We Hunted The Mammoth
The fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit are getting worked up over imaginary feminists again!
Yesterday, in a discussion of paternity fraud, a brand-new Redditor who had never posted a comment before posted a completely unsourced screenshot of what quite a few of the regulars took to be some sort of official feminist statement on paternity fraud.
So Angry Harry, the dotty old British uncle of the Men’s Rights movement, has a post up vaguely warning that the virus software company Symantec just might soon have some sort of shareholders revolt on its hands because it dared to put a bunch of men’s rights sites on a “hate sites” blacklist, blocking access to them for some users of Symantec’s Rulespace software.
That’s kind of an old whine at this point, but what captured my fancy was this recent discussion about Harry’s article in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Oh, where to begin with all this? I’m charmed, of course, by the idea that feminism is just ruining things — ruining things! — for all the nice ladies in the tech world. I mean, it’s not like feminists have anything to complain about with regard to sexism amongst male techies. They’re just complainy complainers. Ladies in tech are doing just fine, thanks! Don’t take their word for it. Take the word of some random dude in the Men’s Rights subreddit for it.
But the real treat here is Hamakua’s nightmare vision of an army of secret “imbedded” Anita Sarkeesians infiltrating major corporations and … doing what, exactly? Secretly making videos about sexist tropes in video games in hidden compartments underneath their desks, like that secret nap compartment George had built under his desk at work on Seinfeld?
Beware the stealth Sarkeesians!
(Found this through the AgainstMensRights subreddit.)
A Voice for Men has a little Google Challenge for its readers, and I’m going to invite you to take part in it as well. In the midst of yet another post trying to gin up outrage over Facebook’s banning of violent rape memes and other such repugnant shit, new AVFM contributor and “former feminist” Jason Gregory sets forth this challenge, which he originally posted on his blog several weeks ago:
Never let it be said that the men of the MGTOW movement don’t focus on the important issues of our time. For example, over on MGTOWforums, a fellow named Andrew brought up a critical danger faced by today’s men, a danger that the mainstream media is too cowardly to address.
I refer, of course, to the rising danger that an innocent, decent, hard-working, good-looking fellow like Andrew might be forced into a relationship with some ugly fat lady.
The MRA hissy fit over Facebook continues. Over on A Voice for (Human) Men, our old friend John “The Other” Hembling offers up his take on the whole controversy, which has roused the usually torpid MRAs to “activism,” and somehow manages to be even more overheated and incoherent than even Paul Elam before him — and at times nearly as ponderous as the legendarily ponderous Fidelbogen as well.
So the manosphere blogger who calls himself The Red Pill Theorist has managed to work himself into a tizzy over a Wall Street Journal piece by a woman who — gasp! — froze some of her eggs in her 30s in order to give her more time in which to find the right guy with whom to have kids.
I was a little saddened to read recently that A Voice for Men — the self-proclaimed “Men’s Human Rights” site that has posted an open call to firebomb government buildings in its “activism” section — will no longer be writing about little old me.
Two weeks ago, you may recall, antifeminist crusader and recent A Voice for Men recruit Erin Pizzey made an “Ask Me Anything” appearance on Reddit which was a rousing success, at least by the standards of Reddit and the Men’s Rights movement. (By the standards of logic and ordinary human decency, not so much.) This Saturday, she gave a sort of encore.
UPDATE: Elam has retracted his original story. See the end of this post for more details.
Men’s Rights Activists often insist that false accusations of rape are literally as bad as rape itself, and that false accusers of rape should spend as much time in prison as actual rapists.
Presumably they feel the same way about false accusers of other crimes, from murder to check kiting.
So in the wake of Paul Elam’s reckless false accusations against recent Georgetown graduate Arianna Pattek, one would expect other MRAs to rise up en masse to demand that Elam turn himself in.
Elam, you may recall, accused Pattek of serious violations of civil rights laws, claiming that she, as an employee of Georgetown’s admissions office, showed clear bias against white men. Indeed, Elam didn’t even qualify his accusations with an “alleged,” as journalists routinely do when writing about those accused but not convicted of crimes. Here’s what he wrote about her:
EDIT 6/15/13: Tom Ball’s manifesto is no longer posted on A Voice for Men, though it isn’t clear if this is a website glitch or a change in policy on AVFM’s part; no announcement about taking it down has been made.
EDITED TO ADD: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it seems even more important to reinterate that influential Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men continues to host, in its “activism” section no less, a terrorist manifesto literally calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations. Until and unless that manifesto is removed, and A Voice for Men apologizes for hosting it, I will be linking to this post every time I mention A Voice for Men.
There has been another courthouse shooting. On Monday morning, the father of a man due in court for a child support hearing pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and shot his son’s ex wife and a friend of hers as they entered the lobby of the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington Delaware. After an exchange of gunfire with police that left two officers wounded, 68-year old Thomas Matusiewicz took his own life. The two women Matusiewcz shot were pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital.
