Jezebel has apparently decided to gin up some page views by running a bizarre, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, skeevily prurient screed on Amber Cole, the 14-year old African American girl who was videotaped giving oral sex to some boys; the video got posted online and, despite the fact that it was, you know, child porn, went viral. The story itself is appalling; so is the screed, written by a guy pretending (for rhetorical effect) that he’s Cole’s father. It reads like something you’d find on The Spearhead.
The piece starts off melodramatically:
I am Amber Cole’s father. I am angry, confused and completely at a loss. I love my daughter. I want to guide her without suppressing her. That is not always easy. Children need protection from their worst inclinations. That is not always easy. I am trying to convince her that the world will still love her if she keeps her clothes on.
Just to remind everyone again: the author is not actually Cole’s father. (And Amber Cole is apparently not her real name.)
The screed quickly descends into an attack on the girl’s mother that reads like something you’d read in the comments section of The Spearhead or In Mala Fide:
She would listen to her mother, if her mother was not busy. Doing something, anything that is not parenting. I want her mother to spend less time being “empowered” and more time being aware and engaged with our daughter.
And it only goes downhill from there. We get a section essentially blaming girls at large for the incident, because they allegedly ignore the “nice guys” who would never make such a tape. We get a section blaming the “mother’s boyfriend, Karrine Steffans or Kim Kardashian” for teaching the girl to be “proficient at such a difficult act. … I want to know why my 14 year-old knows so much about oral sex.”
And then we get a ridiculous race-baiting rant about white feminists and the Slutwalks:
White feminists can teach their own little girls to find empowerment through their crotches – my brown little girl cannot afford to be that carefree and cavalier with her life choices. Slutlife is the hard, lonely vocation of rich, educated, privileged white women who will fuck The World, contract social diseases and still, somehow find a husband. No black woman ever got far being a slut. I want to know what kind of women “slutwalk,” while young impressionable girls of all kinds look on with wonder and admiration.
After placing blame for the whole thing on just about every girl and woman in the world, the author comes to the father:
I am Amber Cole’s father. Don’t ask where I was that afternoon, because you already know. I was at work, just like you. I do not live with her, cannot always talk to her, cannot always be there. Not the way I want, and there are few laws to help me. To protect me and my rights.
Because that’s the real issue here: Father’s Rights.
And then the big reveal:
I am Jimi Izrael. I am not really Amber Cole’s father. But she is my daughter.
You do not think so. But she is your daughter too.
Women campaigning for suffrage for no real reason, because not voting was just what women did back then.
I swear, sometimes I wonder if the entire Men’s Rights Movement is an elaborate hoax. Our old friend Fidelbogen weighs in today with a typically pompous post on the cutting-edge issue of women’s suffrage, posted with the almost-too-good-to-be-true headline: Women Couldn’t Vote.That Was “Oppression?” If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to dismiss it as half-baked satire – except that FB is serious, deadly serious. (And deadly dull, too, most of the time, but I’ll try to keep this snappy.)
Fidelbogen’s thesis:
It annoys me to hear the feminists say that women were “oppressed” because they didn’t have the voting franchise in olden days. Excuse me. . . oppressed? I would take exception to the semantics in this case, for is not a bit clear to me that what was happening ought to be called by such a heinous name.
While most people are either for or against women having the right to vote – though I’ve never met any of the latter group outside of MRA blogs – FB bravely declares himself “a third way thinker upon this subject.”
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because Fidelbogen is going to get all philosophical on us:
I would submit that women’s historical lack of voting rights was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Rather, it was a morally indifferent state of affairs, based on a cultural consensus that was shared by men and women alike in the past.
Hey, it was the olden days. People wore silly hats and watched silent movies and no one had iPhones.
Our ancestors lived in a very, very different world than we do, and their cultural norms were very, very different from ours, yet undoubtedly befitting to their world — a world mysterious and unknown to us nowadays. Who are we to judge?
