Here’s the entirety of a recent post by an MRA who calls himself Snark:
Uh, dude, I think you’ve confused “feminists” with “Daleks.”
Our new friend Fidelbogen thought this was such a brilliant idea he devoted a post to it himself, declaring:
Such economy, such concision. …
Really now, we wouldn’t go far wrong to make our rhetoric revolve around this above all, and very little more. The saying is deceptively simple, for it goes deep and reaches into many corners.
It puts them on the spot, and nails them there.
I knew Fidelbogen was a bit of a pompous doofus, but this is a whole new level of stupidity for him. I don’t even know what to say about something this idiotic.
Also, check out the comments to Snark’s piece. There’s something about potatoes you kind of have to see to believe.
Jezebel’s Anna North has an interesting piece up on the return of Reddit’s ultra-skeezy Jailbait subreddit – and on the surprising number of vocal redditors who think that pedophilia ephebophilia is perfectly “natural.”
This slogan is apparently what CAUSES violence against women.
Another day, another apologia for male violence from the Men’s Rights crowd. This time the apologist is W. F. Price at The Spearhead, who uses several recent news stories involving violent men as an excuse to attack feminism.
Repeated provocations against men, systematic discrimination against men, and state-sanctioned debt slavery are starting to have the inevitable effect. In a triumph for the feminist movement, men are lashing out violently against women, fulfilling the feminist fantasy of a gender war.
In the old days, everything was (presumably) peachy keen between the sexes. Then along came the feminists, and all hell broke loose. Those “take back the night” marches feminists love so much? They’re just red flags to the bulls – that is, our society’s ample stock of “mentally unstable and out-of-luck men.” You don’t want to make these guys mad!
[W]omen were encouraged to be militant against all males, which can only have unfortunate results, given the hands-down male superiority in combat. …
In other words, the fact that there are violent men out there is why women shouldn’t complain about violent men. Presumably the only marches women should be organizing would be “No, Go Ahead, You Keep the Night” marches. Don’t want to offend those rapists –that’ll just make them even rapier than usual!
According to Price, though, feminists actually like violence against women — because it keeps them in business.
For feminism to exist as a valid movement, there must be violent conflict, so many of the efforts of feminists have sought to provoke just that. … You see, for a feminist to justify her job there must be some degree of brutality against women. … So, if you are a feminist, the hapless women murdered or assaulted by the damaged men feminists have created are necessary sacrifices for advancing the feminist agenda.
So not only do the feminists provoke these “damaged men” – they created them in the first place, by being so feministy.
Wouldn’t this whole provoke-the-men strategy make life more dangerous for feminist women as well? No, because feminists are all rich ladies, and everyone knows that rich ladies are never beaten or raped or murdered:
[W]e all know that feminism has never been about the typical woman who lives a humble life, but rather the ambitious elite who want to have access to the big boys and big money on Capitol Hill and Wall Street. … Disadvantaged women are truly the cannon fodder of feminists.
So what “proof” does Price offer for his claim that men are “lashing out” at women because of feminism? He cites three news stories: one dealing with a woman-hating trucker who’s accused of killing several prostitutes; another involving a man who went on a shooting rampage at a church, killing his wife and wounding two others; and finally, the case of James Ray Palmer, the Arkansas man who shot up the offices of the judge who’d handled his divorce and custody case more than a decade earlier. (I wrote about his case here.)
How do these cases relate to feminism? You’ll have to ask Price, because none of the news stories suggest any connection, and Price doesn’t explain why he thinks there is one. True, the trucker is said to be a misogynist, but misogyny is far more ancient than feminism. Meanwhile, we have no evidence that the church shooter was angry at any women other than his wife.
In the case of Palmer, there may be an indirect connection, if it turns out that he was influenced by the angry, violent rhetoric of the Men’s Rights movement. As I pointed out in my post on Palmer, many in the MRM have made a martyr out of Thomas Ball, who committed suicide on the steps of a courthouse, leaving behind an manifesto that urged men to literally burn down police stations — and courthouses. It is certainly conceivable that Palmer’s courthouse rampage was inspired by this sort of rhetoric.
