We Hunted The Mammoth
No book has had more influence over the Men’s Rights movement than Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power. Published in 1993, in the heyday of the early 90s antifeminist backlash, it set the agenda for the Men’s Rights movement as it’s developed over the last two decades. He’s the one who came up with the notions of “male disposability” and the “death professions.” He’s the one who got MRAs fixated on the issue of draft registration.
The Public Shaming blog and Twitchy.com have been doing the world a service by documenting some of the worst rape apologist nonsense that sprouted up on Twitter in the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict. I thought I would add some more screenshots to the growing pile.
RawStory has a piece up highlighting The top 5 rape apologist reactions to the Steubenville rape verdict. It’s well worth reading. As the author of the piece, Emily Mullen, notes:
The Steubenville guilty verdict spawned nearly as much rape apology as the original news of the case did, highlighting the point — made by feminists like Zerlina Maxwell and Jaclyn Friedman — that America has a long way to go before it gets past blaming victims and sympathizing with rapists.
I haven’t yet run across any reactions in the Manosphere to the verdicts, but I’m sure we’ll see some in the next few days. If you run across anything especially awful, in the Manosphere or outside of it, please let me know.
Men’s Rights Redditors, currently silent about the verdicts, were up in arms the other day because Reuters was identifying the accused — now the convicted — rapists, while not identifying the victim. Or, as MRAs prefer to put it, the “alleged victim.” Now, as RawStory points out, she is getting death threats.
EDITED TO ADD: More victim blaming online, as catalogued on the Public Shaming blog: First post, second post with more.
Below, Several examples borrowed from Public Shaming. TRIGGER WARNING for rape apology.
.
.
.
.
.
.
[TRIGGER WARNING for picture of brutalized woman]
If you want to show someone what sort of website A Voice for Men is, have them look at the following screenshot, which I’m putting below the jump because it may well trigger some readers in its depiction of the effects of domestic violence on women:
Hey, do you need an instant karma boost on Reddit? Here’s how to get yourself hundreds of upvotes in four easy steps!
1) Make or find a misogynistic meme graphic that suggests women are terrible and makes light of domestic violence
2) Post it to the AdviceAnimals subreddit with the headline “I know I’m going to get downvoted into oblivion, but its true….”
3) There is no step 3
4) Enjoy your hundreds of upvotes!
Huh. I guess that’s really only two steps.
Graphic after the jump because — trigger warning — it makes light of domestic violence, as do several of the other comments I’m going to quote.
I haven’t had the patience to go through the discussions that developed in the wake of the Men’s Rights Subreddit’s historic winning of the prestigious King Dick of Fart Mountain Subreddit of the Day award yesterday. But I did read enough to come across this little exchange, in which a heroic Men’s Rightser confessed how touched he was that someone outside the Men’s Rights subreddit had noticed the bold, brave activism of Reddit MRAs.
And then someone pointed out some other things he’s said a couple of days ago.
NWOslave, is that you?
Actually, I doubt it; NWOslave has an account under his own name there. But great minds do think alike.
Here’s the link to StarFscker’s original comment in context.
An Orlando man, Faron Thompson, was recently charged with battery and child neglect after an altercation in which he allegedly tried to force his fiancée to swallow her engagement ring when she tried to leave him. (More details here.)
This sort of abuse is depressingly commonplace when women try to free themselves from abusive and controlling men; indeed, if I posted every news account along these lines on this blog I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
No, I mention this case because something that Thompson reportedly told police reveals a lot about the mindset of abusers. When they arrested him, police say, Thompson complained that:
Women always claim assault, but never accept responsibility for provoking someone.
That is how abusers think.
It’s also how a lot of MRAs think.
Indeed, when I read Thomson’s reported remarks, the y immediately brought to mind something written not that long ago by Karen Straughan, the YouTube videoblogger who goes by the name of Girl Writes What. Straughan describes herself in her A Voice for Men bio as “the most popular and visible MRA in North America,” and given the rapturous reception her videos get on You Tube and on Reddit, this may not be an idle boast.