I mean, really, how dare we offer any sort of moral judgment of anything that happened in the past. The Holocaust? Stalin’s purges? Hey, it was the mid-twentieth century – people were just into that shit back then.
Well, FB doesn’t mention either Hitler or Stalin, but he definitely considers women’s former lack of voting rights to be just one of those things that, hey, people were into back then:
[W]as it really, inherently, such a horrible thing after all, that women could not vote? … Why should it even matter? Did the average woman in those days honestly feel that voting was “all that”? Seriously. . . who are we to judge the men and women of past times for their very different way of life which we can no longer entirely fathom?
And besides, most men had been denied the vote earlier, so even if it matters and it totally doesn’t, what’s the big deal if the dudes in charge decided to deny the vote to the ladies for a while longer? As FB puts it:
[W]as it really such an unspeakable crime that the female population couldn’t always go to the polls during that comparatively trifling span of years?
Or is that entire concept nothing but feminist historiography, meant to wring pathos out of history for present-day political purposes by the device of retrojection? That would certainly conform to standard feminist tricknology, wouldn’t it?
Seriously. Those feminologicalnists are totally retrojecting the fuck out of the pastological period using their standard sneakyfulogicalnistic tricknology.
And besides, even though we’re not supposed to judge the past, and even thought that whole denying-the-ladies-the-vote thing was totally a “morally indifferent thing which ought to concern us very little,” FB thinks that maybe it was actually sort of, you know, cool.
I believe a case might be constructed that it was a positive good in the context of those times.
FB decides to leave that case unmade, and returns to the whole “who the fuck cares” argument.
Once upon a time, women didn’t have the voting franchise because societal norms found nothing amiss about such an arrangement. Then times changed, norms changed, and women were admitted to the franchise. That’s all. And women were never, at any point along that general story-line, “oppressed.”
Furthermore, women were never at any time deprived of any rights. You see, women’s “right” to vote simply did not exist in the first place — or not during the period when the so-called deprivation occurred. I mean that “rights” are only a figment. Only a mentation. Only a notion. Only a construct. Rights do not exist in their own right. They are not some mystical pure essence which hangs in the air all by itself — they must be conjured into existence by a strictly human will-to-power, and fixed by law or custom.
And so, if the dudes of the world denied the ladies these “rights,” well, uh, it was “morally indifferent” yet also probably good for some reason.
In conclusion, shut your pie holes, ladies:
So in conclusion, I wish that second and third-wave feminists would shut the hell up with their dishonest, self-laudatory rhetoric about “the vote”. They need to quit tooting on that rusty old horn. It is getting really, really old.
Well, unless they’re this lady. She’s actually pretty good at tooting a horn.
So some douchebag is impersonating me on Reddit. I post as manboobz. He (or she) posts as manboobz_. (That is, with a little underscore at the end.) Luckily most of the faux-manboobz’ comments are fairly easy to tell from mine — this is not someone with a great sense of subtlety — so at least some of the regulars have figured out that this bonehead is not actually me. Not all of them, unfortunately.
As impersonating someone else is a violation of Reddit’s rules, and an asshole move to boot, I politely asked the Men’s Rights subreddit’s mods to ban the faux-me. Here was the response:
It’s not, unfortunately, uncommon for angry or jealous exes to harass, stalk and in many cases actually kill the objects of their obsession. Usually the killer is a man, and the victim a woman, but women kill too, and same sex couples are hardly immune from this kind of violence.
I’ve been following this story – it’s a heartbreaking one — though I hadn’t planned to write about it. There’s no indication, at least based on what we know so far, that Dekraai’s shootings were ideologically driven, that he was anything other than a deeply troubled man, bitterly angry that he had to share custody of his son with a woman he hated. There seemed to be no clear connections between this story and the misogynist ideologues I write about on this site.
But then they started making the connections themselves, offering apologias for Dekraai’s violence and twisting the facts of the case to fit their ideological agendas. TRIGGER WARNING: Many of the comments I quote below are some of the most vile and vicious I have ever found in more than a year of writing this blog.
