Category: violence against men/women

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antifeminism douchebaggery manginas MGTOW misandry misogyny MRA oppressed men paul elam threats violence against men/women

>If you don’t agree with me, angry dudes will kick your ass

>

Anyone who’s seen Taxi Driver will remember Travis Bickle’s late night soliloquy on the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, [and] junkies” he saw every night driving his cab. “Someday,” he told himself, “a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Of course — SPOILER ALERT! — what he really meant by “a real rain” coming was that he, Travis Bickle, would lose his shit and start shooting people.

Bickle wasn’t the only one to mix his predictions with a heaping helping of threat. Those who predict the end of the world at the hand of gods or men or some vague terrible cataclysm are all too often rooting (secretly or openly) for the civilization-destroyers they are ostensibly warning against. We saw this the other day amongst those MGTOWers who are now talking giddily about how complete economic collapse will serve to put foolish women and their “mangina” pals in their proper place.

And we see it again and again in the Men’s Rights movement, when MRAs sternly warn their detractors that if people don’t start listening to them, and pronto, the men of the world will rise up and, well,  kick the shit out of everyone who opposes them. This is a warning only in the sense that a mafioso telling someone that, if he doesn’t pay what he owes, his legs just might possibly get broken, is a warning; by all reasonable definitions, it is a threat. As opposed to the leg-breaking, the threats of these MRAS aren’t very specific threats, but they’re threats of violence nonetheless.

I ran across one recent example of this sort of “warning” in the comments to Paul Elam’s piece on misandry — or at least what he labels misandry — in the Good Men Project’s package on the Men’s Rights movement. (My own contribution to the debate is here.) Here’s “Factory,” responding to another commenter who pointed out that some of his wording in an earlier comment had been awfully violent:

Who said I was interested in proving I wasn’t violent?

In point of fact, I continually warn people that if these issues are not MEANINGFULLY addressed, and soon, there will be a LOT of violence (see: Middle East) that we MRAs won’t be able to stop.

And frankly, if it comes to that, society (and all the women in it along with the men) flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.

Your hubris as a movement is causing a lot of men to be angry. You all vastly underestimate both the anger, and the ubiquitous nature of this anger.

We MRAs do nothing except act as weather vane and map. That’s why we have no central authority, or funding, or organization of any kind. We are average guys mad enough to stand up like we do. There are a LOT more guys that are just as mad, but content to let others lead.

And there are a growing number of men that take Feminist (and ‘official’) dismissal of mens issues as indication that ONLY violent revolution will lead to change.

And speaking for myself, if it ever comes to violence, I will stand aside, and feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done…but I won’t lift a FINGER to stop it.

Just like people like you are doing right now.

Notice the not-so-subtle, and rather thoroughly bungled, rhetorical sleight of hand here. Factory paints the violence as something he won’t indulge in (but won’t stop) — forgetting that in the very first sentence he admitted that he was himself violent. He refers to MRAs as little more than a “weather vane” for male emotion — but somehow later in the paragraph they are leading things. He claims that he will “feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done,” but this is only after stating in no uncertain terms that he thinks “society … flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.”

So, yeah, this is as much a “warning” as the hypothetical mafioso’s reference to broken legs.

Naturally, Elam himself stepped up to second Factory’s emotion, declaring that “[m]en, when disenfranchised and pushed to the edge, have frequently become violent.”

On his own site, Elam has been much more frankly threatening. Recently, telling off one commenter who had the temerity to actually question the gospel according to Elam, he finished off a long rant about male anger with this:

I would not suggest that treating half the population, the stronger half at that, with too much continuing disregard is a very good idea.

Thinking they will never come out swinging is a stupid, stupid way to go.

This kind of logic might best be called the Appeal to an Ass-kicking. The structure of this argument could be broken down as follows:

1) Source A says that p is true
2) If you don’t agree that p is true, Source A (or perhaps some other dudes) will do you bodily harm.
3) Therefore, you’d better fucking agree that p is true.

This is probably the oldest and crudest form of logic there is, and one that is popular amongst many animals as well. (My cat is a master of it, at least when p = “you will give me treats now.”)

