We Hunted The Mammoth
The not-so-good folks at A Voice for Men are still so steamed about the Southern Poverty Law Center calling them out on their misogyny that they can’t think straight. Consider the unhinged anti-SPLC rant AVFM’s “chief operations officer” Dean Esmay posted on the site after the SPLC’s Mark Potok appeared on David Pakman’s internet show last week.
Last month, police say, University of Mary Washington student and feminist/LGBT activist Grace Mann was murdered — bound and asphyxiated by a male housemate and fellow student.
An antifeminist blogger is blaming her death on feminist jokes about misandry.
So I was wondering if any of A Voice for Men’s readers had spoken up in the comments there about a rather sensitive subject: the fact that the supposed “human rights” site recently published a post that was not only 1) an apologia for marital rape but also, 2) written by a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan.
When I took at look at the comments there this morning, the answer was (of course) no: there was no mention of AVFM contributor Amartya Talukdar’s numerous Tweets describing the Holocaust as a hoax, Hitler as a great man, and Hillary Clinton as a “Jewess.”
Instead, I found that those who challenged Talukdar’s post (archived here) — which defended the Indian government’s refusal to see marital rape as rape — got harsh rebukes from other AVFM commenters and the site’s moderators, who went so far as to actually ban two commenters unhappy with Talukdar’s rape apologia.
No, really.
So have you been following this whole #HowToSpotAFeminist thing on the Tweeter? The hashtag was started a couple of days ago by some right-wing radio dudes as an excuse to say mean things about feminism. By yesterday it had turned into a monster, with some feminists jumping in to try to combat the forces of darkness; as I write this at 7:28 AM Wednesday it’s still going strong.
Happily, the hashtag is proving to be very educational. So I would like to share with you The top 10 shocking “truths” about feminism I’ve learned from #HowToSpotAFeminist. You may want to take notes, as some of them are truly shocking indeed.
A Voice for Men seems to joining the ranks of the marital rape deniers. In a post on the site today (archived here), AVFM contributor Amartya Talukdar attacks proposed laws to criminalize marital rape in India as part of an evil feminist plot to “criminalize marriage” itself. Because, in his mind, there is no such thing as marital rape.
In the post, he offers a muddled assortment of “arguments” against the very idea of marital rape. Echoing the, er, logic of sci-fi author and far-right crank Vox Day, Talukdar explains that once a woman marries a man she gives up her right to say “no” to sex with her husband.
Earlier today, several readers alerted me to a new video out with an alarming title: Vox Day Admits to Sex with Women Without Consent, Says Gay is a Birth Defect.
The video, a 46-minute interview of Science Fiction’s biggest asshole conducted by YouTuber David Pakman, doesn’t quite live up to its sensational title (which I now see Pakman has changed).
While Day — real name Theodore Beale — does indeed say that gayness is a birth defect, he’s evasive when Pakman asks him point-blank about some of the more amazingly wrong and creepy things he’s written about rape. Indeed, he’s so evasive in his answers it’s easy to lose track of what exactly Pakman is trying to get him to clarify.
A writer from Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible Return of Kings site recently got himself into a bit of trouble at a white power convention in Tennessee.
The problem wasn’t that the writer, one Blair Naso, didn’t fit in with the motley assortment of Hitler-lovers and former National Review writers who attended the 2015 American Renaissance conference, put on by an organization that actually has won itself an official “hate group” designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center for its virulent racism and its obsessive advocacy for a white “homeland.”
No, he fit in fine, ideologically speaking. In a post for Return of Kings, Naso praised the AmRen crowd for “doing a wonderful work,” and “saying the things that others are terrified to say.”
The problem? Well, Mr. Naso got a wee bit drunk and started harassing women at a local bar. As Naso sheepishly admits in his ROK post,
Earlier today, the illustrious Honey Badger Brigade was booted from the Calgary Expo, a major Canadian fan convention devoted to all varieties of geeky pop culture.
The Honey Badgers — a mostly female A Voice for Men spinoff group known for its unlistenable internet “radio” shows — was sent packing after conventioneers complained about their connections to #GamerGate — a nine-month-long orgy of harassment targeting outspoken women in gaming and their supporters — and their alleged disruption of a panel devoted to women in comics.
According to Calgary Expo officials, the group was kicked out for “actively disregarding” the Expo’s efforts to provide “a positive and safe event” for attendees.
So there’s a giant, growing, and extremely creepy megathread up on Reddit at the moment, and for once, the creepiness isn’t coming from inside the Reddit. Well, less of the creepiness is coming from Reddit than you might expect.
Yesterday, you see, a Redditor known as BA_Baracus posted a couple of simple questions to AskReddit: Women of Reddit, when did you first notice that men were looking at you in a sexual way? How old were you and how did it make you feel?
This wasn’t the first time he’d posted a question to his fellow Redditors; he’s posted a bunch, including “People of reddit with eyes that point in different directions, which one of them is usually looking at me?” and, er, “Recent rape victims of Reddit, how did it happen, and what the hell were you doing in India?” None of these questions got much of a response.
But this time, well, thousands of “women of Reddit” stepped forward to tell the horrifying yet in most cases completely unsurprising stories of the first time men started perving on them, in many cases before they were even teenagers.
Here’s a sampling of some of their stories. TRIGGER WARNING for extreme fucking creepiness.
ATTENTION, MEN OF THE WORLD! More specifically, straight men. Even more specifically, straight men who are gigantic woman-hating douchebags.
Your boy Roosh Valizadeh, pickup guru and rape legalization advocate, would like to warn you about the impending end of the world, at least in terms of you being able to get into women’s pants.
Inspired by the DEFCON system used by the US Military to rate the level of military threat — DEFCON 5 means “chill out, we’ve got this” and DEFCON 1 means “holy crap we’re all gonna die” — Roosh has come up with what he calls the DEFCOCK system — get it? get it? — in order to give dudes “objective and standardized information” on how dude-friendly different countries are.
In countries currently at DEFCOCK 5 — that is, which have what he thinks as the healthiest environment for men — (straight, cis) men benefit from