Bardamu’s argument, such as it is, is utterly at odds with the basic facts of the case. Dekraai and Fournier had shared custody of the boy they’d had together; Dekraai was not fighting to see his child — he was trying to further limit his ex’s access.
Dekraai’s former attorney, Don Eisenberg, told CNS that the two had a “typical” divorce, which was finalized on Dec. 28, 2007.
“This was not a remarkable case. It was a stipulated judgment and the parties agreed on these details,” Eisenberg said.
Under the shared custody agreement, Dekraai had the boy each week from Thursday through the weekend, and the mother had him Monday through Wednesday, the attorney said.
“It was almost an exactly equal split,” Eisenberg said.
There’s not much beyond the headline to Bardamu’s post; the real action is in the comments — many of which openly advocate violence and explicitly endorse Dekraai’s murderous rampage.
[E]nough of this type of offensive action might just start making women and their supporters* think twice, especially if they also become targets. (* Divorce attorneys, child services workers and counselors, family court judges, and other enabling cogs in the feminist legal system)
Self-immolating Thomas Ball may have made a point, but the fact remains that he didn’t strike a blow, even as he advocated it.
The only way this or any offensive action will make a difference is if it starts affecting the judges and lawyers. King John did not sign the magna carta because he was a kindly just ruler, he did it with a sword on the back of his neck while watching a grinning man holding an axe who was busy trying on black hoods. In Mexico entire police forces quit because a few officers go missing. If that started happening then the law becomes meaningless as there is no one to enforce it. …
Essentially men need to tell feminism to shut the fuck up, give it a vigorous slap across the face thus reminding it who is the biological superior, then order it back into the kitchen/bedroom.
In a followup comment he railed against those who expressed disapproval of the shootings:
What options other than overt acts of physical violence are there for a man to deal with a shrew ex and corrupt family court system? To those who are horrified and surprised at this one question…. why? Isn’t the real question – “How come this isn’t a lot MORE common?”. And please avoid the “Well… nothing justifies killing blah blah blah” as we’ve all voted, supported, and tolerated governments who kill over parking tickets much less loss of children. And if keeping your children isn’t worthy of killing what is exactly?
Hopefully one of the dead carcess was his wife. The son will be better off without any parents than to have been raised by a single mother who would have gotten her vindictive way. And to Scott, when you mess with a real man’s child, blood will be spilt. Most men will just lay down and be resigned to the state-enforced kidnapping and extortion plot, but some are made of tougher stuff and for you to whine about this dead ex-wife or that is inconsequential and no loss to humanity.
Presumably he will be pleased to learn that she was one of those killed.
This man went to war. He caused much collateral damage and casualties have piled. And the people whose first reaction is to cry “those poor, innocent people” are people who will never change anything. Death is the way of the world. Violence or the implicit threat of it is what causes change. Go ahead, make it clear that you don’t have it in you to destroy life. The enemy will breath a little easier, because you certainly aren’t going to make any changes.
That said, he should have gone after judges and legislators. There’s no justice like a dead “justice”.
Tweell hoped the shootings would frighten women out of challenging their husbands or ex-husbands in court:
Gandi [sic] and MLK got what they were after via non-violent means, but they were dealing with people of conscience, people who would think about the issues they espoused and not just kill them. Non-violence only works when your opponent has moral character. …
I submit that women … are much more likely to pay attention when they’re being threatened. If it becomes obvious that claiming child abuse during divorce, withholding visitation and other such actions could result in their death, then they might think twice about such behavior.
Meanwhile, on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, more moderate MRAs weighed in on the case. While no one explicitly defended the shooter’s actions, numerous posters said they understood the violence, and (completely ignoring the basic facts of the case) blamed it not on Dekraai but on a court system biased against men.
violent outburst[s] like this will continue to happen so long as ‘kidnapping by court’ and ‘sold into slavery by court’ (via CS & alimony) keeps happening. … fix the family court system and these murders wouldn’t happen.
