexuality are profoundly insulting to both men and women . On the one hand, he’s suggesting that men are basically all potential rapists walking around with, er, turgid pegs;  and, on the other, he seems to regard women as little more than passive (if stubbornly recalcitrant) receptacles for these male “pegs.”

And so it’s hardly surprising that his grand solution to the conundrum he’s invented is a rather depressing one. After noting that it really wouldn’t be a good thing for men to go around willy-nilly raping women and/or, as he puts it, tweeting their meat, he suggests the real solution is for men to be chemically castrated.  And no, I’m not making that up. Here’s Scotty:

I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond.  Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.

That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.

Is he being serious here, or is this all some satirical “social experiment?” Who the fuck knows. Though I suspect if I accused him of being serious, he’d claim he was being satirical. And vice versa. Because that’s just the way he is. 

Also, while I’m at it: the idiomatic expression about pegs and holes posits a square peg and a round hole, not the other way around. Why did Adams reverse this? Why!? Why!!?? Is he trying to drive us all mad?

EDITED TO ADD: Check out Feministe for more on Scott Adams and his peg.

EDITED AGAIN: And Pharyngula as well.

Categories
antifeminism evil women I'm totally being sarcastic men who should not ever be with women ever misandry misogyny MRA oppressed men pussy cartel rape rapey reactionary bullshit sluts

Are false rape accusations the fault of feminism?

Holly Pervocracy's SlutWalk sign, which apparently causes false rape accusations.

If you thought the “meat market” guy from a couple of days ago – you know, the one prattling on about the “market makers of pussy” —  was risibly wrongheaded, here’s an even more insidious attempt to reduce the complexities of human sexuality to a question of “supply and demand.” Over on The False Rape Society blog, Pierce Harlan has a new post with the title:

False rape claims: increasingly a tool to skew the current economies of sex, where sex is cheaper than most women prefer

As you might imagine, the post itself is based on some fairly twisty blame-the-victim logic – with some feminist-bashing thrown in for good measure. Let’s wade through the muck here.

According to Harlan, the “cultural tenets governing sexual encounters” have gone all loosey-goosey in recent years, due to birth control, a general loosening of sexual mores and “the feminist-inspired norms that pressure young women to ‘party like the guys.’”

I assume you have all read Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic A Vindication of the Rights of Women to Get Totally Wasted and Fuck Some Dudes.

But, alas, feminists totally don’t understand the law of supply and demand –and that in the market of sex, they are the supply and not the demand  (because it’s not like women ever really want to have sex themselves).  As a result, the feminist-inspired young women of today are totally flooding the market with cut-rate pussy.

As Harlan explains:

The experts tell us that men have a much easier time obtaining sex than they did in days long gone. …  Women who’d prefer to put a higher price tag on their sexuality are finding themselves locked out of the market.

The results are all too predictable.  Women are having sex more often when they secretly are conflicted about it. We’ve frequently reported here about the proven gender “regret asymmetry” where young women have much higher levels of after-the-fact regret than men following sexual hook-ups.  Regret too often is transmogrified into feelings of being used, and feeling used too often metamorphoses into a false rape claim.

Does Harlan have any evidence to back up this hypothesis? Yes. And it comes straight from his ass.

Having studied the false rape phenomenon closely for a number of years, it is my conclusion that young women are increasingly resorting to false rape claims as an inappropriate method of skewing the current economies of sex, which favors men and which makes sex cheaper than most women consciously or subconsciously prefer.

In other words: he has spent the last several years searching out news stories on false rape accusations to post on his blog. Because there are almost 7 billion people on planet earth, he has been able to find a fair number of such stories. So he’s concluded that there is some sort of “false rape epidemic” going on. In other words, his conclusion seems to be based almost entirely on what’s known as the “availability heuristic,” which, as Wikipedia puts it, “is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.”

