Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, some of the fellas are discussing a recent post from Arthur Goldwag on the Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch blog. Goldwag looks at some of the hero-bashing comments from MRAs in the wake of the Aurora shootings, which we’ve discussed here and here.
This somehow inspires the prolix Men’s Right Redditor Demonspawn to set forth some of his opinions about (most) women and how shitty they are. The whole discussion is worth reading, as a sort of case study in MRA hypocrisy: all this woman-hatred comes in a thread in which Reddit MRAs wax indignant once again that anyone might possibly label them hateful. (Also, how dare women suggest that there’s anything untoward about a dude hanging onto nude pics of an ex, when clearly not deleting them is a sign of “respect.”)
Looks like Demonspawn won himself a convert! Congrats. you beautiful douchebag.
Oh, you ladies, why do you even bother getting educated – sorry, “educated?” Don’t you know that if you get too educated you might end up marrying some dude who is less educated than you, which is apparently contrary to the laws of nature? Or maybe you’ll end up not getting married at all? The horror.
On The Spearhead, guest poster Lyn87 explains how he dropped some “red pill” knowledge on a buddy of his during a recent outing:
One guy has teenage daughters that he’s planning to put through college. I could not resist inserting some red pill into the mix, so I mentioned that 60% of degrees were going to women, and that women prefer to marry up. Since “educated” women don’t often go for “uneducated” men, a lot of women of his daughter’s generation were on their way toward spinsterhood for lack of “suitable” mates.
So women with education are only “educated” in scare-quotes. But men who are “uneducated” also get the scare quotes, because presumably they are wise beyond their years of formal study.
Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died last week, as most of you no doubt know. On The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood uses the occasion as an opportunity to bash lesbians, feminism, and Ride herself. Wood begins her most unusual eulogy by quoting Gloria Steinem, who once said of Ride:
“Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”
Wood scoffs at the very notion, suggesting that
Steinem’s real point, in keeping with her intense dislike of women, was that women should want to be astronauts and there was something wrong with them if they didn’t.
So we’re off to a great start here. Wood then offers this patronizing assessment of Ride’s life – which nonetheless turns out to be the nicest thing she says about the legendary astronaut.
We’ve already seen some unusual perspectives on the Aurora theater tragedy courtesy of The Spearhead and the Men’s Rights subreddit. Over on whiskeysplace, the manosphere blogger (and sometime Spearhead contributor) who calls himself Whiskey throws some racism into the mix.
In Whiskey’s view, the whole thing just shows … just how badly treated white men are in America today. And, he suggests, unless we change our evil white-man-hating ways we should expect even worse massacres to come. His basic thesis:
[T]hat an (admittedly crazy) 24 year old White guy with an extremely high IQ would paint his hair red, carefully position his beat up old pickup truck against one emergency exit door, enter through the pre-arranged opened other door, and kill (again as of this writing) 12 people while wounding 58, many seriously, shows how out of hand Obama’s America has become. …
Who is at fault? In no particular order, Obama, the entire Affirmative Action establishment, Jessie Jackson, feminists, the media, and the American people for taking the easy way out and not removing the former from public life through a hard, brutal political struggle that costs time and effort and more.
You always wonder what guys like this are thinking. With the dog lover at the end, it’s clear he was trying to rattle a woman who hadn’t replied to two earlier messages of increasing creepiness. With the others, I suppose they think there’s always a tiny chance that some woman out there is as desperate and horny and undiscerning as they are.
What’s stranger are those who lead not with sexual come ons but with blatant misogyny. Do men really think that women melt at the thought of dating a man who hates half the human race? Or are they just looking for yet another chance to mansplain their Men’s Rights bullshit to the world?
Here are a couple of examples of this strange and unsuccessful approach to winning over women which I found on the delightful and disturbing blog The Ladies of OkCupid, which documents the quests of three women searching for love online.
Sometimes the misogyny sneaks up on you, as in this OkCupid profile from a “laid-back” slut-shamer (who was clearly not an English major):
This fellow, by contrast, launches into the misogyny right from the start, suggesting that the woman he’s writing is exceptional, simply because she’s not stupid and illogical like the rest of her gender:
This “edgy” fellow tries to break the ice with some lovely rape jokes:
But the strangest one I’ve seen so far comes from this dude, who uses his OKCupid profile as an opportunity to mansplain why feminism is eeeeeevil:
Oh, and that list keeps going; it’s one hundred items long.