But to blame feminism for any of this is ass-backwards. Feminism is a response to misogyny, not its cause. To blame feminism for violence against women is a bit like blaming Jews for provoking the Holocaust. (Forgive me, Godwin; it was the clearest analogy.)
Price ends his piece by urging women to, in effect, shut up and fix him a sandwich:
Women’s best bet for security is not in denouncing and fighting men, as feminists would have it, but in cooperating with them and taking on their proper role.
Then he ends with a weird coda suggesting that feminists should be locked up for having the temerity to speak up in the first place:
The United States will once again be a righteous society only when feminists are jailed for interfering with families, and their academic apologists are removed by security from their jobs in taxpayer-funded educational institutions. This would be the most humane course of action to take. Far more humane, in fact, than provoking men and women to physically attack one another, as feminists would have it today so that they can unleash state agents on confused and demoralized families.
I didn’t have the stomach to read all of the comments responding to Price’s argument, such as it is. But here are some highlights – lowlights, really – of the highly upvoted comments I did read.
Anger against feminism has been building for years. As the men’s rights movement has gained momentum, feminists and their lackeys have doubled down and become more virulent in their anti-male hatred and propaganda. Women today are becoming more and more nasty on an interpersonal basis, and they are doing so more frequently. A breakpoint will come. It will probably take a catalyst; another severe economic downturn might do it. But it will come. Feminists and their pet femboys will push things until it does.
Wait. If the Men’s Rights movement is, in effect, provoking feminists to get more feministy, then wouldn’t (by Price’s logic) the allegedly increased violence be the fault of the MRAs?
Rod worries that in the case of a real gender war, men might actually lose – all because of those darned “white knights” and their reluctance to beat up the ladies:
I’m afraid that if it ever came down to a real physical war between the sexes, men would unfortunately lose. There are too many men who can’t stand the sight of men harming women, and would immediately step in to save them. Perhaps nature instilled in us a visceral reaction to women’s suffering, making us want to step in and help, and at one time in the history of our species, that reaction was no doubt a salutary thing. Now it just works against us.
Antiphon, meanwhile, blames it all on the Jews. Or, more specifically, the Jewesses, who apparently control the feminist movement in the same way that their husbands control the banks.
Needless to say, this being The Spearhead, Antiphon’s comment has three times as many upvotes as downvotes. Apparently, the only thing worse than a feminist is a Jewish feminist.
I guess my Nazi analogy earlier in this post wasn’t so out of place after all.
My favorite incoherent MRA blogger at the moment is our dear friend Christian J from the blog What Men Are Saying About Women. In recent days, Dr. J – famed inventor of the MRA two-dot ellipsis – has delivered up some truly inspired prose. I’d like to share some of the highlights (by which I mean lowlights) from a few of his recent posts.
Women dish it up on a platter in line with their feminist education (free love/free sex mentality) to the alphas as they turn them on, the most, in the hope of either pretending to be carefree and casual about it all or they just have a high sex drive that requires servicing on a regular basis. It’s not that difficult..
The girls ofcourse have been trained to think that they can get away with just about anything as they possess the magic “V” which has a very high trading component as well as a social exchange rate, not unlike the Euro or an open ocean oil exploration license, but the magic “V”is more mobile and comes with it’s own carrier and operator, batteries not included though. Perfect really, when you think about it.
As feminism gets messier and even more morose, one does have to wonder what efforts those masterminds of insanity will do to cover their obvious and blatant erroneous experiments on human biology.
I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to get messier or more morose.
[N]o one really considers them to be anything but a waste product, whose relevance is yet to be determined. A pretend girlie-man if you like, who wavers between reality and the dream state of their female masters. A neutered sycophant living on a different plain where reality and fantasy mix to form their delusional, ethereal world..
And let’s finish up with this muddled attempt to call feminists a bunch of lying liars:
We have on numerous occasions, demonstrated the continual lying and misinformation that the feminist hegemony consistently wallows in without what they believe is, in any fear of contradiction.
I have no idea if the second half of that sentence is the result of some sort of grievous editing error, or if he actually thought it made some sort of sense. With Christian J, it’s impossible to tell.
