We Hunted The Mammoth
The final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as all former English majors will tell you, consists of what has become known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, a punctuation-deprived 24,000-word stream-of-consciousness rush of words reflecting the thoughts of Mrs. Bloom as she lies in bed next to her husband Leopold Bloom.
The soliloquy is famous as much for its smuttiness as for its style, ending with a much-quoted passage in which Mrs. Bloom basically invents the notion of Yes Means Yes:
Earlier this week, Reddit announced a perplexing new plan to “contain” the worst bigots on the site. Instead of simply banning the bigots, their subreddits would simply be “reclassified.” Redditors would have to sign into them much as they now sign into the site’s NSFW subreddits, and, presumably to avoid angering advertisers, Reddit would remove all ads from them.
In other words, as I noted the other day, Reddit has decided to fight the bigots … by funding ad-free forums for them.
Well, the folks in the 4/chan subreddit (not 4chan itself; the Reddit incarnation of it) want to get into that sweet, sweet ad-free action. So one enterprising channer suggested that they spam a thread with the n-word to prove they’re as hateful as the hateful assholes of r/coontown:
Most conspiracy theorists are surprisingly uncreative in their choice of villains, blaming all the ills in the world on one or more alleged evildoers in a fairly short list: the Jews, the government, the Illuminati, space aliens, and a handful of other familiar suspects.
One Men’s Rights activist wants to add a few more names to the list: the women’s magazines Glamour, Allure, Self, Vogue, and, most terrifyingly, Teen Vogue.
Is MRA thinking simply beyond satire?
Cartoonist Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar on Twitter) recently decided to offer a satirical take on the false rape accusation paranoia that’s endemic in Men’s Rights circles, producing the list of tips below, designed to mirror some of the terrible advice that’s regularly given to women on how to avoid rape.
If there are any stray British MRAs reading this blog, have I found an opportunity for you! How would you like to serve under the political whiz-kid who triumphantly led the Justice for Men And Boys (and women who love them) Party a landslide victory in the UK election this May, unexpectedly winning 216 seats in …
Oh, wait, the party didn’t win 216 seats. It got 216 votes. Out of 30,691,680 total votes cast, for a stunning 0.0007% of the total.
That’s one-fortieth the votes received by the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol party, one-eighteenth of those won by the old school classic Monster Raving Loony Party. (Note to non-Brits: those are both real parties.) 153 of these votes were for J4MB leader and A Voice for Men friend Mike Buchanan; 63 went to the party’s other candidate.
Anyway, fresh off this magnificent triumph, Buchanan has just announced that he’s now taking applications for an assistant — that is, for the prestigious post of Deputy Leader for the party. He’s looking for someone who will help to “enable the party to move to the next stage of its development.” which presumably involves getting more than 0.0007% of the vote next time.
Dean Esmay, the Chief Operations Officer (whatever that is) of A Voice for Men, has scored a major public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement with his aggressive promotion of an exciting new Twitter hashtag, #SpankAFeminist.
In what I can only assume is an attempt to convince the world that MRAs do indeed spend a good portion of their days fantasizing about doing physical harm to feminists, Esmay explains in a post on AVFM that the hashtag is necessary “because it’s finally time to put abusive liars over the knee.”
I doubt you would be terribly shocked if I told you that fans of the misogynistic not-quite-Nazi pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh aren’t exactly celebrating Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair. And they’re not: on the Roosh V forum, the regulars have filled a five-page-and-still-growing thread with predictably transphobic outbursts –“Kill it with fire” gifs, references to Jenner not as a “she” or even a “he” but an “it,” emphatic announcements of “would not bang.”
You might be a little surprised, though — as I was — to discover that some of these lovely fellows are blaming the whole thing on … the Jews.
Karen Straughan, the soporific, pseudoscientific YouTube antifeminist, doesn’t seem on the surface much like a “Red Pill Woman.” She’s a single mother with short hair, well past “the wall,” who makes a point of not wearing makeup in her videos.
But she’s got one quality that apparently makes up for all of her other defects as a Red Pill gal: she tells the Red Pill guys exactly what they want to hear, defending their noxious views, feeding their sense of victimhood, and hand-waving away their blatant misogyny.
So it’s hardly a surprise that she got a warm welcome when she showed up yesterday in the Red Pill subreddit to do an “ask me anything.” Today, I girded my loins and popped a caffeine pill and read through her answers. Well, skimmed them, anyway; I’m no masochist.
I learned a lot. Unfortunately, most of what I learned was not true.
While Men’s Rights Activists are quick to label virtually any woman that they disagree with a feminist, they react with outrage when anyone who is not a self-admitted MRA is described as one.
The folks at A Voice for Men are still fuming about what they consider a “trust-shattering” media scandal: the fact that a bunch of news outlets wrote about a supposed Men’s Rights boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, when in fact the virulently antifeminist Youtube blabber calling for the boycott wasn’t technically a Men’s Rights activist at all.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude cluttering up my Twitter mentions with demands I take some sort of action against a tiny handful of commenters on this blog who have referred to the woman-hating mass killer Elliot Rodger as an MRA, even though, as far as we know, he wasn’t one.
To which I can only say: Sorry, guys. You’re Kleenex. And you’d better get used to it.
So my post on Aaron Clarey’s Return of Kings call for a boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road went a bit viral last week, garnering thousands of shares and retweets on social media and inspiring dozens of articles on sites ranging from The Mary Sue to the Guardian and even the Daily Mail, all helping to expose the manly men of the manosphere as the entitled manbabies they are, so threatened by women with power that the very thought of Charlize Theron as a badass postapocalyptic road warrior causes them to lose their collective shit.
Their “boycott” is a bit of a failure as well, to say the least. The film — which so far has garnered an impressive 98% of positive reviews according to Rotten Tomatoes — took in close to $17 million at the box office on Friday (in North America), and is expected to earn more than $40 million this weekend alone.