As Jasmine from The Ladies of OKCupid writes,
Delusional and repulsive takes on a whole new level with this one, because I really don’t think he’s kidding. He has every social media outlet known to man with all the same crap, and his profile is HUGE. So either he’s attempting to become the ultimate Canadian troll, or he really thinks there’s a woman out there who exists like this AND would be interested in him, of all people. Really? He offers little more than a receding hairline and an outrageous sense of entitlement in return.
To paraphrase Animal House, delusional and repulsive is no way to go through life.
Happily for The Ladies of OKCupid, and the rest of those ladies seeking love online, not all the messages are like this. For example, take this message about a basic but delicious foodstuff:
Also, the woman who got the message above about that thinking-outside-the-box use for her glasses? She stayed on OkCupid, and is now in a happy relationship with a dude she met there who is not a shitlord.
So WF Price and the rest of the fellas over on The Spearhead are doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis of the dreaded “male feminist” in general, and me in particular. It is fairly amusing stuff.
If you observe genuinely feminist men, there’s something a bit off about them, and it’s tempting to chalk their feminism up to a result of some flaw or aberration in their character. Normal men (aside from those whose paycheck depends on it such as politicians and men who work for feminist-dominated institutions) simply don’t go in for feminism unless it gets them sexual gratification, but those days are pretty much over, so the remnants tend to be an assortment of freaks and guys who have a chip on their shoulder.
“But those days are pretty much over?” Evidently, Price thinks there was a time during which women were obligated to reward feminist men with “sexual gratification,” but that this is no longer the case. So “normal men” have stopped being feminists, or at least stopped pretending to be feminists.
So what are these freakish feminist men of today really getting out of it?
Norwegian Men’s Rights Activist blogger Eivind Berge, known for his violent rhetoric and rape apologia, has been arrested for death threats against police.
Here are some Google-translated details from a news account here:
The right-wing extremist and anti-feminist blogger Eivind Berge has been arrested for having encouraged and glorified the killing of policemen. The police have found both ammunition and textbooks in use of explosives at Berge.
The police regard the threats as an invitation to others to kill police officers, but also feared that he would commit the acts themselves shortly.
He was evidently arrested on Wednesday. According to this story — at least as far as I can tell from the obviously crude Google translation — he made a specific threat to kill a police officer this Saturday:
Berge also writes about how he was planning to attack a policeman with a knife on a Saturday evening:
“Then I used the trial to come forward as a good example for men, and I considered it to be worth 21 years in prison for premeditated murder.”
According to this account, Berge is being held for two weeks. He claims innocence.
Berge, as readers of this blog may well already know, is a fan of right-wing terrorist and mass murderer Anders Brevik. On his blog, he’s also argued (among other things) that “Rape is Equality.”
He’s glorified the murder of police on his blog numerous times.
Some examples, taken from the second news account:
“… attack on the police is something 100% in harmony with everything I stand for.”
“I maintain that police murder is both ethically and tactically correct.”
Some other examples, direct from his blog (each paragraph is from a separate post; click on the quote for the source):
This was his reaction to a news story about a police officer being killed:
Good news for men is rare in this hateful feminist utopia that is Norway, but today is a joyous day! Today I feel schadenfreude in my heart along with all the hate that feminism and resultant mate deprivation have instilled in me. One blue thug less on the streets.
To feminist prosecutor Anne Cathrine Aga I have the following message: The Men’s Movement is watching you, bitch, and we are seething with hatred against you personally and the police state you represent. Actions have consequences. Trials are still (mostly) public and they sink into our collective minds, where they form the basis of future activism. Hate breeds hate — that is a fact of life too smugly ignored by feminists. …
2011 is the year Norwegian men as a group emerged out of the blogosphere and into the battlefield. This in turn has led to a breakthrough for MRAs such as my good self in the public discourse, probably for the simple reason that the powers that be now realize ignoring us has deadly consequences. Men are angry now, and we have proven that we are deathly serious about resisting feminism. So the feminist prosecutors referred to above ought to wipe that smug look off their faces before it is too late. Clearly seventy-seven body bags wasn’t enough, but I am fairly confident that you will be sorry one day.