In the rather revealing Reddit comment I’m thinking of (which I blogged about earlier), Straughan suggested not only that abused women regularly “demand” the abuse they receive, but that many of them also get some sort of sexual charge from it. Oh, I’m sure she’ll deny that she really meant all that, but I can’t see any other way to read the following.
Oh, and in case you were wondering what article she’s referring to in the last paragraph — the one she says isn’t “seriously ethically questionable” — it’s a post from the repugnant Ferdinand Bardamu arguing that men should “terrorize” their partners because that’s the “the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.” For more about that charming piece, titled “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” see my post here.
I’m having less and less of a problem with calling the Men’s Rights movement “the abusers lobby.”
I’m sure there are some MRAs who are as repulsed by Straughan’s argument as I am. If you’re one of them, and want your movement, such as it is, to be remembered as something other than “the abusers lobby,” you need to call out all those MRAs who make such arguments. Might I suggest that you start by challenging the “the most popular and visible MRA in North America,” otherwise known as Girl Writes What?
A quick one question quiz, which all regular readers of Man Boobz should be able to ace.
Question: Over on The Spearhead, commenters have been offering their opinions about the Newtown school shootings. All but one of the following quotes have been taken word for word from the Spearhead, and reflect who or what the quoted commenter blames for the shooting. Can you identify which statement is NOT from a Spearheader?
A) “Guns don’t kill, the culture kills. A culture of out of control children. A culture of child neglect and abuse brought about and driven largely by the feminist philosophy of the fulfillment of women comes before ALL else, including their children, born or unborn. It wasn’t a hard sell because women already have a dark and selfish nature.”
B) “[A] sick person who may have been turned into monster with the help of a selfish and thoughtless woman.”
C) “I wonder to what extent did the shooter’s mom and female teachers have in motivating his actions? what if the shooter is the victim? what if more and more evidence (or strong implications) of the women using their authority as mom and teachers to manipulate a mentally unstable young man keeps coming out? … Of course it’s not actually paranoia if ‘they’ really are out to get you, is it?. And ‘they’ being a feminist police state, well, they really are out to get me!”
D) “Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Actually, in many ways, feminism is Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”
E) “The problem is women running things. Even after all the massacres, the dearies continue to insist the solution is to disarm all the law abiding citizens.”
F) “A Feminized Culture.”
G) “Lifelong sworn conspirators, murder incorporated, organized feminism, the police and judges, the deadly sneak parroting puppet gangsters, using all the gangster deadly Frankenstein-feminist controls—these hand and rope sneak deadly feminazi-gangsters, the judges and the police, trick, trap, rob, wreck, butcher and murder the people to keep them terrorized in in gangster Frankenstein earphone radio slavery from the Communist-feminazi-gangster government and con artists parroting puppet gangster feminist scum.”
BONUS QUESTION: Did anyone on The Spearhead blame the actual killer? Y/N
.
.
.
ANSWER: A through F are all from The Spearhead. G is the ringer, from a rant by famous paranoid ranter Francis E. Dec, Esq, with the words “feminism” and “feminazi” worked into it here and there to make it sound a little more Spearheadish.
BONUS ANSWER: Surprisingly, yes. This guy.
It’s always a little distressing to see manosphere-style dumbassery outside the manosphere. Today’s offender: Charlotte Allen at National Review Online, explaining how the deaths in Newtown are the result of the school’s “feminized setting.” Had the school been filled with manly men (and manly boys), Adam Lanza could have been stopped in his tracks!
No, really, that’s what she says. Except that what she wrote is somehow even more egregious than my sarcastic summary. Read for yourself:
You all need to go read Kate Harding’s bracing (and given all the recent doxxing bullshit, spectacularly well-timed) Jezebel piece titled “Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists.” Here’s a sample:
Fuck you, first of all, for making it nearly impossible for decent men struggling with abusive partners or unfair custody arrangements to get the help they need and deserve. You have forever tainted those issues with your rage-filled, obsessively anti-woman horseshit, to the point where it’s become difficult for any rational, compassionate person to trust a man who claims he’s been screwed over in family court or abused by a female partner, even if he has. …
Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.
And it keeps going from there.
Thank you Kate, for putting it so well.