Recently Kloo2yoo, the founder and longtime moderator of Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, stepped down. The remaining moderator, IgnatiusLoyola, has just announced his successor, a long-time commenter in the subreddit who calls himself AnnArchist. (Despite the female-sounding name, he’s a guy.)
This is an, er, interesting choice, as AnnArchist is a misogynist asshole who thinks that violence against women is hilarious. Indeed, he’s posted in the BeatingWomen subreddit, a thoroughly vile little forum devoted to posting pictures and videos of women being violently assaulted. He says he enjoys this particular subreddit because “I have a sense of humor so I can laugh at it.” Here’s one recent post of his, and another. I don’t know exactly what was in either video, since they’ve both been removed my YouTube, the first for violating the site’s rules against hate speech, the second for its “shocking and disgusting content.” If you look through the comments on these submissions, you may also note that the r/beatingwomen regulars, in addition to being misogynist assholes, are also racist as fuck.
“Welcome AnnArchist,” the_real_misogynist wrote in response to one of these postings, “with posts like that you’ll fit right in here.”
Needless to say, AnnArchist doesn’t find violence by women against men quite so risible.
So why exactly was he picked as a moderator? Is he truly the best that r/mensrights can offer?
Apparently a lot of the r/mensrights regulars think so; most of those who’ve commented so far have praised IgnatiusLoyola’s choice, and have dismissed the critics as “trolls.” (EDITED TO ADD: The tide seems to have turned; there are now more comments up critical of AnnArchist’s promotion to mod, and posts defending Iggy’s decision aee getting some downvotes.)
EDITED TO ADD: Just wanted to highlight one of his comments on the false accuser he was targeting:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
DD is a sort of compound MRA-PUA who argues for “Men’s Liberation Through ‘Game,’” as he put it in a Spearhead post some months ago. Apparently, if dudes learn how to get the hot babes to give them strings-free sexy times, through the magic of “game,” this will help to “reduce the unilateral enslavement of men through marriage.”
And what attracts the ladies more than the ability to kill? Not much, apparently. If you’ve got that magic killing touch, everyone around you will sense your manly power:
You are a man. A man is a survivor, a hunter, a protector of loved ones. The essence of manliness is controlled power. … That is what women love and what other men respect. Women, most of them anyway, are unable to use force and must rely on men where force is required. … If you lack the ability to kill other people with your bare hands, you will be perceived as if something is missing from your manliness. …
If you can kill, the ladies will pick up on this instantly:
[H]aving the ability substantially raises the value she instinctively perceives you to have. Which, as we know, leads to all manner of good things.
I believe he’s referring to blowjobs.
Oh, and other dudes will be impressed, too:
The respect of other men is also greatly influenced by your killing ability. Up until graduation from high school, the male social hierarchy has a great deal to do with “who can beat up whom”, and although the hierarchy among adult men is more dependent on social and professional status signals, men never stop instinctively evaluating you by what they perceive your killing ability to be, and respecting or disrespecting you accordingly.
And this will set you apart from all the wimpy emo hipsters of the world, who couldn’t even fight a girl:
If there is a “defining” degree of killing ability that makes you “manly”, it is defined by comparison with the female of the species. …
In these dismal times, men who fall short of this line are not terribly rare. Many of the emaciated hipsters and cubicle-dwellers of our generation would have trouble against a Juanita from a rougher neighborhood. These men, due to their lack of killing ability, are seen as unmanly by both men and women.
Meanwhile, your ability to kill will make others sit up and take notice:
The ability to kill makes your feelings relevant. If you lose your temper, someone dies.
This of course implies good things about you – the fact that you aren’t in jail right now means that you are a man in control of his emotions. A man who never loses his temper. Everyone around you subconsciously understands this and respects you for it. It lets people know they can trust you.
Yeah, nothing screams “trustworthy” more than a guy going on and on about how he could kill you with his bare hands.
Also, the ability to kill can help to prevent the ladies from blabbing endlessly about their stupid lady crap to you:
A woman who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she will have less than three seconds to live from the second she makes you lose your temper is not going to set out to intentionally poke and prod you past your breaking point.
