The programming executives at ABC have been secretly replaced by alien pod-people from planet MRA. That’s really the only logical explanation for “Work It,” an upcoming ABC sitcom whose premise seems to have been lifted straight from the comments section of The Spearhead. Here’s a description of the show from ABC:
With unemployment an ongoing issue and women now outnumbering men in the workforce, the new comedy series Work It follows two alpha males who realize the only way to beat the current “mancession” and land a job in pharmaceutical sales is to pass themselves off as women.
Yep, it’s a retread of Bosom Buddies, this time sprinkled with MRA buzzwords. Alpha males, mancession – all we need is a few false rape accusations to complete the MRA-cliche soufflé.
Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this isn’t an MRA show at all. Maybe it’s just a really inept and misguided attempt to explore the issues faced by trans women in the workplace. But somehow I doubt it.
The other day Holly Pervocracy, a friend of Man Boobz with her own awesome and sometimes NSFW blog, drew the picture above, which is her best rendering of what the world apparently looks like to one of this blog’s resident trolls, a rather untraditional traditionalist named David K. Meller. On the left, an example of a fine, upstanding traditional woman, dressed in a proper ladylike manner and concerned with ladylike things (e.g., cooking and kitties); on the right, a foul feminist.
This got me thinking: are there any videos online that depict both cats and bats? This being the internet, the answer was of course yes. So I present to you a kitty snatching a bat from the air. Kitties are fucking amazing.
Here’s another video, involving a cat and a different kind of bat.
EDITED TO ADD: Bat cat!!!! (Thanks, Katz, in the comments.)
Our videomaking friend Graham, also known as Some Grey Bloke, is back, finally. In his new video, he explains his long absence, due in part to what seems to have been a rather large misunderstanding between him and the Men’s Rights Activists of the world, who somehow interpreted the newfound enthusiasm for Men’s Rights he showed in his last video as a sort of satire. (How could anyone be drawn to mock or satirize the serious and important Men’s Rights movement?)
Anyway, here’s his new video. And below it, his previous video on “The Manosphere,” which seems to have gotten 49,208 more views than my last video on the subject. Which I’ve also embedded below. It’s not as good as his, but perhaps you could watch it also.
A group portrait of TwoXChromosomes regulars on Reddit?
As “activists,” Men’s Rights Activists seem to be good at only two things: harassing people, and flooding comment sections of websites with their endlessly repeated half-dozen talking points. On Reddit, for example, the local MRAs have been quite the little imperialists, invading a number of gender-related subreddits (like r/equality and r/egalitarian) and turning them essentially into r/mensrights-lite, which has effectively meant killing them. (The recently started r/masculism – an attempt to do Men’s Rights on Reddit without all the misogyny – doesn’t have a chance.)
Well, now the MRA invaders on Reddit seem to have set their sights on a much bigger target: the TwoXChromosomes subreddit. Yep, they’re trying to turn Reddit’s central hangout for the ladies into a boys club.
2XC– an explicitly female-oriented forum on a site (Reddit) heavily dominated by dudes — has always been a strange place. Though I am myself, obviously, a dude, I used to read it fairly regularly, finding it a welcome respite from all the “sammich” jokes and other idiot misogyny so pervasive elsewhere on Reddit. At the time, 2XC had a (completely unwarranted) reputation amongst the Reddit crowd as an evil place full of feminazi man-haters.
Then something started happening to 2XC. That thing was dudes. And not just any dudes – MRA dudes. Regulars on r/mensrights started linking to threads in 2XC and invading en masse, downvoting anything vaguely feminist and spewing forth their standard litanies of complaint. Some of these invaders decided to stay. And so, these sporadic raiding parties turned into a sort of occupation.
No, 2XC – despite the growing number of MRA residents, including a few female MRAs – has not turned into another r/mensrights. But at times, especially when the discussion turns to some MRA pet issue, the place looks a lot like dude central.
Case in point: this 2XC thread, expertly dissected by NauticalLittleNet in ShitRedditSays. The story: a woman posts a picture of her Halloween costume on Reddit and is bugged by a rude, creepy comment referring to her breasts (something that happens approximately ten zillion times a day on Reddit). So she posts the pic again to 2XC, hoping for sympathy. Instead, she’s treated to a barrage of comments mocking her for her alleged “persecution complex.” As NauticalLittleNet shows, the overwhelming majority of the obnoxious comments (all of which garnered numerous upvotes) were from dudes, many of them MRAs.