Perhaps the best way to respond to it is the way that the commenter calling herself fannie responded to Factory on the Good Men Project:

You’re arguing that men are going to be so angry they’re not going to be able to control their rage and are therefore going to start inflicting mass amounts of violence upon others.

I’m not sure a feminist could be more defamatory of men than you are being.

MRAs sure are misandrist.

I, and feminists like me, think men are better than that.

Me too.

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>Heil Hitlary!

>

Hillary Clinton: A legless Nazi?

Some very, er, interesting observations on world politics from SingleDad on the angry-man internet hub known as The Spearhead. 

I think things will get much worse in ways we cannot imagine today. Why do you think our secretary of state has done nothing except meet with women all over the world non-stop.

I mean, we’re in two wars, North Africa is coming undone and where is Hitlary.

I’ll tell you. She is meeting with and creating a world feminist Cabal to be a non-elected shadow government.

What can we expect, more men in prison, less boys graduating high school, less and more dangerous jobs for men, more wars (to reduce the male population, a win/win for Hitlary), and world wide demonization and extermination of heterosexuality.

They hate men, women that like men, children and families.

Use your imagination … they are doing all this in secret as they know what they have in mind is unethical and could not tolerate the light of day.

Note: When he refers to “Hitlary,” SingleDad is, I believe, trying to draw a humorous parallel between our Secretary of State and the lead character in the 1980 Pakistani film Hitlar, in which the aforementioned Hitlar, son of Hitler, terrorizes a Punjabi village. In case you missed this film when it was in theaters, here’s a bit more on it from IMDb:

The movie starts with the premise that Hitler never died at the end of WWII, but that he escaped and started a family somewhere in the Punjabi heartland. The movie shows Hitlar, the son the world never knew about, sending his goons out to ravage the local villagers and terrify them into submission. Sultan Rahi witnesses the brutal murder of an innocent villager and vows to take revenge. and his quest for vengeance pits him against Hitlar, son of Hitler!

That might seem like sort of an obscure reference for SingleDad to make, but apparently The Spearheaders are huge fans of Pakistanti cinema. (I’m more of a Bollywood man myself.)

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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>Do Men Going Their Own Way Dream of Misogynistic Sheep?

>

Let’s just flush superbad into space.

Some manosphere dudes dream of a future filled with robogirl sex slaves eager to fulfill their every twisted wish. Over on Happy Bachelors, superbad dreams bigger. And weirder. Here’s his vision of a futuristic misogynistic sex utopia, a sort of sexed-up sci-fi version of that old creepy fairy tale about Bluebeard, mixed with a bit of Moonraker for good measure:

in an ideal world i would live alone on a huge spaceship with a large queue of sexy virgin’s in cryofreeze. when i got the urge i would select one to be thawed on a non-Windows OS computer. after having my way with them, if they asked anything too personal, like my name, i’d hit a big red panic button and have them flushed into space. then i’d eat some souvlaki and log on to a feminist forum and tell them how deeply i cared about their cause. “you’re right Sarah! i think twats should rule the world… YAAY TWATS!” then till the wee hours i would work on my mangina annihilation ray. when perfected i’d pull up to earth, get on a 100 million watt transmitter, and announce, while sipping ouzo, “you all got 24 hours to get the f*ck out”.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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>A New Low in Victim-Blaming, Part 2: In Mala Fide on Lara Logan

>

From In Mala Fide

The reaction of the “manosphere” to Lara Logan’s reported sexual assault in Cairo has been highly revealing, to put it mildly. And what it reveals about the assorted Men’s Rightsers, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artists, and others who make up the manosphere is pretty ugly.

Take, for example, Ferdinand Bardamu’s posts on the subject. On Tuesday, Bardamu, whose antifeminist blog In Mala Fide is widely linked to in the manosphere, spat forth a snide, sarcastic rant that attacked Logan for having the temerity to even set foot in Egypt. He started out dismissive:

Apparently, a CBS lady reporter got raped while covering the revolution in Egypt. For some reason, we’re expected to feel sorry for her.