Were I to start a blog entitled “The Dudes Peeing on Things You Shouldn’t Pee On Society,” guess what? I too could cite many examples, drawn from the newspapers of the world.  Were I to do this for several years, my brain would be stuffed full of stories of men urinating on just about anything that can be urinated on, from prayer rugs to cough drops.  This, through the power of the “availability heuristic,” might convince me that we faced an epidemic of inappropriately urinating men, and that this epidemic was getting worse by the hour. (I mean, before I started specifically looking for such stories I almost never heard about this terrible social ill.)

But back to Harlan and his argument, such as it is:

Women are pressured by feminist-inspired norms to make themselves more available to men than ever, but they have also learned that crying rape after-the-fact is a culturally accepted, indeed, feminist approved, antidote to sex they feel was too cheaply obtained.  Instead of saying “no” up front, they are retroactively saying “no” — with false rape claims — after-the-fact. And society has given this backward state of affairs its imprimatur.

One solution? Women need to stop having so much sex — for the sake of teh menz. Or as Harlan, still working the creaky economic metaphor, puts it:

One cure is to enhance the value of female sexuality by decreasing the supply and thereby reduce both regret and false rape claims.

But, darn it, this won’t work, because women are out there marching in the street for the right to, you know, have sex when they want to with consenting partners without being shamed for it.

That, of course, can never happen in a society where “slut walks” are celebrated as liberating events, where colleges excuse women from underage drinking charges so long as they report they were raped, and where false rape claims are routinely excused and implicitly encouraged. In short, it can never happen in a society that encourages young women to be promiscuous and to then tell rape lies when that promiscuity results in an unfavorable sexual experience.

Harlan ends his piece with a call to lock up false accusers for a long time.

Certainly malicious false accusers should be charged. Women who identify the wrong guy in a lineup? No.

And it would be nice if Harlan extended the sympathy he shows for falsely accused men to real victims of real rape, a much larger group of people than the falsely accused. But instead he writes pieces like this one, and links in his sidebar to a host of misogynist blogs that, among other things, routinely joke about female victims of rape and murder, that urge men on juries in rape trials to vote to acquit the accused even when he’s clearly guilty, that claim that age of consent laws are inherently man-hating, and that think it would be great if sex robots and artificial wombs rendered women obsolete.

Those actually interested in helping those falsely accused – rather than supporting Harlan’s retrograde agenda — would do better to support The Innocence Project, and to stop reading Harlan’s drivel.

Categories
cock blockade manginas men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW MGTOW paradox misogyny PUA vaginas white knights

Meet the Meat Market Makers

Buy! Sell! Neg!

Uh oh! Trouble in mansophere paradise! Over on MGTOWforums, the “ghost” calling himself MrLahey is throwing down the gauntlet to all the pickup artists out there who dare to consider themselves allies of MGTOWers. Apparently PUAs are violating the terms of the Cock Blockade; by screwing women, they are evidently screwing over their brethren.  MrLahey, who apparently once took an Economics class, explains:

Ghosts are driven to celibacy due to current market conditions, voluntarily or not, it is done in this particular context of risk aversion. I dare say any ghost would prefer, all else the same, to be sexually active, and wishes the risk-reward was different so he could participate in the meat market.

The conditions that make a man ghost are legal, practical and moral. Too risky, too high a price, too time consuming. … Now those conditions that make a man ghost do not exist in a vacuum, but are created by the sum of interactions of the meat market players, right ? The sexually active are the traders and the market makers of pussy, ensuring market liquidity.

Yes, he did just use the phrase “market makers of pussy.” And evidently not as a joke. He continues on with this metaphor:

So when the ghost leaves the market, the ones left to play it, and thus able to sustain or modify the conditions of the trade are the men left in the field : manginas, white knights, puas and mgtow. …

The reason I believe women get away with exorbitant prices (associated risks) for pussy is the existing demand, which sustains the price and favors similar conditions for each subsequent iteration of the trade. …  I fail to understand how catering to a woman’s skewed entitlement and grandiose sense of self-worth (telling her lies, buying her things for sex, investing more time in entertaining her than in actual sex … etc) can ever be helpful or instrumental to bring the market price (risks and costs) of pussy down.

