Category: the spearhead

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>QuoteOTD: Wisdom from the superior sex

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Wisdom from misterb, aka misterbastard, taken from a discussion on The Spearhead on “Academia and the Politics of Peer Review,” which quickly degenerated from an idiotic discussion about the evils of academia into an idiotic discussion about how women are stupid, selfish and evil. (Isn’t that how discussions on The Spearhead always go?)

Anyway, the wisdom:

I hate to say this. Feminism dumb down society.

Misterb make feminism mad! Feminism stomp misterb!

More wisdom:

In my opinion. Women should never be allowed to hold degrees in soft sciences. And there should be no degrees in regards to soft sciences.

Just because a woman holds a degree to some cheap laden science or bad science. It doesn’t make her smart, but in fact it has an opposite effect. it makes her downright stupid.

There’s different between knowledge and wisdom. And today’s lacks both of them. Only thing she’s good at is being worthless

In another comment he corrected what he evidently saw as his one and only mistake in this final paragraph: “today’s” should have been “today’s woman.” 

Yep, that oughtta fix it.

I’m sorry, but idiots going on about their intellectual superiority: always funny. Always.

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antifeminst women feminism misogyny the spearhead

>The Surreal Housewife

>One of the things that still surprises me as I traverse the weird online world of anti-feminism is the number of women I’ve run across who think that they have altogether too many rights. I’ve written in the past about women who don’t believe they should have the right to vote. Today, Laura Wood, a proudly retrograde woman who thinks the solution to contemporary “cultural ruin” is for employers to start paying women even less than they do now. According to “Why We Must Discriminate,” a manifesto of sorts on her blog The Thinking Housewife:

Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural ruin of its women. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. … First and foremost, we must restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions must be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.

It’s a strange manifesto and a strange blog. Unlike many of the reactionaries I regularly quote on this blog, Wood is not an idiot. Her tone is measured and cautious. If you accept her fairly ludicrous premises — the key ones here being that it would be desirable or even possible to undo decades of economic and cultural history to essentially return to an imaginary, idealized prefeminist world in which men could earn enough to comfortably support a family and women would work primarily for “pin money” — her manifesto almost makes sense. And yet what she is saying is, not to put too fine a point on it, vile.

She is utterly blithe, for example, about the effect her proposal would have on single and divorced women:

Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.

Who needs a man-sized wage when you can just beg dad for cash when the rent comes due?

Wood not only thinks women deserve to be paid less than men for the same work; she’s also wary of women taking on almost any authority at all outside the home. While she’s admits it’s technically possible for women to be, for example, effective drill sergeants, she finds the idea vaguely abhorrent:

When women start barking orders at grown men, the delicate balance of power between the sexes is disturbed. Women are mothers and wives, lovers and friends to men. These roles are damaged by domineering bossiness. Male psychology is radically different from female psychology. After all, mothers are women. There is no more significant fact than that.

There’s more, much more. Troll This Blog has assembled a lengthy list of Wood’s more backwards utterances, from which I drew the example above, including some thoughts on race that would not be out of place at a (very polite) Klan meeting: “Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today.”

Though I found her blog through links on a Men’s Rights blog or two, and her ideology is more or less consistent with some of the more reactionary MRAs out there, Wood is not exactly an MRA herself. Indeed, she has tangled with the Men’s Rights Movement on several occasions — lambasting commenters on The Spearhead for “juvenile” misogyny, and accusing MRA elder Paul Elam of “idiocy and hatred” for his, er, idiotic and hateful statement that if he were on a jury he wouldn’t vote to convict a clearly guilty rapist.

Wood’s enmity towards certain elements of the MRM has been reciprocated. Our good (not) friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog recently took on a “mangina” commenter at what he calls “The (Not) Thinking Housewife” for suggesting that the MRM had its roots in “radical homosexuality.”

This is one of those battles, to paraphrase Calvin Trillin, in which I can only hope that both sides suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.

NOTE: Before any of the anti-feminists who regularly post here accuse me of lacking “substance” because I do not “rebut” Wood’s “arguments” in detail, I request only one thing: find me something solid to rebut. Wood, like many of those I write about, offers a lot of opinions — see the quotes above, and on Troll This Blog, for numerous examples — but almost nothing to actually support those opinions. Find me an example of an argument she has made that is actually supported with actual empirical evidence, with specific citations and/or links to sources, and I’ll have a go at it.