Then turned up the sarcasm:

Oh, what a symbol of courage Miss Logan is! What a beacon of determination and grit and…no, seriously. I can’t go on.

Fuck Lara Logan. Fuck her and the shit-for-brains idiot who thought it was a good idea to send a WOMAN to report from a war zone. …

Of course, Bardamu ignores the simple  fact that is is dangerous to send ANY reporter, male or female, into the midst of a revolution — indeed, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 140 attacks on journalists in the Egyptian unrest so far; one journalist was shot and killed. Despite this fact, it is an undeniably good thing that some reporters (male and female both) are willing to risk their lives to cover wars and revolutions and other dramatic, dangerous, and important events. No one has suggested that the attacks on male journalists mean that men should not be covering these events. No one is mocking the male journalists who were attacked. (Well, almost no one. Bardamu refers in passing to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, also famously attacked while covering the events of Egypt, as a “twinkle-toed pansy [who] couldn’t handle the heat on the streets of Cairo.”)

For Bardamu, though, Logan’s story is one of a woman foolishly trying to make her way in a man’s world:

You send a chick into a situation like the one in Egypt, you might as well hang a sign around her neck that says “FREE FUCKTOY”. I don’t care how many disaster areas she’s reported from, how many awards she’s won, it was going to happen eventually. …

Sucks that Lara got raped, but she had it coming. [Emphasis in original]

To Bardamu, this case is evidence not only that women journalists should not be sent to cover the Egyptian revolution but that they should not be allowed to leave their home country at all:

[O]f COURSE Lara shouldn’t be sent on another foreign assignment again! She, nor any other women should be allowed to be a foreign correspondent for their own safety.

And then, after arguing that Logan “had it coming,”and that any western woman who has the temerity to leave her hotel room and step out into the streets of Cairo should expect herself to get raped sooner or later, Bardamu then suggests that Logan may be making it all up:

There’s a non-zero chance that she didn’t get raped at all, and that she made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. …

I have no evidence that she’s not telling the truth, only a tiny feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s been growing year by year, with every venal vixen who falsely accuses a man of rape because she wants fame, or she feels like a slut after sleeping with the guy, or she’s mad that he slept with her best friend the day after, or whatever else.

Naturally, in the comments, many of Bardamu’s fans agreed that women women who trespass into male spaces deserve whatever happens to them. According to “John”:

Women do not belong in men’s locker rooms, Mike Tysons apartment at 2:00 a.m., drunk in a bar bathroom with the Steelers quarterback, and they sure as hell don’t belong “reporting” in the middle of a revolution. Women should not go to Frat Parties dressed like sluts and get drunk with the expectation that “nothing will happen.” …

This woman, Laura Logan, is not just an idiot – she is an adulterous whore. She shares this unfortunate circumstance with tens of millions of others of her sex, and deserves no pity whatsoever.

For some, the case was not just another excuse for “slut shaming” but evidence that the very notion of equality between the sexes is wrong. As Brett Stevens put it:

American women are rape targets worldwide. They are known to be clueless, friendly, and most of all, sexually easy. If a woman chucks her sexual favors out the door at the drop out of a hat, why not just go the extra mile and apply pressure? … We take these girls from comfy suburbs and send them into war zones and riots and wonder why they get gang raped. Amazing cluelessness, arising from our insane idea of “equality.”

There were other comments even worse than these — e.g., this one — but I don’t have the heart to post them here.

But Bardamu’s retrograde notions were also challenged in the comments — mostly from those who saw his noxious post linked to on feminist sites and on Twitter, but also in a few cases from actual fans of his blog.

This reaction inspired Bardamu to post a second piece on the Logan story, one even more narcissistic and self-righteous than the first. After taking on some of his critics (most notably Molly of Progressive Blogic, whom he labeled a “premenstrual whiner”), and casually referring to Logan as “an unwilling cum dumpster,” Bardamu tried to pretend that it was him, and not the feminists, who had the best interests of women at heart.

Lara Logan had no business being in Cairo, or anywhere in that part of the world for that matter. All of you leftie feminist tossers screeching about “rape culture” have her blood on your hands. How many more have to suffer before your lies are discredited?