The rattling sound you hear is Adam Smith’s skeleton rolling in its grave.

Categories
idiocy marriage strike men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny

Fun with charts, or why MGTOWers don't understand marriage trends

As we’ve seen again and again on this blog, misogynists love to talk about how much better men are than women when it comes to things like math, logic, and scientific thinking generally. Unfortunately, their posts and comments online – filled with breathtaking failures of logic, absurd unsourced assertions and magical thinking — do not seem to bear out this hypothesis.  I would compare the scientific thinking of most manosphere misogynists with that of the creationists, but frankly that would be insulting to creationists.

A case in point: a graph – provenance unknown – posted in a recent MGTOWforums discussion of marriage. The standard line amongst the lady haters is that marriage is on the way out , because men are “waking up” to the evils of marriage in an allegedly feminist state and deciding to, well, go their own way. The reality: while the marriage rate has been falling fairly steadily for the last quarter-century or so, for a variety of reasons, most people do marry at some point in their lives; it would be silly to assume that a trend over the course of several decades heralds the death of a social institution that has lasted (and has had many previous ups and downs) for millennia.

Of course, that’s not the way the MGTOWers in question see it. Their proof that marriage is doomed – doomed, I say – lies in this little graph which charts with mathematical precision the exact date range within which marriage will vanish forever from this good earth:

That's not right.

Now, there are many problems with this little graph. For one thing, what happens AFTER the projected marriage rate goes to zero? Does the marriage rate bounce like a rubber ball back into the positive realm? Or does it go below zero, with unmarried couples divorcing one another – just in case?

Second, this chart is based on a tiny number of data points – a mere 25 year sliver of the millennia-long history of divorce. If you go back a mere century and a half – see the chart below, taken from a paper you can find here — you’ll see that the marriage rate doesn’t conform to any neat mathematical formula; it jumps up and down, affected not only by slow-moving cultural changes but by events in the real world – look at the gigantic spike in marriage after World War II.

But the main issue here is that there is simply no way you can come up with a neat equation to predict the future of marriage because THE WORLD DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. History isn’t math. It cannot be predicted in advance, and any attempt to do so — especially one based on a tiny sliver of data — is doomed to failure. (Well, certain aspects of reality can be predicted — like when Halley’s comet will next return (assuming it’s not eaten by a giant space monster we haven’t discovered yet). Orbits can be calculated with mathematical precision; social trends cannot.)

To illustrate the dangers of extrapolation, let’s consider the little chart below, prepared by a helpful assistant (who happens to have access to a scanner). The chart provides some interesting data on the age of a hypothetical cat named “Fluffy” and her projected life expectancy. As you can see, Fluffy was hypothetically born in 2001, making her ten years old today, with her age increasing by one every year. (Just pretend that the numbers line up properly; my assistant, despite her many other charms, is not big on precision, and may have been drunk when she prepared this chart.) Based on this data (which show Fluffy’s age increasing by one every year), we could project that by the time the next century rolls around our dear little cat will be 99 years old.

If projecting the future were as easy as drawing little lines on graphs, the world would be a much simpler, and much less interesting, place to live. Most of us realize this. MRAs and MGTOWers, not so much.

Categories
creepy men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny MRA patriarchy sex vaginas

Abortion, men's rights, and that asshole in New Mexico

Here's where all the troubles begin

As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.

But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”

I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed.  Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.

Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.

NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)

So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.

Categories
antifeminism kitties men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA the spearhead

The Spearhead on Lady Lit 3: Electric Boogaloo

This baby knows more about contemporary women's fiction than all Spearhead contributors combined. (As does the kitten.)

There are really few things quite so entertaining as watching people as ignorant as a box of pig shit offering their opinions on literature. Especially when the people in question are W.F. Price and his gang of misfit boys at The Spearhead, who are back for yet another take on the whole Women’s Lit question.

