Once again, a look at some of the comments that people try to leave here, but which for assorted reasons don’t get past the rigorous We Hunted the Mammoth screening process.
I kid; the process is not rigorous at all. You just need to pass a minimal standard of basic human decency. Here’s an assortment of comments from people who, well, fell short. In each instance, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to guess why.
Uh oh! Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men is outraged by the latest terrible calumny besmirching the good name of the Men’s Rights movement. That Big Lie? That Men’s Rights Activists are boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road.
As Esmay puts it, in his characteristically overheated prose, the very notion that there is such a boycott
is a completely fabricated story by a handful of elitists abusing their power in the media–and betraying their fellow journalists while doing it.
Using his powerful internet detective skills, Esmay has managed to track down “the source of the lie,” which, as he sees it, “appears to have originated from a discredited hate-blogger named David Futrelle … .”
I’ve left off the rest of his sentence, as it is straight-up libel. Well, so is the bit about me being a “discredited hate-blogger,” and the part about the “lie” originating with me. I will give him credit for managing to spell my name correctly.
I’ll cop to the fact that my post on a would-be boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road set off an avalanche of articles on the subject. The Mary Sue, I believe, was the first to pick up the story, and was quickly followed by a few others. And then other writers piggybacked off of them. For better or worse, that’s how it works in online journalism these days.
But if Esmay is looking for the source of the incorrect notion that self-described Men’s Rights activists were behind the “boycott,” well, he’s not going to find it in my post, which contained no mention of Men’s Right Activists at all.
Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.
The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,
You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)
And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.
Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.
But Esmay seems to think that there is some vast conspiracy afoot, writing that
we are really serious with this question: was anyone paid to put this fake story in the press? If so, who was paid and who did the paying?
Don’t be silly. No money changes hands. At least no human money. We do it under direct orders from our feline overlordsladies.
Apparently, to Dean Esmay at least, posting that Mad Max: Fury Road is being boycotted by MRAs, when most of the boycotters are in fact merely MRA-adjacent, is a greater crime against truth than denying the Holocaust.
You may recall a fellow name Albert Calabrese from Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant GQ article about A Voice for Men’s conference last summer. You may not remember the name, but you may recall one important fact about him: He thinks the age of consent should be lowered to twelve years. “I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex,” he told Sharlet, “than on the side of ruining men’s lives.”
Calabrese, a former substitute teacher, has made his own “errors,” having won himself a spot on the sex offender registry in Fayetteville, Arkansas for “Unlawful Sexual Conduct With A Minor.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (The PayPal page will say you are donating to Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Bad news, guys! Over on the Red Pill subreddit, the regulars have uncovered a massive conspiracy to dupe men into relationships with women who are not the 8/10 would-bang hotties that they seem! This conspiracy is known as “makeup” — and you may already be a victim!
Earlier today, a Red Pill Redditor calling himself constructiveasshole dropped a massive truth bomb on his Red Pill colleagues. It turns out that that pretty gal you have your eye on — or that you might even be dating! — is actually … not so pretty. Because women are FAKE.
Constructiveasshole, drawing on his own sad story, revealed some of the dirty tricks that women use to lure men to their doom:
The dude behind the Black Pill blog — formerly known as Omega Virgin Revolt — has some harsh words for the conspiracy theorists who seem to be everywhere online.
Does he take them to task for the bizarre anti-Semitism that infects their ranks? No. For declaring everything from the Kennedy assassination to the recent record snowfall in Boston to be “False Flags?” No again. For convincing themselves that TV news anchors routinely shape-shift into their reptilian forms and back again while on the air, just to screw with us? No again, again.
Is the bellicose conspiracy doofus Alex Jones moving further into Men’s Rights territory?
In this video, posted on his Infowars site today, Jones introduces a special report on what he calls the “bizarre excesses of the anti-human transhumanist super-Nazis who are the feminazis.”
In the report itself, Infowars’ Paul Watson – like Jones, a bit of a yeller — describes an evil plot spearheaded by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and the National Basketball Association to – brace yourself – encourage men to do more housework and child care. This includes, Watson reports ominously, scrubbing the dishes and even doing laundry.
In his must-read GQ story on A Voice for Men’s conference last summer, Jeff Sharlet detailed an unsettling encounter between his friend Blair and AVFM’s “collegiate activism director” Sage Gerard, who, Blair told Sharlet, crudely propositioned her and gave her “the most unconsensual hug I have ever known.” (I wrote about it here.)
Now Gerard has offered a rebuttal of sorts to Sharlet’s article and, well, it’s nearly as creepy as the incident itself. Gerard admits that he was indeed flirting with her and that, yes, “[m]y talking to her included a reassuring knee pat and a hug.”
He also claims that Blair was literally hired by GQ in order to flirt with men at the conference and lure one or more of them into raping her.
Pity the poor MRA meme-makers. It’s hard for them to find real-world images to illustrate their deeply held belief that women in general (and feminists in particular) secretly or not-so-secretly run the world.
Indeed, there seems to be a lot of photographic evidence that supports a rather different conclusion about women and power. Do women run the US congress? Nope.