Sorry, but a guy who refers to any women, much less a woman who has been raped, as a “cum dumpster” pretty much forfeits any right to be taken seriously on the subject of what is best for women.

About a week ago, Bardamu reported that he’d taken a Psychopathy Test on OkCupid, and had scored an impressive 31 points, which put him in the ranks of the “True Psychopaths.”  His posts on Logan — full of narcissistic rage and utterly lacking in basic human empathy — seem to bear out this diagnoses all too well.

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>Lady Killers

>

Feminist Training Camp

There’s only really one rule to follow if you want to get upvoted on The Spearhead: make sure you say something hateful about women! If you follow this rule, you can say almost anything you want, no matter how completely batshit insane it is, and still get a couple of dozen upvotes. Works every time!

Consider, for example, this peculiar wisdom from one fellow calling himself Anonymous age 68, taken from a long, rambling comment that, the last time I checked, had 35 upvotes and only 11 downvotes. Take it away, you lovable old kook:

For 45 years, the man-haters who run this country have been saying privately they want to kill most men. I read MS. in the 80?s, and it was there. In recent years, they have shushed the stupids who have been saying it publicly, but you can be sure they are privately saying, “NOT YET, STUPID!” …

Killing large numbers of men is the only one of the original feminist goals which has not yet been achieved. And, all the other things they have done to men were directly or indirectly in the original lists.

I subscribed to MS magazine in the 70?s and 80?s, until my stomach would not take it any more. They told right out in there, their original goals. The world cannot be safe until most men are terminated.

I tried to tell other men, who treated me like s**t. “Why do you worry about things like that? This is the USA, and nothing like that will ever happen. …” 

Exactly what the Jew leaders told worried Jews in the 20th Century.That worked out real well.

Just in case you didn’t subscribe to Ms. in the 70s and 80s, and you’re wondering what the other original feminist goals were, here’s the whole list:

1) Buy comfortable shoes
2) Create Lilith Fair
3) Kill men.
4) ???
5) Profit!

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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>Rapist babies and internet threats

>

How the hell did I get mixed up in all this?

The manosphere is in an uproar about a public service TV ad from an anti-violence group that portrays a baby boy as a future rapist. Some MRAs are attempting to refute the ad’s implication that improperly socialized men are prone to violence by posting and upvoting … violent comments and veiled threats online. And apparently some non-veiled death threats as well.

A few days ago, you see, W.F. Price, head honcho at The Spearhead, wrote a critical piece about the endeavors of one Josh Jasper to draw attention to sexism in Super Bowl commercials; Price also pointed out that Jasper, CEO of the Riverview Center, a nonprofit serving domestic violence and sexual assault victims in Illinois and Iowa, had put out an earlier commercial that, in Price’s words, “impl[ied] that baby boys are all potential rapists.”

Despite the source, that’s actually a more or less accurate description of the ad, which depicts a happy little baby boy as a future rapist. I’m just not quite sure why that’s so objectionable; after all, every baby, male or female, is a bundle of possibilities, some good, some bad. (Hitler was once a happy, gurgling baby.) The point of the ad is that parents can have an effect on how their kids turn out; if you raise your son to be a violent, misogynist asshole, he may well end up a rapist.

As much as I agree with this basic sentiment, I’m not going to defend the ad. It’s terrible. Generally, I’m not a fan of using babies to make political points — it’s trite and manipulative, to begin with. And in this case, it’s worse than that: portraying a baby as a future rapist seems rather hamfisted, given that babies are often victims of abuse themselves. 

Judge for yourself; here’s the ad.

All this said, the flaws of the “rapist baby” ad in no way excuse the response it’s gotten from some of the more hotheaded in the Men’s Rights Movement and the manosphere in general. On his website, Peter Nolan declares that the ad “promote[s] hatred of male babies”; on The Spearhead,  Poester99 goes even further, accusing Riverview Center of “promoting violence against baby boys.” Which is, of course, completely absurd. (Even besides that, as Jasper has pointed out on his blog, the Riverview Center serves male victims as well as female ones.) It’s hard to know if the people spouting this nonsense honestly believe it, or if they are using the baby in the ad even more cynically and opportunistically than Jasper is.