At this point I’ve run out of jokes on this particular subject, so I’m just going to let Mr. Price dig his own hole here. Here he is, trying to argue that feminism has made terrible lady writers even terribler.*

[I]t appears that since feminism’s triumph, female achievement in the higher arts has deteriorated substantially. When women no longer have to excel to be read and recognized, but simply have to advertise the fact that they are women to be celebrated for dubious achievements, they won’t put as much effort into producing anything of quality. So the sorry state of women today is a direct result of feminist privilege, which absolves them of all responsibility and deflects any criticism. …

Yes, feminism has wrecked Western womanhood, reducing the young women of today to spoiled brats who can’t take a hint of criticism, and immediately turn to authorities to bolster their self-esteem. No woman can be too fat to be beautiful, too dense to be intelligent, or too dull to be creative. They are all equally super-duper goddesses, before whom men must genuflect and heap up mounds of praise.

Price of course gives no examples to back up any of his, er, “arguments,” and somehow I suspect he hasn’t actually read any fiction written by women beyond an odd title or two he might have been assigned in high school. I wonder if Price could even name a half-dozen living woman novelists without having to resort to Google — excluding JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and Jackie Collins (who hasn’t heard of them?) and Harper Lee (who wasn’t assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in high school?).

*I am aware that “terribler” is not a real world.

Categories
antifeminism evil women men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA oppressed men sex

Fear and loathing on a date

Let me tell you more about the Pussy Pass ...

The Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit is awash in mini-manifestos. My favorite of the most recent batch, a rousing 3-part rant running under the title “Do not fear them!” 

Who is “them,” you ask?

Women who might just decide that they don’t really want to have sex with some dude who keeps going on about how men are the most oppressed group in the world.

Responding, apparently, to a comment in an earlier thread suggesting “that being publicly vocal about the way men’s rights are trampled on and ignored is a great way to lose the opportunity of getting laid,” manifesto writer Kuppers argues that it just ain’t so —  but when it is, just bite your tongue for as long as it takes to get into her pants.

He starts off with a strange variant on the notion that there are plenty of fish in the sea. If you feel that women won’t want to have sex with your Men’s-Rights-espousing self, Kuppers suggests,  it’s

because your brain was conditioned in a small communal/tribal setting. A group of angry women was a serious threat to your prospects of reproduction. As you know, women often act like herd animals, and view acceptance and appreciation from their peers of their choice of man to be important. This is completely moot today. There are millions of fish in the sea.

Aside from that final truism I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about.  I don’t recall growing up in anything that might possibly be considered – literally or figuratively – a “tribal setting” ruled over by a group – sorry, a herd – of “angry women” hell-bent on keeping me from reproducing.  Is this a common experience? Also, I have precisely zero interest in “reproduction.”  Indeed, I sort of make it a policy to only have sex with women who are at least as interested in preventing reproduction as I am.

On to point two in this curious document, which is that ladies love dudes with strong opinions:

Women, while they do not always explicitly say so and sometimes contradict so, sincerely do appreciate a man who has strong internal beliefs and principles, and does not compromise that for the sake of assuaging someone else’s sensitivities, including theirs. A man who is willing to pretend he is something he is not, isn’t attractive on a deep masculine level to women.

True, up to a point, but you might want to keep all that shit about women being angry reproduction-threatening herd animals to yourself. That might not go over so well on your first Starbucks coffee date. Or ever. Protip: Misogyny aside, very few people want to get with people who refer to sex as “reproduction.”

But if your desire for sex outweighs your manly desire to be truthful about your obnoxious beliefs, well, that’s all good too – if by “all good” you mean “you can still have angry sex with women you despise if you just keep your pie hole shut for a few hours.” Or, as Kuppers puts it in his third and final point, which he apparently doesn’t realize completely contradicts point number two:

The kind of woman who a) wants you to be subordinate to her crazy foaming feminist nonsense, and b) has no tolerance or patience for your concerns, is not worth anything more than a cheap, well-protected fuck anyway. Fine, keep your mouth shut for the couple of hours it takes to get her into bed, but you’d be mad to pursue anything more serious with a woman like that.