Moderator AnnArchist – we’ve met him before – agreed, arguing that
To prevent this in the future the solution is clear: Mandate 50/50 custody without any child support as the default
I don’t condone what he did. No sane person would. But, I understand it. … You steal someone’s kids with the help of our so-called “family” courts you’re a pig. You have it coming. Period.
I think it’s high time we put a spotlight on these kidnappers. They are NOT innocent people. They are the scum of the earth. I couldn’t care less about their “welfare”. I care about the millions of parents, mostly fathers, who’ve had their kids stolen from them AND their kids.
When I pointed out in the discussion there that Dekraai had hardly been denied access to his child, AnnArchist changed the subject, suggesting that it was Fournier’s accusations against Dekraai in court that had pushed him over the edge. In fact, both had made numerous allegations about one another in court; Dekraai accused his ex-wife of phone harassment; she complained that he was abusive, mentally unstable and had threatened to kill her. Obviously she was right to have worried.
But according to AnnArchist, Fournier was wrong to bring up his instability in court. As he put it: “Poking the bear is dangerous.”
If you really think someone is nuts, you probably don’t want to be the one to call them out in open court because if they don’t go to prison they might kill you. Its tough to do with kids involved, but if she thought he was capable of something like this, using it in a custody dispute would be considered by many to be risky.
Astonished, I asked him if he was really saying what it looked like he was saying, that if you think your ex is dangerous, and literally insane, you shouldn’t challenge them in court when they try to get sole custody of your kid? His reply:
I didn’t know what to say to this bizarre argument, so I stopped responding.
I don’t know what to say to any of this. It is beyond appalling.
You might assume that those Occupy Wall Street protests (and their various offshoots) you’ve seen so much little of on the news lately are all about, you know, Wall Street, and the economy, and the fact that the very people who got our economy into the mess it’s in are somehow all still richer (a lot richer) than you or me. But apparently that’s not it at all. Nope! Apparently it’s all about hating on the menz.
You might assume that by “the dudes” the lady in question is referring to extremely rich dudes – you know, the 1 percent that the “we are the 99 percent” movement is focusing its attention on. But apparently PMAFT knows better than we do, declaring that
she is demanding men subsidize her, not rich men or billionaires (which would be questionable enough) but men in general.
Oh, but she’s not the only entitled princess on display on the 99 Percent blog. Here are two other women — chosen from hundreds of examples from the blog — that to PMAFT seem to epitomize the evils of female entitlement and man-hatred:
Imagine, women actually having the chutzpah to want medical insurance for young children! Blatant misandry at its worst!
The commenters whooped it up in typical Spearhead fashion. “Single mums want to fuck with John and expect Harry to support her and her kids,” complained Nico. “New-age gov-mediated cuckoldry.”
symptomatic of the feminized educational system and media. Without a manly Patriarchy to call BS on a lot of these entitlement notions, we have several generations of women now sailing into the hard rock of reality. … nobody cares.
So, single mom? Should’ve kept your legs closed… should’ve chosen a better man….
I am not in America, but my single friends who get laid by one of your friends once every blue moon are already paying for you and your friends shoes and bastards by the insane amount of taxes imposed on them with threat of imprisonment.
If these guys are the 1%; that makes you, the 99%, parasites….
You, found a dipsh%t welfare boy, made a baby, and we, the 1% as defined by you, who actually want to work and create something useful, not bastards, are getting screwed by the real 1% who steal from us to give to you, so you can buy shoes and create bastards.
As a man … more than one third of my earning … go[es] to feed your shoes and your bastards …
Single mom with shoes and bastards, bought and being payed for by my money.
Occupy Wallstreet just shows that the western man is the pinata of the western world. And then he dies.
This comment got 63 upvotes from the locals, but no shoes or bastards.
AfOR, not quite as longwinded, noted that he found the women’s pictures “hilarious,” adding:
Suck it down bitches.
If you blow me PROPERLY I’ll buy you a 99 cent burger.
This got 58 upvotes from the totally non-hateful readers of The Totally Non-Hateful Spearhead.