Unfortunately, the MRA reaction has gone well beyond simple rhetorical overkill. A number of comments on The Spearhead, many of them with dozens of upvotes, are essentially threats — some vague, some not-so-vague — against Jasper himself. duke writes that:

Mangina creeps like Josh Jasper should suffer the same fate as Nazi sympathizers after WWII-taken out and shot after a five minute trial.

Avenger adds:

If men really were as violent as he claims they would have shut him up long ago. One good beating and this mangina would never open his mouth again.

Firepower, meanwhile, goes after Jasper’s … first name:

So long as males tolerate sissified males named “Josh” – pissing even on our SuperBowl – these gender traitors will only feel encouraged to increase their anti-male slurs.

Over on A Voice For Men, meanwhile, MRA elder Paul Elam insinuates that Jasper, far from being a sissy,  is a violent “alpha puke” — and calls on his fans to dig up dirt on him:

This man deserves consequences for his actions.

Some history on Josh is known. We know he was a marine and we also know that he was a Los Angeles police officer. Two areas for sure where the capacity for violence is a plus. Add to that the fact that he was on a Domestic Violence task force and this bad apple starts to stink a little more. …

Anyone want to take any bets on whether this alpha puke ever busted heads as a cop, simply because he could? It leaves one to wonder – especially given the intellectual violence he is so obviously willing to inflict on male children – just what sort of skeletons are in this douche bag’s closet.

If they are there, I would love to get my hands on them and rattle them together for the world to hear.

And on Men-Factor, antifeminist blogger ScareCrow (who used to regularly post comments here) posts the email addresses of The Riverview Center’s mostly female board of directors, urging readers to “vent your anger” on this “bitch-hive,” adding “I aim to destroy it.”

I don’t have the patience or the stomach to sort through the comments on the YouTube page for the ad to see what other vile shit has been posted there.

I can only hope that most of this violent language is just standard internet tough guy  talk, and won’t result in real violence in the real world. Even if you believe that Jasper’s ad commits a sort of rhetorical violence against male babies — which I think is a ridiculous reading of the admittedly idiotic ad —  it does not justify actual violence against anybody.

EDIT: I should have let this one sit a little before putting it up. I’ve made various changes to strengthen and clarify my argument.
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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>”I don’t hate women. I just want them all to die bitter and alone.”

>

Non-haters also gonna hate.

The “Rant you very much” section of NiceGuy’s MGTOW [Men Going Their Own Way] forum is the place for commenters to post stuff that they think might be too crazy and “out there” for the forum’s other sections. Given what else is posted over on NiceGuy’s — the stomping ground of a fellow named Nightstorm and his wild fantasies of moustrap vaginas and leech women —  this is a tall order indeed.

NiceGuy richbansha tried his best to live up to these high expectations with a recent rant titled “Why not hate?” Why bother to pretend that we don’t hate women, rich asks his fellow NiceGuys, when this won’t actually do us any good? As for him, he admits his hatred up front. (I’ve taken the liberty of bolding some expecially ranty bits in the quote below, and adding a paragraph break.)

Do I “hate women”? You bet your ass!  …

[T]he most common reason why one of us will deny the possibility that we hate them  is not not look bad. Is there any doubt that they don’t hate YOU or that those listening in wouldn’t just as soon see you violated? … No matter what you do, you can still expect the most inconscionable treatment at the hands of AW [American Women]. If the response to both kindness and cruelty are identical, what is the reason for such a lopsided favoritism for appeasement?

When saying that you want to rape and cut up a woman with a band saw is met with the exact same reaction as saying you want to want to buy them a drink, what … is the incentive to not be hateful and violent? We have seen for ourselves that refraining only makes you are more likely target for hatred and violence. … So when a stinking cavern gets out of hand why not pulp her? You know you want to. Does anyone really think that stopping yourself or saying you would stop yourself will make it any easier on you?