Aw, yeah, it’s good to be a potential bare-hands killer:
[Y]ou will be afforded a completely unprecedented kind of respect. …
When you are The Man, everyone around takes note. It is a form of celebrity. Women gravitate to you, pulled by the invisible streams of attention, respect and deference which we all subconsciously sense in any social situation.
Given the sort of adoring attention DD must get from the ladies, it’s sort of amazing that he finds time to even keep up a blog at all.
We need a Godwin’s Law expansion pack to deal with white dudes who compare their lives with that of slaves in the Antebellum south. Well, for those who compare their lives to slaves without concluding: “Wow, my life is really much, much better than that of a slave. For example, I am not enslaved!” That’s not, alas, the conclusion drawn by this spelling-challenged Men’s Rights Redditor:
I’ll give Sofia, the antifeminist bloggress behind the blog Sofiastry, credit for one thing: unlike a lot of Men’s Rightsers, she doesn’t deny that there is a wage gap between men and women. She just thinks that it’s justified – that women should be paid less.
Why? Well, I admit I don’t quite understand her explanation, which has something to do with women getting worse grades in school, working less, and, well, whatever the hell she’s trying to say here:
women who are likely seen in executive and higher-earning positions are estrogenically flawed in their lack of sufficient desire to prioritize family life. Its the equivalent of a man who has no creative, intellectual or ambitious drive — all hallmarks of testosterone.
Oh, and because, like Barbie, women think that math class is tough:
can it not simply be reduced to the fact that the average man has more of of an aptitude for finance and numbers than the average woman?
In a followup post, Sofia raised a critical issue that she somehow had overlooked in her earlier analysis: women are a bunch of blubbering crybabies.
I couldn’t count on one hand the number of times a female co-worker cried on the job (myself included), but I couldn’t name a single male (homosexuals excluded & even then…). Women are more emotional, more likely to take days off for such reasons (or no reason) and quantifiably put in less hours on the job. Depending on the field, I’d also wager that women are less likely to revolutionize an industry or make the same amount of exceptional contributions men do.
Seriously, gal. Don’t be a bunch of Lady-Boehners. Stop all of your sobbing! (Oh, oh oh.)
From time to time, something will happen on the Internet or in real life that I know I should write about for Man Boobz, but it’s so infuriating or depressing that I can’t bring myself to write about it. The recent bullshit on Reddit involving a young woman whose story of a sexual assault was met with angry disbelief until she provided video proof that her injuries were real is a perfect case in point.
Briefly, what happened is this:
A young woman posted about a sexual assault she’d endured a day or so earlier – a man had tried to rape her, pushing her to the ground and scraping her face on the pavement. In a separate topic she posted a picture of her injuries, most notably a giant scrape on her cheek. You can see it at right; click on the picture to see it full size.
Then another Redditor noticed that some time back, the same woman had posted a picture of herself in zombie makeup. This, he said, made him skeptical that her injuries were real — it was probably just a good makeup job.
That was all it took to send Reddit into a full internet lynch mob frenzy: obviously this woman was a liar and an attention whore and, even worse, possibly a feminist anti-rape activist! Redditors suddenly became both medical and makeup experts, and declared that the giant scrape on her face was obviously phony. (Not to me; I tried arguing with several of them to no avail.) It got ugly, very ugly, very quickly.
The woman at the heart of the storm asked if she needed to post an actual video of her cleaning the wound on her face to show that it was real; a redditor demanded that she do just that.
So she did. (Here it is.) Long story short: the scrape is real. The woman also posted a picture of the business card given to her by the police detective she’s spoken to when reporting the incident. It’s now pretty clear that there is no reason to doubt that her story is true. Even the Redditor who originally challenged her story realized that she was almost certainly telling the truth.
At this point the lynch mob lost its steam; some people even apologized to her.
But the evidence of the ugliness remains in a host of different threads and different subforums on Reddit. I honestly don’t have the energy or the patience to sift through all of the ugliness; luckily, Jezebel has given a decent account of the whole spectacle; you can go there to get some more of the details.
Naturally, Men’s Rightsers contributed to the ugliness – though most of the worst comments appeared outside of the Men’s Rights subreddit, and a surprising number of r/mr regulars refused to jump on the original “she’s a liar” bandwagon.