Aside from the explicit threats of violence, the violent and threatening rhetoric here is not unlike much of the rhetoric we see regularly on A Voice for Men and other MRA sites. AVFM founder Paul Elam, for example, told one feminist that:
I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. … We are coming for you.
The blogger Emma the Emo, Berge’s girlfriend, has posted comments here in the past defending him. The news account quotes someone identified as Nataliya Kochergova, described as his girlfriend; I assume this is “Emma,” because what she told the media is similar to what she posted here. She of course denies that he planned any real violence. According to the article, she said:
There are not really threats. He has never had plans to kill someone, he has said several times in his blog. When for example, he says that “the police killings are an effective way to prevent stupid laws,” it’s a factual description and not a threat. Even those who love the police agree with it.
At the time I wrote my last blog post, I believed I would probably become Norway’s first modern violent activist in peacetime. Celibacy enforced by a feminist regime had driven me to the point where I saw no other option. I would target the pigs who enforce feminist law, knowing I could realistically at least kill one of them before I would be captured or killed myself. Thus revenge would be assured and if I lived, my reputation as a violent criminal would make me attractive to some women. But then in the nick of time this blog attracted a lovely girl commenting as “Emma.”
This is why I take violent rhetoric from MRAs very seriously.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, MRAs glorify MRA “martyr” Thomas Ball, who killed himself on the steps of a New Hampshire courthouse last year in hopes that his death would inspire MRAs to literally burn down courthouses and police stations.
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. … This is too important to be using that touchy- feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers
AVFM tastefully omitted Ball’s specific instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails, but left this in:
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
For many more examples of violent threatening rhetoric from MRAs, I urge you to go through some of my posts here and here.
Evil women oppressing men and destroying the economy.
JeremiahMRA’s call for lady murder wasn’t the only highlight (by which I mean lowlight) of that Fathers’ Day thread on The Spearhead. Towgunner also posted a rambling wall-of-text in which he offered some most intriguing thoughts on Fathers’ Day, economics, feminism, and ladies in general. Here’s are some excerpts, which I have taken the liberty of breaking into separate paragraphs:
Happy Oppressor’s day. I really like passive aggressive ruse by feminists who claim that housework is beneath them and thus oppressive. And yet, in honor of men and fathers, we have posts and articles discussing how fatherhood has “evolved”? …
Like everything from feminism it contradicts itself. If equality is to “liberate” women (from staying at home, oh the humanity!) and that staying at home is something pathetic, then why doesn’t that apply to all people? Under this new understanding, no one should be subjected to the indignity of staying at home. So why are women throwing temper tantrums yet nothing is said of men?
Uh, maybe the issue is that men and women should be able to decide if they want to stay at home, rather than being compelled to either work or stay home based on their gender. Not that this choice is really a choice for most people, as most mothers, like most fathers, have to work.
Worse, if there is a trend of men staying at home, then it is a disturbing trend indicative of the major structural perversions created by government intervention.
Watch out, you’re spilling conspiracy theory all over your misogyny.
Today, thanks to our “smarter” and “faster” women, we’re to believe that fulfillment is an internship at goldman sachs…and, oh by the way, all these longer hours “they” are paying you less…and less and less.
Because … feminists are responsible for long hours and stagnating wages?
And then women write books on how their disadvantaged from “asking for more money”, because they were brought up with dolls? Never once do they acknowledge that everyone is being paid less because since the government gave them “their chance” it created incredible amounts of malinvestment, which effectively bankrupted the US and the West.
Ah yes, “allowing” women to enter into the workforce – never mind that they’ve always been in the workforce in large numbers – somehow caused the financial crisis that led to our current malaise? Towgunner, please show your work here.
This is all to show that women can be a part of human progress. It pains them to no end when they flip through a history book and its one man after the next. I say that they did have their chance and look at the results – we will go through another crisis, likely a huge global reset and the US is, right now, a vastly different country (not for the better)…look at our culture we celebrate death and killing people…we hold the most decadent and immoral on high.
