Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:
So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.
Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”
Goodnight, Paul! You can buy your own Misogyny Bunch pillow for only $19.19 at A Voice for Men’s Red Pill store.
Let me take a moment to ignore my regular readers and speak directly to the Men’s Rights Activists who might be reading this blog. I suspect there are a few.
What I would like to talk to you about it ironic humor. Because, here’s the thing, sometimes people say things they don’t actually believe in order to make a little fun at the way other people see them.
So I did an interview about my Confused Cats Against Feminism blog with Catster.com, a site that devotes itself to collecting “helpful and hilarious information for the worldly but still infatuated Cat aficionado.” Alas, as a result of publishing this interview with me yesterday, they now seem to be collecting angry MRA commenters as well.
Here are some highlights of the, er, debate so far, which I’ve waded into myself, perhaps unwisely. (These are selections, with a bunch missing, though the comments that look obviously like they are responses to other comments, are.) Maeve Connor is the author of the post about me.
The debate between Matt Binder (from the Majority Report) and Paul Elam (from A Pile of Money for Paul Elam) went off yesterday. I can’t say it went off without a hitch, because it was actually quite hitch-full. Indeed, it was kind of a disaster — at least for one Paul Elam.
Paul’s the one who wanted the debate. He chose the topic, he chose the format, he controlled the venue. And he lost the debate rather spectacularly, grimly reading a succession of prepared statements while Binder shot down his arguments with common-sensical one-lines and raised issues that Elam didn’t or couldn’t address.
Binder rattled Elam early by presenting him with an unattributed quote that sounded virtually identical to Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic rants and which Elam dismissed as something that no MRA would ever say; Binder then revealed that it was a quote from Stefan Molyneux, the MRA “philosopher” who was one of the featured speakers at AVFM’s recent conference. (Indeed, it was a quote that I highlighted in my first Misogyny Theater videos on Mr. M.)
The Hate Bus, not to be confused with the Peace Train or the Joy Jitney.
So in my email inbox yesterday, alongside a nagging reminder from my dentist to schedule a checkup and my latest marching orders from the Gynocrat Central Committee, I noticed an email from an unknown correspondent with the intriguing subject line “The Holy War against Feminism.”
Clicking on it, I found an angry little manifesto from someone calling himself Mortago Black. It started off with a bold all-caps claim:
THE MENS REIGHTS REVOLUTION IS AT HAND.
The revolution will not be spellchecked.
But apparently, if Mr. Black has any say over things, it will be “liked” on Facebook: our manifesto-writer followed his bold headline with a link to a Facebook page – which, by the time I got around to looking at his email, had been taken down, probably because it contained stuff like, well, the rest of his manifesto.
Welcome to the first episode of Misogyny Theater, our new animated series, bringing you the best of the worst of YouTube misogyny.
In today’s episode, we revisit an old video from John The Other, also known as John Hembling, a fellow most of you already know pretty well. The monologue in this video is an unedited excerpt from a YouTube rant of his, minus some of the distracting background music that was included in the original.
Content Note: The misogyny in this one is pretty bad, even by John the Other standards.
I will try to produce at least one of these a week. There’s plenty of misogyny on YouTube, so it’s doubtful I’ll run out of material any time soon. I will also be doing a series based on Creepy PMs. Big thanks to everyone who’s pointed me to interesting candidates for future videos, as well as to those who’ve volunteered to do voice work or who’ve sent in pictures of their pets. Thanks as well to the anonymous Friend of the Mammoths who put together the snazzy title sequences here.
In my post announcing my video plans last week, I offered some suggestions on how to help; I’m going to write up a most detailed FAQ on this shortly.
John’s original video is no longer up on YouTube, but you can see clips from it — including the portion I used in the video above — in this more recent video from him in which he tries to explain away the horrible things he said. Apparently it was just a big joke! All in good fun!
EDIT: Removed an embedded video that was no longer functioning because it’s been removed from YouTube.
EDIT 2: For a mashup of Hembling’s original video, along with another video of his in which he pointedly refuses to apologize for the original video, see here, courtesy of Mancheeze.
You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
Men in Canadian elevators are sometimes also used as chairs.
Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
Relationships with women: “Complicated and oftentimes dangerous.”
Men’s Rights Activists continue to make strategic use of the media attention they’ve gained as a result of the Elliot Rodger killings. Yesterday, Al Jazeera America ran an interview with A Voice for Men’s “US News Director” Robert O’Hara in which he touched upon numerous important Men’s Rights issues, like the fact that he doesn’t hate women because his mother is one, and how it was totally an amazing publicity coup for AVFM to be singled out as a misogynistic hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Let’s look at some highlights from his Q and A. (The block quotes are direct quotes from the man, the legend, himself.)
So about a week ago, someone put a petition up on Whitehouse.gov asking the president to classify the Men’s Rights Movement as a terrorist group. The petition, posted in the immediate aftermath of Elliot Rodger ‘s killing spree, seems to be sincerely motivated. But it was a bad idea. The Men’s Rights movement is full of assholes, some of them potentially quite dangerous. Still, not every MRA is an Elliot Rodger in the making, and this kind of hyperbole doesn’t help those who are trying to expose the true terribleness of the Men’s Rights movement.
After their initial outrage wore off, MRAs decided to treat the petition as a golden opportunity for self-martyrdom. Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men urged fellow MRAs – sorry, MHumanRAs – to sign it themselves, perhaps not realizing that it might prove difficult to convince the world they’re being oppressed by a petition if they’re the ones most actively collecting signatures for it. (Esmay also took a moment to compare me to Bull Connor, which seems a tad odd, to say the least.)