Don't put the pussy on a pedestal. Unless it's this pussy.
The blogger Fidelbogen likes to think of himself as some sort of grand theoretician of “counter-feminist” thinking. Which means that his posts are usually far too long and ponderous to read, much less to write about. His ideas – at least judging from the few posts of his I’ve had the patience to wade through — are really not much more advanced than your typical MRA; he’s just much more pretentious (and long-winded) about it.
He is, in other words, the sort of guy who could take 3000 words to explain the rather basic MRA notion that women control men with their vaginas.
I’ll give him credit for one thing: despite his vague title, Fidelbogen states his thesis quite plainly at the start:
Female sexuality is raised high upon an altar like a golden calf. Male sexuality is looked upon as a ratty old kitchen chair with a cracked vinyl seat, under suspicion of mildew.
Well, ok, not the very start. Right about here:
This disparity, this imbalance, this . . . . inequality, accounts for most of women’s power over men. By extension, it accounts for a great deal of feminism’s leverage in the realm of gender politics.
In other words: vagina=power.
I leave it to the poets to wax lyrical about the mysteries of the eternal feminine, and to the psychoanalytic priesthood to plumb its shadowy depths. As a political tactician and theorist, it is my cold-blooded task merely to figure out how the world works, blabbity blabbity bloo.
Ok, those last three words are my paraphrase of his argument. Focus, Fidelbogen, focus!
The higher valuation assigned to female sexuality generates a seller’s market for women in the so-called game of love. That is how the world works; women do not queue or cluster in quest of men’s favors. No, it is nearly always men who act this way around women.
Deprived of euphemism, the case is this: women have cornered the market on sexual intercourse, and are able to dictate the price and the accompanying politics much as OPEC might set the terms for oil. …
Understand, that the higher valuation of female sexuality translates into both female power and loss of male power. Since female supremacy is feminism’s driving ambition, it makes sense that the women’s movement has undertaken to siphon power away from men using every siphon hose imaginable.
Normally, I would assume this last bit was some kind of sniggering reference to blowjobs. As Fidelbogen seems to be utterly without a sense of humor, I have to assume it’s merely a belabored metaphor.
So how do the evil feminists siphon away male power? By driving along some sort of road:
Certain lanes, deeply rutted by age-old usage, serve handily along feminism’s route to power.
So after siphoning their way down this road, we (and the evil feminists) arrive at what I’ll call (to keep Fidelbogen’s metaphor going) “Courtship Lane.”
The word “courtship” is revealing. Men are the “courtiers”, which is to say lackeys or sycophants who wait upon the pleasure of their “lord”. In courtship, more often than otherwise, women hold all the cards. Feminists, being women, are well aware of this. But they are also aware that the realm of courtship, while being women’s greatest zone of power over men, is likewise a critical link in the chain of power which binds men specifically to the designs of feminist domination.
After a bit of empty rhetoric, Prof. F continues:
Most women are aware of their superior sexual bargaining power. And many women have been politicized to some degree (more or less) by feminist ideology. This latter group will most certainly carry their politicized outlook into the sexual bargaining arena, and in their minds both feminist ideology and the knowledge of their age-old power will meld together into a troublesome sort of hybrid entity.
Fidelbogen, alas, does not take the opportunity to name this dastardly “hybrid entity.” Let’s just call it THE FEMIGINA!! (In all caps, with two exclamation points.)
At this point, Prof. F loses what little steam his argument has, and begins prattling about this and that and the evils of feminism. I will attempt to convey the gist of it with the following excerpts. In order to truly capture the flavor of it, I will replace the traditional ellipses – used to indicate excised material – with the phrase “blabbity blabbity.”
Blabbity blabbity to gauge the extent of feminist indoctrination among the female population would be like measuring the spread of a gaseous substance with a rubber band. Blabbity blabbity [f]eminism has blabbity blabbity secured a tremendous power over men by means of a momentous bio-political conjunction. Blabbity moral corona of the ideology blabbity female noosphere blabbity blabbity feminist-tinted spectacles blabbity blabbity the path lies clear before us.
