Another day, another muddled mess of misogynist generalizations completely unsupported by any actual evidence. Today, at A Voice For Men, Theodore Labadie reflects on the Roman Pantheon, and how teh menz made all the cool shit in the world lol, ladies are teh suckkssss! I’m paraphrasing, of course. In his words:
Men do not see the world like women do. The gaze of men projects outward into it; they see it, they take what they need from it, and they remake it anew. The gaze of women falls inward. The world becomes them, it exists for them. And thus, women do not build; they consume. It is not the vicissitudes of society or the education system that makes women like this. It is their nature. And, I hazard a guess … that because of the consumptive nature of women and of men’s desire to give them every comfort and convenience that we are eating ourselves alive.
I wonder, if the genius of men were fully recognized where would we be now?
Gosh, I don’t know. We’d probably all be flying around with jet packs while having sex with sexy sex robots. That’s just a guess, though. But I have a question for Mr. Labadie, and for every MRA who gets vicarious man thrills from stuff other dudes have made: how many Roman Pantheons have you personally built?
Also: it sort of undermines your case for inherent man genius when you use the word “bare” to mean “bear.” Real men proofread.
Program Note: I will be man-debating Paul Elam, the man behind A Voice For Men, on the topic of Domestic Violence, starting tonight on his man-site. I will post links when the posts start going up.
The quote of the day today is a long and rambling one, so buckle up. It’s from a comment on The Spearhead, by a fellow named Snark, which was enthusiastically highlighted by the Schopenhauer-loving, Age-of-Consent-Law-hating theantifeminist on his creepy blog. The theme of the post? Whatever nasty, violent, bad shit men do is all the fault of hot young women, who control men through the power of their evil sexiness.
Before settling into his argument proper, Snark gets one little point out of the way: he’s not talking about feminists, who are, he says, generally too old, or, if young, too “neurotic and/or ugly” to control men with the promise of sexy sex. No, Snark is talking about hot young women, who control men without having to resort to feminism. Oh, feminism is evil. But pretty girls are evil squared. So let’s begin:
There is a whole different game of misandry being played here. They already hold the power – sexual power – and so have no need to engage in things like feminism. They already have everything feminism could offer them, that is, control over men.
Gynocentrism Theory teaches us that even when those individuals in powerful roles are mostly men, they are doing the bidding of women, not of men en masse; thus the lie is given to Patriarchy Theory, which suggests ridiculously that the few men in power stick up for all the ‘little guys’ out there, against the interests of women.
Gynocentrism Theory then tells us what women – either the non-feminists who sexually control men, or successful feminists – actually do with this power over men. They get men to fight each other. …
Men aren’t naturally violent or aggressive; they simply have the potential to be these things. It is the fact that women reward with sex those who prove themselves to be the most violent and aggressive which makes men act violently and aggressively.
Hmm. So by this logic, then, we can assume that Hitler was just a hapless schmo driven to genocidal fury by thoughts of Eva Braun all tarted-up in a sexy dirndl. Heck, he probably would have spent his whole life painting pictures of butterflies had it not been for all those foxy frauleins. And just imagine how much worse World War II would have been if he’d actually had two balls, instead of just the one! Let’s continue:
The price of a woman’s titillation is an innocent man getting his head smashed in as he walks home. This, just so that the perpetrator can be sexually selected. Woman’s role in the crime is concealed; she didn’t perform the act, after all; she only manipulated the man’s natural stimulus and response system to get him to perform a violent display for her sexual benefit.
Poor men are stuck between their rock-hard dicks and a hard place:
The outcome of all this is that men today are being ground between two millstones: on the one hand, non-feminist women demand that men must act aggressively and violently if they are to be sexually selected; on the other, their feminist sisters demand increasingly brutal punishments for men who act precisely in this way.
Oh, and the way those ladies dress!
[T]oday we are subject to the new phenomena [of] ambient porn, that is, the promise of sexual rewards from desirable young women at every turn. Women who decry pornography do so while dolled up to look like porn stars themselves, and don’t you dare criticise them for it. There is no escaping the pink wurlitzer: male sexuality is provoked everywhere you look, whether in images from your TV screen, or in magazines, adverts at bus stops, billboards, and more pervasively and perversely than all of this, in the flesh, walking around absolutely everywhere from your home to the local store to the place you work. …
The pink wurlitzer? Do you mean … this? Never mind. Onward:
Our sexuality is being forever provoked, taunted, prodded at. All to ensure that we react in that ‘real manly’ way that the young non-feminist women demand, so that we can promptly be caught and brutalised by white knights employed by institutions controlled and run by or for the benefit of feminist women.
How Women Rule the Universe
And what set all this in motion? The bikini? The Wonderbra? Nope:
[T]his was all quite possibly set in stone from the moment women were granted the vote.
The vote! That sexy, sexy right to vote.
Not that this argument, such as it is, deserves a rebuttal, but if men are naturally nonviolent, and women are the cause of their violence, why do gay men get into fights?
>One of the things that still surprises me as I traverse the weird online world of anti-feminism is the number of women I’ve run across who think that they have altogether too many rights. I’ve written in the past about women who don’t believe they should have the right to vote. Today, Laura Wood, a proudly retrograde woman who thinks the solution to contemporary “cultural ruin” is for employers to start paying women even less than they do now. According to “Why We Must Discriminate,” a manifesto of sorts on her blog The Thinking Housewife:
Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural ruin of its women. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. … First and foremost, we must restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions must be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.
It’s a strange manifesto and a strange blog. Unlike many of the reactionaries I regularly quote on this blog, Wood is not an idiot. Her tone is measured and cautious. If you accept her fairly ludicrous premises — the key ones here being that it would be desirable or even possible to undo decades of economic and cultural history to essentially return to an imaginary, idealized prefeminist world in which men could earn enough to comfortably support a family and women would work primarily for “pin money” — her manifesto almost makes sense. And yet what she is saying is, not to put too fine a point on it, vile.
She is utterly blithe, for example, about the effect her proposal would have on single and divorced women:
Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.
Who needs a man-sized wage when you can just beg dad for cash when the rent comes due?
Wood not only thinks women deserve to be paid less than men for the same work; she’s also wary of women taking on almost any authority at all outside the home. While she’s admits it’s technically possible for women to be, for example, effective drill sergeants, she finds the idea vaguely abhorrent:
When women start barking orders at grown men, the delicate balance of power between the sexes is disturbed. Women are mothers and wives, lovers and friends to men. These roles are damaged by domineering bossiness. Male psychology is radically different from female psychology. After all, mothers are women. There is no more significant fact than that.
There’s more, much more. Troll This Blog has assembled a lengthy list of Wood’s more backwards utterances, from which I drew the example above, including some thoughts on race that would not be out of place at a (very polite) Klan meeting: “Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today.”
Though I found her blog through links on a Men’s Rights blog or two, and her ideology is more or less consistent with some of the more reactionary MRAs out there, Wood is not exactly an MRA herself. Indeed, she has tangled with the Men’s Rights Movement on several occasions — lambasting commenters on The Spearhead for “juvenile” misogyny, and accusing MRA elder Paul Elam of “idiocy and hatred” for his, er, idiotic and hateful statement that if he were on a jury he wouldn’t vote to convict a clearly guilty rapist.
This is one of those battles, to paraphrase Calvin Trillin, in which I can only hope that both sides suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.
NOTE: Before any of the anti-feminists who regularly post here accuse me of lacking “substance” because I do not “rebut” Wood’s “arguments” in detail, I request only one thing: find me something solid to rebut. Wood, like many of those I write about, offers a lot of opinions — see the quotes above, and on Troll This Blog, for numerous examples — but almost nothing to actually support those opinions. Find me an example of an argument she has made that is actually supported with actual empirical evidence, with specific citations and/or links to sources, and I’ll have a go at it.
Q: How many Men’s Rights Activists does it take to screw a Fleshlight?
A: That’s not funny!
So what emotion did you feel when Christine O’Donnell’s bizarre anti-masturbation video first started popping up on cable news and the intertubes? (If you haven’t seen it yet, pop over here and return when you’re done.) Did you feel amused, annoyed, befuddled, perhaps concerned that someone so wacky could possibly be voted into office? Did it make you horny, baby?
For the men’s rights blogger behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech blog, there was nothing funny about the video. “They’re Afraid of Men Masturbating,” he wrote in a piece also published on the The Spearhead, warning fellow men to beware the dark specter of the mysterious “they” — he never quite specifies who this is — trying to get between men and their hands.
And how will the evil “they” control men? Not by clamping their hapless partners’ junk in a stylish new CB-6000 Male Chastity Device. Not by drawing litlte moustaches on all the pictures in their porn stashes. But sneakily, insidiously, through “shaming language.” Religious conservatives like O’Donnell will open up their Bibles and start talking about Onan. Others will smirk and call men losers.
“When women use vibrators they are praised for taking control of their sexuality,” he complains. “When a man uses a fleshlight he is attacked for being a loser who can’t get laid.” The ultimate goal? “[T]o protect the pussy cartel from competition” in the form of fleshlights, virtual reality sex, and the comforts of their own hands and a bottle of lotion.
Yes, he did just use the phrase “pussy cartel.”
So, yeah. Here’s the thing. The reason the sex-positive feminists and the Samantha Jones’ of the world describe female masturbation as liberating is because, for many women, masturbation is still a source of deep, deep shame, so much so that many are too skittish or uneasy to even try it. While getting reliable info about sexuality is difficult, most studies of the subject indicate that men masturbate far more than women. (No duh.) One 2007 survey found that 95% of men had masturbated at least once in their lives, while only 71% of women had. More than half of men surveyed had masturbated in the week prior to taking the survey; only 18% of women had. Heck, I jacked it twice while writing this paragraph. I’m not afraid!
And here’s the other thing. When people call you a loser for shacking up with your fleshlight instead of a warm, living, flesh-and-blood woman, they’re not really making fun of the masturbating.
No, they’re making fun of you for being so wholly objectionable to any sane woman that you’re left alone with only your hands and your sex toys. They’re making fun of you for being the sort of person who uses the phrase “pussy cartel.” They’re making fun of you for being such a crazy misogynist creepazoid that you’ve actually managed to convince yourself, at least for the amount of time it takes to write a blog post, that your “hand will do more for [you] than a woman will.”
Is that shaming language? I suppose it it. That blog post was, well, pretty shameful.
EDIT: Some less-than-careful readers of this piece have somehow concluded that it is anti-masturbation, or at least anti-male-masturbation. It is not. Guys, masturbate all you want. In your bedroom, in the living room, in front of your pets, wearing a hat, wearing a dress. I don’t care. Masturbation is healthy, normal, and oftentimes highly entertaining. I have been known to masturbate myself. My critique was not of masturbation but of guys who actually think that Christine O’Donnell’s loopy remarks, which even she is backtracking on, mean that a “pussy cartel” is trying to stop men from touching their wieners.
EDIT 2: The target of this piece offers a response that suggests, among other things, that he really can’t read very well. But he assures us that he actually is getting laid, so yay for him on that.
Oh dear. The Men’s Rights movement often seems like a giant He Man Woman Haters Club. But generally the cleverer of the MRAs go out of their way to deny outright misogyny. Oh, we don’t hate women, just feminists. We don’t want to take away the legitimate rights of women; we just want equality, with neither side getting special rights at the expense of the other.
But then there’s this dude. In a recent post on the popular men’s rights blog The Spearhead, a guy calling himself ramzpaul argues, with utmost seriousness and sincerity, that women should be denied the right to vote. Let me repeat that: he argues that women should be denied the right to vote.
The post is titled “How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization,” and, yep, he means it. (He’s also got a version of the rant up on You Tube. He sort of reminds me a bit of Stephen Merchant, if Stephen Merchant were an insane American reactionary woman-hating freak.)
It’s a weird, rambling diatribe, but after some swipes at Cultural Marxism and Google (which offended his sensibilities by mentioning the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment on its home page), ramzpaul gets to the heart of his, er, argument. Borrowing some odd notions from a 19th-century anti-suffragette Madeline Dahlgren, he argues that allowing women to vote divides the sexes, creates discord in the family, and destroys marriage. He wraps it all up thusly:
The people opposed to female suffrage proved to be right beyond their wildest predictions. As Google was celebrating the 19th amendment, a British newspaper detailed the boasting of a 26 year old woman who claims to have had sex with 5,000 different men. If Madeline Dahlgren were alive today, I am sure she would have understood the connection between female suffrage in the West and the decline of civilization.
Single mothers, rampant divorce, abortion and falling birth rates are part of the cancer that is destroying what is left of Western Civilization. But very few people (even conservatives) fail to realize that the inception of this cancer can be found in the passage of the 19th amendment.
I’m not even going to bother to refute any of this, which is so mindbogglingly stupid it refutes itself.
But what’s even creepier than this little essay is the response it got on the Spearhead: 191 comments, at last count, mostly offering enthusiastic assent. Yep. Almost everyone there agreed with every word of this nonsense. Here are a few of the choicest nuggets, all of which were massively upvoted by the denizens of The Spearhead:
Oh, a tiny handful challenged this craziness, but they were downvoted into oblivion. I had to click a little link to see this comment, from someone calling himself barsin:
Yeah, what he said. At least that last bit. I’m rather in favor of the Men’s Rights Movement self-destructing through its own idiocy and insanity.
EDIT: Just to point this out to anyone who doesn’t get it: By talking about a particular bunch of MRAs who think that women shouldn’t be allowed the right to vote, I am not suggesting that every single MRA, or even most of them, believe this. But the response to the Spearhead article does pretty clearly indicate that there are way too many of them who do believe it.
There are several discussions of this article now taking place on Reddit. Check them out.