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crackpottery evil women idiocy quote of the day rape the spearhead

>Quote of the Day: Stupidity Strikes Twice

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They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place. That’s not true. But people like to say it nevertheless. That’s not something anyone would say about stupidity, ever, because stupidity strikes the same places with such monotonous regularity.

And so it is that I can report with pleasure but not much surprise that stupidity — really massive stupidity, in fact — has once again hit the discussion thread on The Spearhead which provided us with our previous incredibly stupid Quote of the Day. This time, a fellow called TFH offers his unique take on rape statistics:

“1 in 4 women on college campuses have been raped”

….and none of those women are ever higher than a 6 in looks. Most are 4s or lower.

Coincidence? I think not.

We never, ever see women who would rate a 7 or higher making a big fuss about ‘rape’, claiming that rape is rampant, etc. EVEN THOUGH THEY WOULD BE THE ONES MORE AT RISK.

This fact reveals the rape industry to be a complete fabrication. A ploy to get attention.

Always ask yourself : Where are the women who are a 7+ in looks, who are sufficiently afraid of rape to bring it up as often as the uggos do?

I should note that in addition to the rest of the stupidity, he’s a little confused as to what the 1-in-4 statistic refers to. The study in question, by Mary Koss, found that 1-in-4 college-age women had been the victim of rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives. (1-in-8 had been raped.) For more on the study upon which this figure is based, take a look at this extremely useful piece on Alas, A Blog, which has a whole category on the site devoted to the study in question, and on the claims of various anti-feminists to have “rebutted” it. Daran of Feminist Critics, a regular commenter on this blog, has also written two very useful posts on the subject as well.

EDIT: Here is another excellent post from Daran taking down Heather MacDonald, one of Koss’ recent critics, as well as two comments here that shed even more light on MacDonald’s flawed arguments. Thanks, Daran!

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evil women men who should not ever be with women ever quote of the day sex the spearhead western women suck

>Quote of the Day #2: Wham, Bam, No Thank You, Ma’am!

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Femocracy in action.

While “mean0dean0” over on Reddit suggests that his fellow men should be hooking up with easily-impressed immigrant chicks, SingleDad on The Spearhead has a somewhat more hardcore strategy for horny hetero men living in the American Femocracy: Have sex only with women who have absolutely no idea who you are or where you live, then flee the country.

I espouse anonymous sex, don’t ever let a woman know your name, city or profession. People say I am extreme but society is run by the femocracy in our country and they want carte blanche to imprison any man at any time that displeases them.

The femocracy has a vested interest in putting any man accused of having heterosexual sex in prison. … This is because they are lesbians and gold diggers who hate men. … So you cannot co-mingle with women in the west. It is a simple as that. …

I recommend mass migration for parents of boys. There is a witch hunt. They want your boys in prison. … I submit that if you don’t leave, like the Jews in Germany, you are putting your son’s at grave risk, or maybe you love your daughters more than your sons.

My plan is to be outta here is less than 5 years. It is the only logical conclusion.

Note: I’ve condensed his post quite a bit. The whole thing is worth reading, as a sort of case study in crazy.

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>Paul Elam’s Evasive Pseudo-Eloquence

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Edward Bulwer-Lytton

patron saint of terrible,

terrible writers

There are all kinds of bad writers. Some can’t string simple sentences together; others spew thick clouds of incomprehensible jargon. But in some ways the most annoying bad writers of all are those who are bad writers because they think they are great writers.

Paul Elam is one of those. An influential blogger, at least within the marginal mini-world of the Men’s Rights Movement, Elam writes polemics for The Spearhead and his own web site, A Voice For Men. His topics range from the evils of chivalry to “Death Row and The Pussy Pass.” And they’re full of sentences like this:

[G]ender feminism is not the light of reason, but much more like a burning cross, issuing a grotesque, dystopian glow; a suitable backlight for an Orwellian nightmare.

Or this, from an essay about the dilemmas of young men today:

[T]hey are suffering from the loss of things never held, from things missing but never known. They are, quite literally, a lost generation of the walking wounded, wandering blindly from a battlefield on which they never knew they stood.

Yeah, except that the only battlefields most of these guys have seen have been the multiplayer maps of Halo or Modern Warfare 2. 

