The feminist activists amongst you may have been a bit baffled by the peculiar activist strategy of the Men’s Rights movement. That is, doing absolutely nothing beyond yelling a lot online, flooding comments of newspaper articles with Men’s Rights rants, and sometimes harassing individual women.
But apparently this is all part of their super seekret master plan. A plan, moreover, which is going gangbusters, all appearances to the contrary. For, apparently unbeknownst to virtually everyone in the world, the Men’s Rights movement is poised for a gigantic mainstream breakthrough. Any moment now!
After yesterday’s horribleness, here’s a bit of MRA pontificating that’s mostly just absurd. In the Men’s Rights subreddit, our dear old friend OuiCrudites spells out the Seven Step Plan that is destroying men today. He doesn’t explain 1) who exactly is taking these steps, or 2) why exactly they want to destroy men, but, you know, I think we can just assume 1) the evil feminist gynomatriarchy/women in general and 2) EEEEEEVIL.
Interesting that two whole steps out of the seven here involve complaints about “females” dating thuggy alpha bad boys instead of decent, hard-working nice guys like those you might find posting thoughtful comments on gender relations in helpful list form on Reddit.
How manosphere doofuses think the world actually works.
Another in an ongoing series of posts on seminal works in the manosphere canon, as it were. At some point, I’ll make a page for these.
Like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, F. Roger Devlin’s 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power (downloadable here) is a kind of Manospherianurtext, an original source of many of the terrible ideas that are now accepted as gospel wherever misogynists gather in large numbers online. Though the name of Devlin is hardly as well known as that of Farrell, many of his ideas, most notably his reworked notion of “hypergamy” — which we will get to in a minute — are omnipresent in the manosphere.
So WF Price of The Spearhead, who responded to my previous post criticizing his and his commenters’ appalling reactions to the Cleveland abductions with thoughtfulness and maturity (by which I mean a bizarre and weirdly racist personal attack on a commenter here), has now taken offense to a darkly satirical piece the Onion ran in the wake of the revelations of what allegedly went on Ariel Castro’s house for the past 11 years.
The Onion piece wasn’t funny, exactly, nor was it meant to be; it was pretty clearly the raw reaction of someone reacting with appropriate horror to the details of Castro’s alleged crimes, which seem to surpass even the worst “man-hater’s” vision of male depravity. Price, rather missing the point, sees the Onion piece as simple “feminist man-hatred” and suggests that it proves his point all along: that patriarchy is a lie.
The Castro brothers were neither patriarchal nor privileged; they were low-life predators from the bottom of society. Not to say that low-class men are all bad people, either, but men without privilege are the most likely to commit crimes, for obvious reasons. …
The myth of male power and privilege is just that, and the Cleveland case is one more pebble on the mountain of evidence that exposes it for a lie.
Empowering men in their families will not lead to more crimes against women and girls, but fewer.
Huh. So I guess if we make all men rich, and order the police to stop responding to all “domestic disturbance” calls, all our problems will be solved!
Never mind that Ariel Castro seems to have lorded it over his now-dead ex when he was involved with her, reportedly brutalizing and terrorizing her and getting away with it in part because he threatened to further brutalize her if she testified against him. He may not have had much power in the wider world, but he certainly seems to have felt quite “empowered” in his dealings with women and girls, and the “justice” system didn’t provide any justice to his apparent victims, even before the kidnappings.
And never mind that Price continues to refer to the “Castro brothers” although the police are saying that Ariel Castro acted alone.
Despite not knowing the basic facts of the case, Price seems to like the idea of using cases like this one to push his antifeminist agenda. According to him, his attempts to use the case to “refute” the feminist idea that
male privilege [is] tied to abuse of women … really enraged them, because how dare I use one of “their” cases to point out that they are wrong. From their perspective, it should be a sacred feminist right to use these incidents against men as a political bludgeon so as to coerce more concessions, more power, etc. Some went so far as to accuse me of blaming women and feminists for the kidnappings themselves (rubbish), while a few others sent me some hate mail.
But you know, I’m going to keep it up, because they do not have the sole right to the narrative when convenient tragedies occur. …
Feminists will doubtless use examples of outrageous crimes in an effort to remove more men from their families, thereby creating both more victims and more criminals. They will use examples like the Castro brothers’ kidnapping whenever and wherever they can. We must stop them from doing so, and we must not be intimidated by their feigned moral outrage when we speak the truth about their agenda.
Dude. if you think the reactions people are having to the Cleveland abductions — or to the terrible things you and your commenters have said about them — are in any way “feigned,” then I can only suggest that you may have completely lost touch with your humanity.
Once again, the Spearhead’s commenters lived up to their past standards of moral monsterhood, continuing to put the blame for Ariel Castro’s crimes (and pretty much every other ill) on feminism and women in general. Here are some selections. You’ll notice the one wishing death on feminists is officially “well-liked” by the commentariat there.
The only vaguely encouraging thing in the entire discussion? That Dana’s call for urban genocide got a couple of downvotes. To the two Spearhead readers who don’t think wiping out an entire community of decent people because of the behavior of one man is a good idea, I would like to say “thanks.” And also suggest that maybe you should stop reading The Spearhead.
EDITED: Added paragraphs about Ariel Castro’s alleged brutality towards his ex, and clarification that only he has been charged, not his brothers.
I’ve been reading through the archives of Bang Some Chicks, a PUA parody blog featuring the imaginary exploits of the incredibly stupid chick-bangers F-Close Frank and DTF Dave and a couple of other faux PUAs.
Men’s Rights Activists have a lot more in common with white supremacists than they’d like to admit.