In a followup post, he blames it all on the alleged tendency of women to adore “bad boys” and treat kind, considerate nice guys — richbansha apparently thinks he is, or at least was, one of them — like dirt:

My fate was decided in 7th grade when that girl said I had cooties. …  If you ever got a “P” in the box on your report card that says “Respects the rights of others” then you are a marked man. …

I have suffered far more for the things that I had nothing to do with than any active and intentional infraction that I ever committed. … Who do skanks even call the cops on? Violent meth dealer Bf who routinely beats her and impregnates her or the honest, hardworking auditor who pays for the meth dealer’s offspring? Is it any wonder that I think dudes should get on the good side of that equation?

The “good side,” of course, being the side of of the girlfriend-beating “bad-boy” meth dealer.

So, yeah, that’s what a rant on NiceGuy’s looks like.

More interesting to me than the actual rant, though, are the responses of others in the forum. TheDude suggested he tone it down a bit: 

So you think that violence may be the answer when there are thousands of cops who would love to beat your ass because you “disrespected a lady?” I think talking about it on this board just makes us a target and it is bad advice.

In other words, the voice of reason in this discussion frames his advice in entirely self-interested terms: Don’t attack women because then cops will beat your ass. Don’t talk like this on the forum, because it makes MGTOW look bad.

And then there are those who chime in to say they didn’t hate women … but. There is always a “but.” A couple of the “buts” are fairly mild and inoffensive. the american, echoing the famous Dr. Freud, notes

I don’t hate women. I just don’t understand their thought processes.

Our friend Yohan goes a little further (bold in original):

I am not hateful or violent, but I am highly MISTRUSTING against all and everything a Western female will ever tell me.

It’s not only about my past, it’s about the present legal situation in feminist countries, which encourages females of any age to consider men of any age, even young boys and old people, even your own father as nothing but trash except for quick money supply.

About hate, it should be said, hate is really bad for your health cousing heart problems, stomach problems etc..

And then there are … these. Richard Cranium blames those evil Sufragettes (and the manginas who loved them) for it all:

It’s not a matter of hating women per se, it’s hating what they’ve become, or more specifically what manginas have let them become. As has been stated here & elsewhere, the day we let them out of the kitchen and let them vote was the day it all went to hell.

Big R takes his non-hatred to a whole other level:

I dont hate them either. I want them to live to see how lonely and suicidal they,ll become when they find out all the men have dumped them forever in the feminized world. I want them to live and suffer without men or the attention they receive from us. …

I have turned out just a little vengeful towards women for the treatment I have received from them throughout my life. Just seeing an AW maybe lying on the sidewalk after a drunken suicidal depressive drinking binge after being dumped and cheated on would brighten up my day.

Our friend Yohan obliged this last wish by posting a photo of a drunk woman lying on the floor in what appears to be a pool of her own urine, with a friendly little note advising Big R to “have a nice day.”

So very considerate, these Men Going Their Own Way.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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>The uprising in Egypt: Not all about the menz

>

Leon Trotsky — you know, THE Trotsky — once said disdainfully of writer Dwight Macdonald, who’d had the temerity to actually question him about something-or-other, “everyone has the right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.”

Now, Trotsky was sort of a shit, and probably would have been a worse dictator than Stalin, and Dwight Macdonald was awesome, but I’ve always loved this little put-down, and I’d like to update it for the internet age.  So here goes:

Everyone has the right to pontificate about shit they know nothing about on the internet, but our comrades at The Spearhead abuse the privilege.

The latest example: A short piece about the Egyptian protests from Spearhead head cheese W.F. Price. Noting that footage of the protests show a lot of angry men out on the streets, Price opines:

Governments that consistently neglect or antagonize their male populations never last too long.

Yep, no matter what happens anywhere in the world at any time, on The Spearhead it’s always all about the menz. Indeed, not only has the Egyptian government been insufficiently accommodating to men, Price suggests; it’s also started flirting with feminism, having “recently taken the lead in the Arab world in empowering women.” But such a transparent ploy to win over the wimmenz will invariably backfire, he argues (or, rather, asserts), further angering the angry men in the streets:

Female support matters little; women shift allegiance at the drop of a hat, so any government that counts on them to prop them up is making a mistake.

Those fickle, fickle women!