As you may have already gathered, Elam’s flights of literary fancy are invariably hokey and melodramatic. And they’re essentially meaningless. They say absolutely nothing, while giving the impression that they say an awful lot. Indeed, when you try to nail down the meaning of any of his not-so-fine phrases, they simply fall apart.

In the first quote above, he attempts to smoosh together the KKK and the world of George Orwell’s 1984 into some strange symbol of feminist awfulness. Huh? The KKK is a vigilante group; the villain in 1984 was a totalitarian government. They’re both bad, to be sure, but different kinds of bad. Big Brother wasn’t a Grand Kleagle. It’s a sloppy mix of metaphors that represents some pretty sloppy thinking.

So why am I picking on Elam’s writing style? Shouldn’t I be focusing on the substance of his argument? My point is that you can’t separate the two. Elam’s style is designed to conceal his lack of substance.

Ironically, the person who provides the most insight into what Elam is trying to accomplish with his purportedly elevated prose is none other than Orwell. In his classic essay on “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell took a look at some typically terrible political prose of his day. The two qualities that united all his examples in awfulness were a certain “staleness of imagery” and a “lack of precision.” His analysis fits Elam’s essays to a T:

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

George Orwell, being Orwellian

And why is this? Orwell concluded that the airy abstractions, the mixed metaphors, the grand prefabricated phrases all worked together to conceal the true meanings of what was being said, to offer “a defence of the indefensible,” whether one was a Communist defending the Russian purges or an American politician defending the atom bomb.

With Elam, though, we see something slightly different. He’s not defending the indefensible so much as trying to disguise the sheer insubstantiality of some of his central arguments, which would be simply laughable if he hadn’t gussied them up with ponderously “fancy” prose. Consider this passage, describing Elam’s thoughts after discovering that his spellchecker didn’t recognize the word “misandry”:

A culture that refuses to acknowledge that a perfectly legitimate word exists on paper, is in effect denying its existence to the collective consciousness. … It is like trying to describe a cloud without being able to use the word itself- to a world that does not believe in clouds. We are limited to talking around the subject; we present our meanings in metaphors and similes and anecdotes.

Reduced to its essence, though, Elam’s claim here is simply absurd: Because “misandry” isn’t a common enough term to include in his computer’s dictionary, our culture has no way of expressing the notion that certain people and ideas are man hating.

Really, Paul? We’re “limited to talking around the subject?” I really haven’t noticed much of that. The term “man-hating” gets the idea across fairly bluntly, and has long been popular with a certain sort of man, often in conjunction with words like “bitch,” “cunt,” or “feminazi.”

In the crowd you hang with, I imagine you hear this kind of talk all the time. Surely you’ve noticed it.

Elam doesn’t always write in such a stilted, evasive style. Sometimes he butches it up a bit, launching crude tirades against “mangina morons,” or telling a woman who was sexually harassed as a tween and an early teen that “guess what, cupcake, when you start growing tits, men start looking at them.” In a recent piece about the impending execution of a female murder-plotter with an IQ of 72, he wrote of his desire to “throw some burgers on the grill, crack open a few cold ones, and watch them ice this murdering bitch on pay-per-view.” (This despite the fact that he actually opposes the death penalty.)

Stick with this style, Paul. It may not be pretty, but at least it’s true to your nature. You’re not a grand philosopher; you’re not a literary lion. There is nothing smart or sophisticated about anything you ever write or think. Basically, you’re a dick. So write like one.

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crackpottery idiocy misogyny reactionary bullshit the spearhead woman's suffrage

Hey, fellas! Let’s just take away their right to vote!

 

Oh dear. The Men’s Rights movement often seems like a giant He Man Woman Haters Club. But generally the cleverer of the MRAs go out of their way to deny outright misogyny. Oh, we don’t hate women, just feminists. We don’t want to take away the legitimate rights of women; we just want equality, with neither side getting special rights at the expense of the other.

But then there’s this dude. In a recent post on the popular men’s rights blog The Spearhead, a guy calling himself ramzpaul argues, with utmost seriousness and sincerity, that women should be denied the right to vote. Let me repeat that: he argues that women should be denied the right to vote.

The post is titled “How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization,” and, yep, he means it. (He’s also got a version of the rant up on You Tube. He sort of reminds me a bit of Stephen Merchant, if Stephen Merchant were an insane American reactionary woman-hating freak.)