Men’s Rightsers – such romantics at heart!

Categories
creepy men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny Uncategorized

AskMen.com's Creepy Dude Survey

Dude, do you have a moment to take a quick survey?

So AskMen.com just put up the first segment of its annual 3-part Great Male Survey.  Filled with strange assumptions and sometimes creepy questions, it’s a survey that reveals at least as much about the survey makers as it does the survey takers, and what it reveals ain’t good:  it seems to have been written by a jaded ex-romantic ( or a committee of such) only a few short steps away from full-blown MGTOW-hood.

The survey starts off with a fairly innocuous question about basic compatibility, but quickly veers off course with question #2:

How important is it to you that your wife/future wife signs a prenup?

Hold on a second, daddy-o! We haven’t even determined if the little missy has “wife potential” yet —  as question #3 puts it.

After one more question about marriage, the quiz moves on to cheating and then (perhaps inevitably) to the issue of divorce:

Do men get screwed by the courts in divorce?

Then it’s onward to kvetching about what a naggy shrew your partner is (assuming you haven’t already finalized the divorce):

Followed by the classic “Would you dump a girlfriend if she became fat?” (Just in case you’re wondering, ladies, nearly half the American guys in last year’s survey said “yes.”)

Next we get to what we might call the “creepy controlling asshole” portion of the survey. After asking whether we’ve ever snooped through our partner’s email or Facebook messages, they pose this doozy:

That quiet clattering you hear is the sound of a thousand creepy dudes Googling to see if this is possible – and, if so, the best place to put the chip.

After several more questions about Facebook and the internet, a few badly conceptualized questions about romance, and a bunch about sex, the quiz moves on to some good old-fashioned slut shaming, asking men to quantify the number of sex partners a woman is allowed to have before they consider her “promiscuous.”  Ladies: you’ll be glad to know that 41% of American dudes who took the survey last year consider any women with more than 9 lifetime partners to be dirty sluts – sorry, “promiscuous.”

Then of course it’s on to an attempt to quantify exactly when women start getting all old and ugly:

Yes, one of the possible answers is “18.” You may be slightly reassured by the fact that zero percent of last year’s survey takers gave that answer. Six percent said “20,” though, and 24% said “30.”

Then we have this curiously worded question on workplace sex:

So the idea that your partner might be a big higher up on the old org chart isn’t even a possibility? What is this, 1962? Did they borrow this question from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl? Or find it scribbled on a napkin on Don Draper’s desk just before he impulsively proposed to his new secretary?

I think we need to design our own survey.

(Note: Cartoon above borrowed, of course, from Comically Vintage.)

Categories
antifeminism evil women I'm totally being sarcastic idiocy men who should not ever be with women ever MGTOW misogyny MRA oppressed men reactionary bullshit the spearhead Uncategorized

"No I won't read your literature … bitch!" and other thoughts on female fiction from the dudes of The Spearhead

This better not be written by some dame!

So Esquire magazine recently posted a list of “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read” on their website.  Esquire being Esquire – that is to say, a men’s magazine that had its glory days in the era of Mad Men and that seems to be aimed mostly at old farts (and aspiring old farts) —  only one book of the 75 was written by a woman.  (That’s 98.67% male, for those of you with lady brains who can’t do the math.)

The internet being the internet, some people noticed that the list was a wee bit heavy on the dudes, even for a men’s magazine, and pointed this out. The bloggers at the Joyland Publishing blog suggested that while the books on Esquire’s list were “mostly fantastic,” it might behoove men to pick up a book or two written by a woman once in a while. And so, with the help of some of their readers, the two assembled a list of “250 Books By Women All Men Should Read.” (Why 250 and not, say, 75? Because they got a lot of suggestions.)

Here’s a little one-question quiz for you all: What title did W. F. Price at The Spearhead give his post on the controversy?

A) “Some Great Suggestions for Books by Women You Guys Might Want to Read.”

B) “Did You Know There Are Female Authors Besides The Chick That Wrote Harry Potter?”