Naturally, this sort of thing – which happens pretty regularly on 2XC – has totally changed the dynamic of the subreddit from something that was sort of a haven for Reddit women to just another subreddit overflowing with obnoxious dudery.
As a Redditor called emmster noted recently in r/feminist, some women in 2XC have basically stopped posting anything vaguely feminist for fear of being jumped on by argumentative dudes:
I’ll be getting downvoted to Hell in the comments, but get PMs that are supportive from women who feel too afraid of the judgment and vitriol to jump in. I don’t love knowing there are women afraid to voice their opinions in a space that’s for women.
Honestly, I think the sustained r/MensRights invasion is what’s taking the largest toll. It’s like they can’t stand the idea that women have a space that’s active and popular, and they have to come ruin it.
And it doesn’t help that, as Donna_Juanita noted in the same discussion, some of the 2XC mods have essentially bent over backwards to accommodate the MRA invaders and to clamp down on feminists allegedly causing “drama.”
Since young men are a majority on the site as a whole, and a pretty hefty number of them haven’t had the “There Are Places I Am Not Necessarily Welcome to Pontificate on My Opinion” realization, the space becomes less of a place for women, and more of a place to talk about women. Which is a pretty big distinction. And a tricky thing to keep from happening without raising the ire of the entitled, ignorant young dude contingent.
As a reddit friend of mine put it, it all started with the “Hey Ladies, What Do You Think of My Dick?” posts. When a bunch of guys started posting questions, trying to “understand women,” which of course is a flawed goal, because women, being people, have a variety of opinions and preferences, and cannot actually be understood as a group. Some of them were actually questioning preferences on penis size, hence the name of the phenomenon.
My hypothesis is that eventually, it will be nothing but men talking to men about what they think about women.
Not that there is a shortage of such spaces on Reddit, or in the world in general.
By the way, that picture above is not actually a picture of 2XC regulars. It’s a picture of the Huutajat Men’s Shouting Choir. Which is a real thing in the world. Here they are in action:
So on this lazy Sunday I have decided to forgo the pleasures of mocking the manosphere in favor of this little musical interlude. Here’s an interesting performance by Malian musicians Daouda ‘Flani’ Sangaré and Alou Fané of their signature song, “Keleya.” I found it on the excellent African/Latin music blog WorldService. The blogger explains:
The song is about the jealousy (“keleya”) between co-épouses (co-wifes) in a polygamous marriage. When performing the song Flani would dress up as a woman, and would at times improvise to add to the comical effect of the song.
So is Flani’s cross-dressing a challenge to gender roles, or a comical reaffirmation of patriarchal power? I really don’t know. Gender is complicated. But this is a killer song. Today, the Boobz can wait.
This is sort of apropos of nothing, but if you’re ever looking for the most cheerful sounding song that’s actually about depression and denial, here it is: The Statler Brothers’ classic “Flowers on the wall.”
Lyrics here. And here’s a later performance of the song featuring a great deal of facial hair, and a brief non-singing cameo by The Man in Black.
Consider this an official Manboobz Weekend Dance Party Open Thread.
Oh, and they’ve also got a Facebook app that’s — get this! — only available to men! I’m not sure the women of the world are going to suffer much from being banned from playing a rudimentary flash game that involves shooting “girly things.”
I know they’re hoping to generate controversy here, but really? This is just too dumb to even get annoyed about, much less angry. It’s not misogynistic; it’s more a parody of misogyny. Is it such a parody – stereotyping guys as macho buffoons — that it’s actually more misandrist than misogynist? You could make an argument for that, but again the ad is so over the top ridiculous, so soaked in irony, it seems silly to get indignant about this either.
So what’s going to happen when the MRAs of the world hear about this ad? Will they, missing the irony, embrace its Diet Soda Going Its Own Way (DSGIOW) mentality? Or will they denounce it as an example of ad world misandry and pretend to be deeply offended?
I’m betting on the latter. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
The programming executives at ABC have been secretly replaced by alien pod-people from planet MRA. That’s really the only logical explanation for “Work It,” an upcoming ABC sitcom whose premise seems to have been lifted straight from the comments section of The Spearhead. Here’s a description of the show from ABC:
