We Hunted The Mammoth
As everyone reading this blog no doubt already knows, feminists have hailed the Pentagon’s decision to open combat jobs to women, which will allow women the same opportunities to serve as men. The decision is also a backhanded acknowledgement that, for all intents and purposes, women are serving in combat today already. (Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth lost both of her legs in combat in Iraq – but officially, what she was engaged in wasn’t combat.)
An Orlando man, Faron Thompson, was recently charged with battery and child neglect after an altercation in which he allegedly tried to force his fiancée to swallow her engagement ring when she tried to leave him. (More details here.)
This sort of abuse is depressingly commonplace when women try to free themselves from abusive and controlling men; indeed, if I posted every news account along these lines on this blog I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
No, I mention this case because something that Thompson reportedly told police reveals a lot about the mindset of abusers. When they arrested him, police say, Thompson complained that:
Women always claim assault, but never accept responsibility for provoking someone.
That is how abusers think.
It’s also how a lot of MRAs think.
Indeed, when I read Thomson’s reported remarks, the y immediately brought to mind something written not that long ago by Karen Straughan, the YouTube videoblogger who goes by the name of Girl Writes What. Straughan describes herself in her A Voice for Men bio as “the most popular and visible MRA in North America,” and given the rapturous reception her videos get on You Tube and on Reddit, this may not be an idle boast.
In the rather revealing Reddit comment I’m thinking of (which I blogged about earlier), Straughan suggested not only that abused women regularly “demand” the abuse they receive, but that many of them also get some sort of sexual charge from it. Oh, I’m sure she’ll deny that she really meant all that, but I can’t see any other way to read the following.
Oh, and in case you were wondering what article she’s referring to in the last paragraph — the one she says isn’t “seriously ethically questionable” — it’s a post from the repugnant Ferdinand Bardamu arguing that men should “terrorize” their partners because that’s the “the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.” For more about that charming piece, titled “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” see my post here.
I’m having less and less of a problem with calling the Men’s Rights movement “the abusers lobby.”
I’m sure there are some MRAs who are as repulsed by Straughan’s argument as I am. If you’re one of them, and want your movement, such as it is, to be remembered as something other than “the abusers lobby,” you need to call out all those MRAs who make such arguments. Might I suggest that you start by challenging the “the most popular and visible MRA in North America,” otherwise known as Girl Writes What?
I haven’t been keeping up with The Spearhead of late, but a commenter here drew my attention to the sort of timeless wisdom I’ve been missing from the Spearhead gang.
In this comment, DW3 offered his thoughts on how to combat the evils of single motherhood. The solution involves putting single moms in workhouses. To be more specific, in sex-workhouses — that is, whorehouses.
I think there should be whorehouses for single mothers to work at, to pay their debts to society. Such a system would kill several birds with one stone.
There would be safe and legal access to prostitution, presumably reducing the drugs and violence associated with the way the trade is currently practiced.
It would allow single mothers to learn the value of getting up and getting to work on time, so that they might aspire to a different career.
It would assist traditional families in steering their daughters and nieces and sisters in a different direction, with a very visible and well-known consequence to ignoring the families’ advice.
It would allow single mothers to give back for all the resources they consume, and ideally it could replace child support on some sort of sliding scale of pay for the workers. Perhaps starting at $50 paid per client, less $20 per child more than 1. That way, a single mother with 3 kids could still get $10, and more than that would be inclined to try to hide off the grid the way divorced and separated fathers now have to.
I have my own opinions about whether choice single mothers cause more harm than divorcees, but for this proposal I suppose that they should be treated differently. Divorced women would surrender their children to the father and have to pay half their whorehouse earnings to support the family, however they would get the full $50 regardless of the number of kids.
Perhaps the whorehouses could charge $80 for providing their services, with a modest 20% discount for married men who proved they had a family to support.
DW3 prefaced this comment with a line in which he notes that this idea might be a bit much even for the regular denizens of The Spearhead. But no one actually took issue with his proposals. Indeed, Lyn87 (a Spearhead regular I’ve written about before) noted that he’d had similar thoughts on the matter himself.
Since men are responsible to pay for the children that women they have sex with choose to bear (that is the stark legal reality – every child that is born is born due to the SOLE choice of the mother), then it stands to reason that:
Money paid to support a child = the obligation a man incurs by having sex with the mother.
Since having sex is enough to legally entitle a woman to a man’s money if a pregnancy ensues and she elects to give birth, shouldn’t taking a man’s money legally entitle him to have sex with the mother if he has not already done so?
Fair is fair, right?
My Modest Proposal: a single-mother-by-choice who takes public assistance should be required by law (as men’s financial obligations are), to have sex with any man who can produce a 1040 showing that he paid taxes in the past 12 months (at least once for each child).
The Spearhead: As reliably awful as stomach flu.
Our little friend over at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog has done us a favor today by summarizing the, er, evidence behind one of the manosphere’s dumbest tropes: the notion that working women don’t really work, because their jobs don’t count, or something. Here’s Mr. PMAFT:
For the most part women don’t work. They may have jobs or be stay at home mothers/wives, but in neither case are they doing real productive work for the most part. Various groups promote their own form of make work jobs for women.
Ok, Mr. Hard-working Superior Man, let’s see you provide some evidence for these assertions.
Scary news from A Voice for Men. On their front page right now:
So Sweden is Nazi Germany?
This is a little confusing to me, because, according to what I’ve always considered the most trusted and reliable source of Swedish information, Sweden is actually Napoleonic France.
Unfortunately, my only other real source for information on Sweden is not much help either, as it seems to suggest that Sweden is … the Mojave desert?
Oh dear. Our friends the Men’s Rights Redditors have discovered Mr.Ian Ironwood’s little treatise on sexbots. While some are a bit skeptical about the reality of the (non-existent) Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act — more skeptical, anyway, than Ironwood or Vox Day before him — this doesn’t stop the regulars from offering all sorts of distressing and/or hilarious opinions on the subject.
So the Boobz are getting worked up – again – over some imaginary “proposed legislation” to ban sexbots. Vox Day, one of the esteemed elder statesmen of the right-wing of the manosphere, has resurrected an urban legend that first fooled his comrades about two years ago, reposting a “statement” of mysterious Canadian origin explaining that
provisions have been proposed for the new Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act, the first draft of which is currently being finalized.The provisions are specifically meant to target the concerns that were expressed at the roundtable that sexbots will negatively impact the pursuit for gender equality and may unduly emphasize the objectification of women as sexual objects.The suggested provisions fall into the larger framework of regulating the emerging service robot industry that will be governed by the Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act and under the direction of the Ministry of Robots and Artificial Intelligence, to be established in Ontario and other Canadian provinces and territories at the end of next year.
The main provision of this dastardly Femi-Canadian proposed legislation?
The use of sexbots in the privacy of one’s home is prohibited, unless otherwise permitted by the Ministry of Robots and Artificial intelligence or a relevant regulating agency as per the criteria outlined in the Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act.
You may wonder: Why didn’t I read anything in the papers about this Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act? Why haven’t I heard about this Ministry of Robots and Artificial Intelligence?
Well, you guessed it. Because neither of them exist. I looked into this two years ago when the story first, er, broke in the manosphere. There’s no vast feminist conspiracy to deny Canadian men (or, for that matter, women) their still-imaginary sexbots. The “statement” was evidently written as part of a law school class project on law and robotics taught by Prof. Ian Kerr at the University of Ottawa Law School.
If you Google “Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act” or “Ministry of Robots and Artificial Intelligence” you will find that literally the only people talking about this issue are MRAs and PUAs and conspiracy theorists. And some of the more gullible 4channers, though a few of them quickly figured out that the whole thing was fake. (As did the Real Doll enthusiasts.)
Vox Day, who has yet to come to this realization, draws some dire conclusions from this thing that isn’t real, declaring that the
This Canadian attempt to preemptively ban sexbots is an overt confession by feminists of both sexes concerning their belief that women have nothing significant to offer men but sexual services. Moreover, it is proof that their “pursuit for gender equality” is directly and fundamentally opposed to the most basic human freedom. …
One would think that even those only superficially acquainted with human history would realize that attempts to put the technological genie back in the bottle almost always fail, as do attempts to prevent men and women from pursuing pleasure in ways deemed illicit. But then, a near-complete ignorance of human history is required to either be a feminist or possess a genuine belief in the rainbow-tailed unicorn of equality.
Well, not so much. Though Vox proves yet again that there are few people on planet earth as gullible as the manosphere’s pompous philosophers.
NOTE: Vox isn’t the only manospherian up in arms about the evil imaginary sexbot ban; more on this tomorrow.
I ran across this remarkable painting, titled “The Irritating Gentleman,” on Sheltered and Safe From Sorrow, a blog devoted to Victorian mourning rituals and other creepiness from that period. The gentleman in question seems to be a Victorian era Pickup Artist in action. He’s even peacocking, Mystery style, with that bow tie and stupid hat and even a non-ironic handlebar moustache. Probably the only thing keeping him from wearing aviator goggles is the fact that airplanes haven’t yet been invented.
What makes it all the worse is that the PUA’s target is clearly in mourning. As the blogger behind rawr I’m a tumblr notes:
She’s wearing all black in 1874. Black gloves, hat, cloak, and dress. In public. The whole nine yards. That’s not a fashion choice or a gothic thing. Back then when people wore all black like that, they were in mourning for someone who died. No one did mourning like the Victorians, that shit was an art form to them.
Someone in her family has died—she could even be a young widow. No one’s accompanying her either. With the carpet bag? She’s traveling alone while still in deep mourning. Look at the closeup. She’s got tears in her eyes. She is upset, devastated in a way that one is only when someone has died. And the guy’s still bothering her, like her problems are flippant bullshit and she needs to just smile or pay attention to him because ladies are supposed to be pleasing for men no matter what shit they’re going through. That’s not a look of “what an ass.” That’s a look of devastation that even in her pain, she’s expected to give people like him focus. She’s not mad. She’s hurt. And to add insult to injury? Everyone would be able to tell. It was a clear sign and still is in ways that someone is mourning, to dress in black crepe like that. He would know why she’s wearing all black, and he’s still demanding her attention.
What an insufferable dick.
Yep.
One effect of living within the ideological bubble of the Men’s Rights movement is what you might call ideological inflation: MRAs start off believing, for example, that women don’t face discrimination today, in the developed world — an idea that’s wrong enough to start with. But then, surrounded by other delusional MRAs who reinforce their every wrong notion, the denizens of the Men’s Rights bubble come to believe that women haven’t ever been discriminated against anywhere and at any time in the history of the world. (You may recall those evil cavewomen who sat around eating prehistoric bon bons while the men hunted the mammoth to feed them.)
And that leads to things like the following video, in which the FeMRA video maker who calls herself The Wooly Bumblebee declares war on a pair of “Misandric Pants” she bought for her daughter by accident.
Yep, that’s right, she’s furious because one fucking percent of the proceeds made from selling these pants goes to a charity fighting against the very real discrimination and oppression that girls face all over the globe. You know, like being denied educations because they’re girls. Like being forced into child marriages with adult men. Like being forced into prostitution as children. That sort of thing.
Apparently girls don’t suffer from being repeatedly raped as children. But boys are totally oppressed because a tiny portion of the profits from a pair of pants goes to a charity that talks about, and tries to do something about, the shit girls have to endure because they are girls.
Fellas! Better hold on to yourselves, because I’ve got some terrible news for you.
Actually, you’d better NOT hold on to yourselves. Because this is the news, straight from that always 100% reliable news source, the Men’s Rights subreddit:
I wonder if manginal orgasms are still allowed?