Just a quick update on the case of Arianna Pattek, the recent Georgetown graduate targeted for harassment by A Voice for Men and others, including the white supremacists at Stormfront. As I pointed out in an earlier piece, the “detective work” that led A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam and the other Pattek-bashers to target her was incredibly inept and sloppy, and it’s clear beyond any possible doubt that she has nothing whatsoever to do with the misandrist blog they accused her of writing, which increasingly obviously seems to be an utter hoax.
And so the MRAs have found yet another woman to hate.
Earlier this month, as many of you no doubt know, a Men’s Rights group sponsored a lecture at the University of Toronto. The event drew protesters, and the protesters drew MRAs with video cameras. One of the MRAs filmed a confrontation between a red-haired feminist activist and a number of MRAs who continually interrupted her as she tried to read a brief statement.
Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters. And so, after video of the confrontation was uploaded to YouTube, and linked to on the Men’s Rights subreddit and elsewhere, she became a virtual punching bag for the angry misogynists of the internet.
The tech sector fighting off feminism (artist’s conception).
So we’ve been talking a lot about the MRA response to the Adria Richards firing over the past few days, but (like a lot of the regulars here, I suspect) I’ve had one lingering question in my mind: what does eminent MRA philosopher Cooter Bee think about all of this? Well I am pleased to report that Mr. Bee has finally weighed in on the subject in a comment over on The Spearhead.
Always a model of thoughtfulness and restraint, Mr. Bee suggests that the best way to deal with the problem of women in technology – rightfully a man’s place – is for men in tech to go on a giant man strike until civilization starts to crumble:
And so the Internet has found a new woman to hate. Most of you are probably already familiar with the Adria Richards debacle that’s developed over the past several days. If not, Jill at Feministe has a good summary of events:
Adria Richards, formerly of the company SendGrid, was at a tech conference this week when some dudes behind her made a series of inappropriate and sexual jokes. Annoyed by the pervasiveness of misogyny in the tech world, she snapped a photo of them and put in on Twitter with a complaint. One of the conference organizers spoke to the men and they apologized. Totally reasonable! Good response, PyCon. Later, one of the dudes got fired. Instead of getting mad at the company that made the choice to fire him, the internet hordes descended on Adria. She was on the receiving end of rape and death threats. Her address and phone number were published. Her blog and her company’s website came under DDoS attack. Oh and then her company, SendGrid, fired her.
Like Jill, I think firing someone for a “dongle” joke is an overreaction, to say the least. But Richards wasn’t responsible for that; indeed, she told the fired man she hoped his employer would reconsider and take him back.
The regulars at PUAhate.com – we’ve met thembefore — are a strange and bitter bunch. Most seem to be self-loathing so-called “incels” who blame their lack of romantic and sexual success on their average or below-average looks. Rejecting the basic premise of the pickup artist crowd – that average guys can transform themselves into suave lotharios by mastering manipulative pickup formulas – the PUAhate regulars tend to be true believers in what they somewhat pretentiously call “looks theory,” the odd and obviously untrue notion that women only date men with “male model” looks.
PUA makes you think that all your problems are because of your personality/behaviour – i.e. things you can control. So when you keep failing, it means that YOU are fucking up and doing things wrong
the reality is that many of us just lost the genetic lottery. we are ugly, the wrong race, the wrong height etc, and that fucked us up. there is NOTHING we can do about it
So, naturally, the PUAhaters spend a lot of their time jealous of tall, good-looking men for their supposed monopoly on the women of the world — whom they also hate.
But the strange thing is that the PUAhaters pretty much hate everyone else as well. They get angry when guys they consider ugly score “hot chicks.” They get angry when guys who are good-looking but not male models get attention from “really hot girls.” And so on, and so on, and so on.
Indeed, many of the regulars seem to walk around in a perpetual state of rage, angry at each and every man who’s managed to pair up with a woman, not to mention the women as well.
One regular recently described his “day from hell” to his comrades:
To start the day I saw a couple where it was an average White guy with an OBESE Asian girl. They were walking around acting like they were trying to prove shit. LMAO. I wanted to kick the guy in the fucking nuts for dating that landwhale. If you’re going to use the racial advantage, at least date a girl who is under 300lbs. Later I go to the gym and see the same tall guys I usually do. Even if I had a good face, how the fuck do you compete with guys who are fucking 6’4”?
Then at the gym there’s this good looking White guy there talking to this Asian dude about how Asian girls are easy and how they approach him. To make things worse after that these fucking frat douchebags come in with their girlfriends to show off . Then to cap off the day a girl I used to know from freshman year walks right past me without even saying anything. I used to fucking live next door to this bitch and now she doesn’t even say anything and acts like a pretentious cunt. She’s an Indian girl dating a White dude lmao. Days like today make you wonder why you even still try in the first place.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, most of those posting on PUAhate don’t actually seem to be ugly by anyone’s standards but their own, at least judging from the pictures of themselves they sometimes post to the site, which reveal them to be mostly average-looking guys, with some of the regulars even quite conventionally handsome.
But evidently they would rather believe that they have “lost the genetic lottery” rather than face a more obvious explanation for why the girls don’t like them: because they’re shallow, self-obsessed assholes who hate themselves and hate women and radiate their bitterness from every pore. (And some are even creepier than this, like this pedophile – sorry, ephebophile – who’s angry at me personally because unlike him I don’t chase after 15-year-olds. Link NSFW.)
The PUAhaters often talk about getting surgeries to “correct” their supposed genetic flaws. They would do far better to spend that money on therapy.