EDITED TO ADD:
Speaking of hateful, here’s a comment I somehow missed, from evilwhitemaleempire. Readers of the comments here will recognize him as a dickish dude who posts dickish comments here from time to time. But in this comment he really lets his misogynist flag fly. (TRIGGER WARNING FOR VIOLENT MISOGYNY) Referring to one of the women cited as “entitled” by PMAFT, who had noted that she has “no money to hire a lawyer so I can divorce my abusive husband,” evilshitemaleempire offered this advice:
Heh. If she’s telling the absolute truth about her life on that paper (questionable) then she needs to go back to that abusive husband and start doing some serious dick sucking. And if he wants anal sex she’d better give it to ‘em.
At last count this comment had 16 upvotes and one downvote. Stay classy, Spearhead.
Sometimes Alpha cab drivers want to punch their customers too.
Every day, it seems, I learn a little bit more about the oppression of men. Recently, for example, I learned that men who are working customer service jobs are oppressed because they are prohibited from punching their customers, even when these customers are really, really annoying, and possibly even ladies. At least that’s the lesson I took from a recent Facebook posting by MRA and frequent Spearhead contributor Jack Donovan. Here’s Jack:
Men want to carry their own weight, but to do so, they may have to take a job which requires them to choose “flight” over “fight” as part of their regular duties. All customer service oriented jobs, for instance, require men to take abuse from … someone who is angrily issuing insults and challenge cues … and reply submissively.
Even worse is when some of these poor men, like Jack, are natural “alphas” forced to take these beta-ass jobs because for some reason the people in charge of hiring haven’t recognized their awesome alphaness:
It would be interesting to see someone do a study tracking the testosterone levels of “alpha” type men who would not choose a customer service job, but who were forced to take a position where they had to apologize and beg forgiveness from abusive women and “betas” all day.
It’s almost like you have to act as if the customer is always right!
As a man who had blood in his face for *several hours* after having to hold my tongue while I was screamed at by a neurotic old female customer this week, the physical effects were pretty noticeable in the short term. I was murderously furious for hours and then emotionally exhausted and kind of depressed through the next day.
Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone – with the possible exception of the old lady, of course, and the rest of the customers, and maybe the firm employing Mr. Donovan – if he could have chosen “fight” instead of “flight,” and just popped that old bat in the nose? Problem fucking solved!
Let’s just shut down the economy and the judicial system for a day or two while we work out a way that Mr. Donovan can just punch people without any consequences. Because he’s an alpha, damn it, and he really shouldn’t be hemmed in by petty “laws” and “social conventions” and “moral codes” clearly meant for betas and ladies and other losers.
EDITED TO ADD: Donovan has responded to this post in the comments here. He says he’s not an MRA, so I’ve edited out that part. (I did find his Facebook post through a link on the MR subreddit, FWIW.)
I should clarify that Donovan did not talk directly about punching people; he talked about the “fight or flight” instinct.
Oh, and they’ve also got a Facebook app that’s — get this! — only available to men! I’m not sure the women of the world are going to suffer much from being banned from playing a rudimentary flash game that involves shooting “girly things.”
I know they’re hoping to generate controversy here, but really? This is just too dumb to even get annoyed about, much less angry. It’s not misogynistic; it’s more a parody of misogyny. Is it such a parody – stereotyping guys as macho buffoons — that it’s actually more misandrist than misogynist? You could make an argument for that, but again the ad is so over the top ridiculous, so soaked in irony, it seems silly to get indignant about this either.
So what’s going to happen when the MRAs of the world hear about this ad? Will they, missing the irony, embrace its Diet Soda Going Its Own Way (DSGIOW) mentality? Or will they denounce it as an example of ad world misandry and pretend to be deeply offended?