You do realize that men still basically run the economy, right? That as of 2011 there were only 12 female CEOs in the Fortune 500? That the overwhelming majority of economic movers and shakers, in governments and in the private sector, are men?
The women’s world is here, they do things not out of practical necessity but out of spite, Mother’s Day comes and they bemoan house wives, Father’s day comes and they point out that some men are staying home. There is nothing practical here, there is spite, there is insult, and there is hubris.
Women get jobs out of spite?
I don’t admire women, I don’t ever want to be one either, there is nothing noble about them. In fact I find it an insult to be called “equal” to them at all.
And a happy belated Fathers’ Day to you too, Towgunner!
This comment got me thinking about the old Martha and the Muffins song “Women Around the World at Work.” So here it is:
So the other day some of the fellas on the Men’s Rights subreddit were having a strange little conversation. One Men’s Rights Redditor posted a clip from Bill Burr, in which the comedian complained that when his girlfriend hit him, he couldn’t hit her back without getting himself into a lot of trouble.
Yep, that’s right. He wants to date other men so, if the need arises, he can punch them.
Naturally, this being Reddit, other straight dudes jumped in with their own fantasies about how much easier life would be if they were gay. After all, jacKofKats pointed out, dating a guy would mean you could play video games with the very same person you have sex with, something obviously impossible in heterosexual relationships.
Oneiorosgrip agreed with the original poster that life would be much simpler and easier if guys could hit their mates:
Dolanduckeroo expressed envy towards his gay friends, who apparently lead lives of ease and endless zipless fucks, all the while being appreciated for who they truly are.
A few actual gay men wandered into the discussion, hoping to inject a bit of realism, pointing out (among other things) that gay men actually face something called “homophobia” — look it up if you haven’t heard of it — pretty much every day of their lives. Naturally, they got fewer upvotes than the “wish I were gay” fantasizers.
Most women, it is fair to say, don’t want to be deprived of education; they don’t want to be considered little more than baby-making machines; and they don’t want “independent” women to be maimed or murdered.
But according to the influential manosphere blogger Vox Day, women who object to any of this just don’t know what’s good for them. In one of the most repellant manosphere rants I’ve run across yet, Vox attempts to rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women, offering his own “scientific” rationales for keeping women down. Is this all somehow satire on his part? He certainly seems sincere.
TRIGGER WARNING for all that follows; Vox explicitly defends the maiming and murder of women.
Vox starts out by arguing that depriving women of education makes solid evolutionary sense:
[E]ducating women is strongly correlated with reducing their disposition and ability to reproduce themselves. Educating them tends to make them evolutionary dead ends. … 40% of German women with college degrees are childless. Does PZ seriously wish to claim that not reproducing is intrinsically beneficial to women?
Instead of being educated, Vox goes on to argue, girls should be married off young so they can start popping out babies:
[R]aising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children allows them to pursue marriage at the age of their peak fertility, increase the wage rates of their prospective marital partners, and live in stable, low-crime, homogenous societies that are not demographically dying. It also grants them privileged status, as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike. Women are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-bearer and child-rearer, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.
Next, he defends the practice of throwing acid in the face of “independent” women:
[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.
He moves on to honor killings, arguing that they too are good for women, because
female promiscuity and divorce are strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy.
He offers a similar rationale for female genital mutilation, before launching into this bizarre racist attack on abortion rights:
[F]ar more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.
Vox wants “girls” – presumably teenagers — to be married off young and start popping out babies. Yet in his mind female fetuses are “unborn women.”
Despite Vox Day’s repellent ideas about women – and his proud racism – he’s an influential figure in the manosphere, mentioned approvingly and regularly cited by others who present themselves as more moderate voices. It may not be a shock that the reactionary antifeminist blogger Dalrock includes Vox in his blogroll, and cites his work with approval (see here and here for examples). But, astoundingly, he’s also regularly cited approvingly by antifeminist “relationship expert” Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (see here, here, and here). And she has even written at least one guest post on Vox’s “game blog” Alpha Game.
At this point I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. But I still am.