It’s a weird, rambling diatribe, but after some swipes at Cultural Marxism and Google (which offended his sensibilities by mentioning the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment on its home page), ramzpaul gets to the heart of his, er, argument. Borrowing some odd notions from a 19th-century anti-suffragette Madeline Dahlgren, he argues that allowing women to vote divides the sexes, creates discord in the family, and destroys marriage. He wraps it all up thusly:

The people opposed to female suffrage proved to be right beyond their wildest predictions. As Google was celebrating the 19th amendment, a British newspaper detailed the boasting of a 26 year old woman who claims to have had sex with 5,000 different men. If Madeline Dahlgren were alive today, I am sure she would have understood the connection between female suffrage in the West and the decline of civilization.

Single mothers, rampant divorce, abortion and falling birth rates are part of the cancer that is destroying what is left of Western Civilization. But very few people (even conservatives) fail to realize that the inception of this cancer can be found in the passage of the 19th amendment.

I’m not even going to bother to refute any of this, which is so mindbogglingly stupid it refutes itself.

But what’s even creepier than this little essay is the response it got on the Spearhead: 191 comments, at last count, mostly offering enthusiastic assent. Yep. Almost everyone there agreed with every word of this nonsense. Here are a few of the choicest nuggets, all of which were massively upvoted by the denizens of The Spearhead:

Womens’ suffrage, unbound by corresponding responsibility has helped the west to become what it is today. Bankrupt and heading into ruin.

For the first few hundred years of this country men held the top wrung of political authority. They discussed with their wives what would be in their best interest as a family, not what was in the best interest of a giant socialist goal. The government was subordinant to them. Now a days the government holds all the power, the women answer to Big Daddy Guv and men are subordinant and accountable to everyone. Women’s sufferage has not improved anyone’s lot in life.

Women have been given too much power. And what have they done with they squander it. Create unnecessary laws. If women didn’t vote, the country would be different. There wouldn’t have been same sex marriage. Men wouldn’t be cheated out of their own homes and children. There would have been a lot more native born people here. No abortion.

But it isn’t all the fault of the evil wimmenz:

While feminism and women are largely responsible for the collapse of the West, men had a role to play as well. Feminism would have never taken root and grown if it weren’t for the scores of beta males who just gave in to the demands of women and feminists. We men should have put our foots down and said “No”, but we gave in to the pussy power. Thanks to that, we have the situation we’re in now.

Another commenter made the same point a little more, er, bluntly:

It is amazing how men become manginas where some pussy is present. When you discuss some topic about the relationship between sexes and you try to introduce MRA arguments, you have the women AND THE MEN against you. … This is the problem of the West: there are no men anymore, only little babies that are scared of Mommy getting angry with them. Feminism has revealed the true nature of women: “ME!ME!ME” and the true nature of men “PUSSY!PUSSY!PUSSY!”

Amazingly, a few women actually agreed with the article as well:

A repeal of suffrage would appeal to those “very few responsible women” the most. It wouldn’t shock them, as they are already discussing it seriously. I’d be grateful to give up the vote if all of the Girl Power types had to give up theirs, as well.

And again, from the same woman:

Here’s the practical reason why female suffrage doesn’t make good sense: When men vote in favor of their own economic interests, the women attached to them benefit. When women vote in favor of their own economic interests, they are more inclined to divorce their husband, so the men do not similarly benefit. Money should flow primarily through the husband, then everyone gets enough and the marriages are stable.

Oh, a tiny handful challenged this craziness, but they were downvoted into oblivion. I had to click a little link to see this comment, from someone calling himself barsin:

This is the laughable lunatic fringe of the far-far right wing that unfortunately always tries to attach itself like a disgusting parasite to any movement for men’s rights, eventually killing it. No reasonable human being even a conservative would touch this poisonous shit you’re spewing with a ten foot pole.

Yeah, what he said. At least that last bit. I’m rather in favor of the Men’s Rights Movement self-destructing through its own idiocy and insanity.

EDIT: Just to point this out to anyone who doesn’t get it: By talking about a particular bunch of MRAs who think that women shouldn’t be allowed the right to vote, I am not suggesting that every single MRA, or even most of them, believe this. But the response to the Spearhead article does pretty clearly indicate that there are way too many of them who do believe it.

There are several discussions of this article now taking place on Reddit. Check them out.