C) “Feminist Publishers: Force Men to Read Women’s Lit”

Yep, the correct answer is C, of course.  Apparently a couple of bloggers suggesting some books by women that men “should” read  is some kind of Gestapo-like imposition upon men by “Feminist Publishers.” Price grouses:

[I]it strikes me as rather mean-spirited of females in the publishing industry to denounce even ineffectual efforts to introduce men to literature. By all accounts, publishing has come to be dominated by women, and men are reading far fewer books than women these days. Given this state of affairs, you’d think that the women in the industry might be a bit gracious and let the boys pick and choose which titles interest them.

But of course that won’t do, because feminists must find fault with any and everything men are involved in. …

The implication [of the Joyland Publishing blog post] is that men should be forced by political pressure to read female writers (sometimes these feminists come off as whiny, annoying girlfriends complaining that “he just won’t listen to me!”).

Or, you know, it might just be that the writers of the blog post, and those who wrote in with suggestions, really enjoyed the books in question and thought that dudes might just enjoy them too.  Sort of like when a friend tells you that you should totally watch the movie Dogtooth, because it is so fascinating and creepy and awesome. Or when I tell you right now that you should go watch Jane Austen’s Fight Club on Funny or Die.

Naturally, the comments from Spearheaders were even more ignorant and obtuse than Price’s post. The basic theme: Bitches can’t write for shit (as far as I know).

In case you think I am offering an unfair characterization of the, er, debate, here’s one Spearheader’s contribution to the discussion:

when a man says “no, I won’t read your literature”, you have to respect that, bitch.

And another’s:

I basically do not read anything a wimminz has written, not even in my favourite genre of science fiction, because every single time I have tried they have been unmitigated fucking crap full of feminazi girl power bullshit and emotional baggage and basically very little hard SF…

And still another’s:

I never read anything written by women unless it happens to be instructional and related to work. Pretty much all the fiction I’ve ever read is by and for males. If I read some non-fiction for fun it’s always got a male author. I realized a while back that my cd collection is about 98% male. When I was a kid I never thought about it, it just came naturally. Now that I’m older I intentionally avoid anything by women.

It’s always,er, instructive to see what some random guy who apparently reads mostly instructional manuals has to say about the literary controversies of the day.

There were, of course, more thoughtful analyses, like this earnest comment from the excitable, exclamation-point-happy David K. Meller:

Women write for an audience of their own level–to wit themselves! Most men are simply too intelligent to be interested in what passes for literature scribbled by women! …

Correct me if I am wrong, but is most woman’s “literature” one more kvetch klatsch of women–or girls–getting together to complain about, to defeat, or to evade the workings of us evil, letcherous, abusive, horrible M-E-N! There is no point in men reading such drivel …

There may be better days coming; when women are once again taught the arts of pleasing men, in their creating a comfortable environment for the chosen man in their lives, and when they again will use their ability to read to discover new and better ways to do this, and their ability to write to communicate these truths to others of their sex! Until that happens, literacy for women, much less dominance in authorship, editing, and publishing has been, and is, a BLOODY MESS for everyone, especially men!!

PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller

Yes, women should really only be allowed to read and write if they are reading or writing instructional manuals on how to cook and give better blow jobs, possibly at the same time.

PEACE AND FREEDOM!! to you too, good sir.

Speaking of which — the blowjob bit, not the PEACE AND FREEDOM!! — the commenter calling himself dragnet suggested that young men such as himself were simply too busy to read much of anything. They have other priorities:

The vast majority of my reading is for work, research, and classes. …

Frankly, I’d rather be getting laid than reading a novel after a grueling work week. The three or four hours I sometimes have free on the weekend when I’m not working or working out or sleeping or eating, I’d rather be out with my friends or getting serviced by whatever girl I’m with at the time.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a penis, must be in want of some girl to service it.

PEACE AND FREEDOM!!1!!

Anyway, ladies and manginas, any good lady books you want to suggest for the dudes of the world?