I’m betting on the latter. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
These are the awkwardly posed businessladies who wrecked our economy
Like a lot of people, when I’m looking for insights on the current economic mess, I turn first to random dudes posting on The Spearhead. Here’s some guy called Poiuyt explaining how ladies and the men who don’t hate them are the source of all our troubles:
Because this god damned genderist society has become so amoral, so degenerate and so bankrupted on account of its genderist pervervions and femaleist subversions, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to grow itself out of the mess it finds itself in. The proverbial golden geese and their precious eggs in male produktivity have been either been killed, eaten, over-exploited, over worked, abused, dis-incentivised, harrased and are now increasingly extinct.
Well, I can’t argue with that, though the whole goose metaphor isn’t working 100% for me, given that I’m pretty sure it’s not the man goose that lays the eggs, but the lady goose. But that’s nitpicking. Poiuyt is on a roll:
You simply cannot get any further male inspired ekonomic growth out of hugely indebted and morally bankrupted societies as ours following genderist statism today, … … because the primary sources of growth potential in male inspired productivity and male entrepreneurship has been cannibalised to the bone. Cannibalised to the point where there is nothing left to base any further ekonomic growth on, consequent of the vicious sexist state ideology of womanism at all costs.
According to some MRAs, this guy doesn't care about rape
Ugh. No jokes this time, just an appalling little exchange on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit. First, a Redditor called xbyiu offers some unsolicited, and pretty pig-ignorant, thoughts about SlutWalks. The basic thesis:
Personally, I think a lot of feminists just don’t care about rape victims. They’d much rather see women as a whole being a victim of the patriarchy and fight against that sort of abstract idea then deal with the reality of rape, which can be fought against with simple tips on how to protect yourself.
Hold on; it gets worse.
To this the r/mr regular EvilPundit replied (in a comment that, last I checked, had gotten three times more upvotes than downvotes):
I’d go even further, and say that many feminists love rape. For them, it’s a perfect way to demonise men in general.
If rape didn’t exist, feminism would invent it. In fact, feminism does invent a lot of rape, with its imaginary statistics such as “1 in 4”, and so on.
In other words, feminists don’t really want to prevent rape. But most rape is imaginary. So feminists are trying to not prevent something that doesn’t much happen anyway. Brilliant.
A note on the “1 in 4” thing: EvilPundit’s insinuation that it’s an “imaginary statistic” is a common MRA talking point. It’s not imaginary, but it’s not quite accurate either. The one-in-four number comes from a study conducted in the 80s by researcher Mary Koss: based on a detailed survey of college women, she found that roughly one in four of her respondent had been a victim of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14. This is often simplified – and distorted – into “one in four female college students are raped while in college.”
In fact, Koss’ survey found that one in eight college women answering her survey, not one in four, had been the victim of completed rape. Other studies have reported numbers not far off from this. The National Violence Against Women Survey, for example, found that roughly one in six of female respondents reported being the victim of rape in their lifetime.
The fact that some people have misrepresented Koss’ study doesn’t mean that her findings are “imaginary.”
I’m not even sure why I’m writing all this, given that as a feminist I presumably don’t care at all about rape.
Ladies! Better move fast if you want to sink your talons into some hard-working, high-earning beta man-wallet! Men’s Rights Redditor ShinShinGogetsuko is on to you ladies and your devious ways, and he’s taking his video games and going home. By which I mean: he’s GOING GALT!
Men are choosing to reject the culture that is being forced upon them which tells them to be anything but MEN. What they want us to be is slaves, to throw away our souls and toil away while women get to do whatever they want in the name of “female empowerment” and with a court system that will side with them. Equality is the ideal, but it’s not about equality–it’s about control. Men are going Galt.
When society takes a stand against the destruction of men’s character, then men will return to being men. Until then, Xbox 720.
Jezebel has apparently decided to gin up some page views by running a bizarre, victim-blaming, slut-shaming, skeevily prurient screed on Amber Cole, the 14-year old African American girl who was videotaped giving oral sex to some boys; the video got posted online and, despite the fact that it was, you know, child porn, went viral. The story itself is appalling; so is the screed, written by a guy pretending (for rhetorical effect) that he’s Cole’s father. It reads like something you’d find on The Spearhead.