And then he comes to his point:
Men should cease to value female sexuality beyond a certain fixed rate. Once the cost exceeds this rate, the value should fall to zero—leaving the purveyors in their deserted market stall.
Yep. That’s right. He’s talking about what we here on Man Boobz know as the Cock Blockade.
Blabbity blabbity it would go against nature blabbity blabbity laborious gritting of teeth. Blabbity blabbity supremely human accomplishment. Blabbity blabbity we are more than simply animals.
And he comes to another point:
Devaluation of female sexuality would alter the balance of power between the sexes. There would come a point where a man, any man, could make the personal choice to cast loose from women altogether—in all but the peripheral aspects of his life.
Blabbity blabbity men would need to cut each other some slack blabbity blabbity stop competing with other men in the customary arena where female flesh is the prize. Blabbity blabbity. The question “are ya getting any?”, along with the adolescent mindset it signals, would be out of place in this altered scheme of things.
And this would put the ladies in their place – standing lonely in their vagina stalls, gamely trying to interest men in their now worthless vaginas.
Women would be the courtiers, the ones who queue and cluster. Deny women their fundamental age-old power, and feminism would find itself reeling in shock as though from a serious blood loss. The best way for men to free themselves from the boa-constrictor grip of feminism is to free themselves from the power of women.
So now I have the image of lady boa-constrictors with head wounds standing in a line, displaying their boa-constrictor vaginas with a sort of desperate hopefulness to the wholly uninterested men who pass by.
After a good deal of blathering so tedious it’s not even worth quoting in part, Fidelbogen begins to ponder the power of “no.”
[M]en must play hard to get. They must learn to exercise the very same option which has historically been the province of women, namely, the power to say NO.
Saying no lies coiled at the very heart of playing hard to get. Saying no signifies a withdrawal which generates a vacuum along its line of retreat, and this vacuum by its draft draws the other into a pursuit by default.
I feel a bit of a breeze myself, but I think that’s just because Prof. F is talking a lot of wind.
Let’s move from breezes to earthquakes:
The changes I am discussing here would amount to a tectonic realignment of unquestionably world-historic magnitude. An inversion of the Victorian pedestal.
The old way of doing things, Prof. F tells us,
I have decided to call it the pussy paradigm—a somewhat vulgar expression to be sure, but it has the common touch!
Ironically, the common touch is something hetero dudes will have to become masters at if they swear off the ladies. Prof. F continues:
So, this pussy paradigm belongs in the category of things which predate feminism’s arrival in the world. And when the feminists got here, they saw in a flash where their advantage lay, and they closed in, and they threw a harness around it.
They threw a harness around a paradigm?
The heart of feminism is female supremacism, and the heart of female supremacism is the pussy paradigm. Remember this if you remember nothing else.
So what does Prof. F call his pussy-optional way of doing things? The “optionality paradigm.” That is, dudes can have sex with women or not, whatever they want, and shouldn’t pressure one another to score with the ladies. (I’m not quite sure how, in Professor F’s economic model, the price of pussy can be reduced to zero if some dudes are still interested in it, but I confess that I only sort of skimmed that bit of his post. Life is short, and Fidelbogen’s posts are long.)
More blabbity blabbity:
The future, in theory, should see a migration of the optionality paradigm toward the center of the map within hetero-normative male culture, along with a corresponding displacement of the pussy paradigm toward the perimeter. This would exactly reverse the present disposition of forces. The optionality paradigm would, at that point, become the ruling paradigm.
After reading this turgid turd of a paragraph , I decided to cut my losses and skip directly to Professor F’s grand conclusion. Which turns out to be neither grand nor much of a conclusion:
My endeavor in writing has been to flesh it out somewhat. To write about it is to give it a form, to make the inchoate choate, to fashion an anchor of words that can hold things usefully in place so we can discuss them, if need be, with a view toward implementation and concrete action. The time to draft contingency plans is now. Put these ideas in your thinking cap and ponder their utility.
Even better, put them in a small bag, weigh it down with rocks, and toss it into the nearest large body of water.
Jesus, this turned into a long post. Still, it’s only about half the length of Prof. F’s original.