In the comments, someone called Antz took this absurdity a step or two further, asking his fellow Spearheaders to

note the alpha males in battle gear, ready at the drop of a hat to open fire on their freedom loving brothers with machine guns.

Alpha males have always been the wielders of the burning blade of feminist anti-male hatred.

Yes, that’s right. The Egyptian security police have suddenly gone feminist on us.

This isn’t the first time Price has attempted to cast an uprising in the Arab world as a manly reaction to the doings of evil women. He titled a recent piece on the Tunisian uprising “Arrogant Woman Slaps Young Man, Brings Down Her Regime.” The “arrogant woman” in question was a corrupt local official who slapped and thereby humiliated a young Tunisian street vendor named Mohammad Bouazizi; his very public suicide — he lit himself on fire in front of a government building as a form of protest –was what set off the Tunisian uprising. (I have no idea what Price means by referring to “her regime,” as the woman in question was  merely a local functionary and the regime in question was of course headed by a man.) Price wrote:

Authoritarian regimes in Muslim-majority states tend to favor women’s empowerment, seeing women as natural allies in keeping fundamentalist Islam at bay and willing participants in corrupt patronage systems. However, favoring women can only go so far, as men need a certain degree of appeasement as well, and it seems that young Tunisian men have had enough of being – quite literally in this case – slapped around.

Never mind that Tunisia’s historic adoption of women’s rights legislation — abolishing polygamy, and, horror of feminist horrors, requiring men to actually get consent from women before marrying them  — happened more than half a century ago. Never mind that the repressive Ben Ali government was actually moving backwards on women’s rights. A woman slapped a man, so the uprising was therefore all about the symbolic slapping of men by an evil regime that Price has bizarrely described as a “her.”

Back to Egypt, which is even less of a feminist paradise than Tunisia. Indeed, a 2010 report from the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights concluded that the country was getting worse, not better, when it came to its already dismal record on women’s rights. As thedailynewsegypt.com reports (link is to Google’s cached copy of the story):

The report, which is based on the findings of international human rights organizations, stated that Egypt was ranked 125th out of 134 countries regarding women’s rights, and was ranked 13th among countries in the Middle East/North Africa region. …

The state council’s refusal to appoint female judges in February was considered by the ECWR as a major setback to women’s rights in 2010. …  Women still suffer from inequality in the workplace … there’s been a rise in violence against women. …  71.4 percent of violent crimes in 2010 were against women. …

The ECWR also highlighted the increased use of two new alarming police practices against women: the practice of holding women hostage in order to force fugitives to surrender themselves to the police, as well as the sexual violation of women by police officers.

But that’s not the only thing that Price has gotten very, very wrong: As many observers far more knowledgeable than Price have pointed out — including, amazingly, one commenter on The Spearhead — the footage of male-dominated protests we see on TV is in many ways wildly misleading: Egyptian women have been involved in the current protests in unprecedented numbers.

As Jenna Krajeski noted on Slate’s XXFactor blog,

An unprecedented number of Egyptian women participated in Tuesday’s anti-government protests. Ghada Shahbandar, an activist with the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, estimated the crowd downtown to be 20 percent female. Other estimates were as high as 50 percent. In past protests, the female presence would rarely rise to 10 percent. Protests have a reputation for being dangerous for Egyptian women, whose common struggle as objects of sexual harassment is exacerbated in the congested, male-dominated crowd.

Max Strasser, a former associate editor at Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition in Cairo, explains the dynamic:

It is no secret that Egypt is a conservative country when it comes to gender relations. Men and women generally, though not exclusively, adhere to traditional gender roles where women stay at home. As a result, many public spaces are heavily male dominated. Moreover, sexual harassment is frustratingly common … Big crowds, like soccer rallies, are usually the least hospitable for women.

Since this uprising began, the typical gender dynamic in Egypt’s public space seems to have been thrown out with the regime. Some have said that as many as half of the protesters are women. Moreover, as I have watched Al Jazeera it seems clear that women of all walks of life, from young girls in jeans to older women wearing niqab, are taking part.  All are chanting, pumping their fists and, at times, battling with the riot police.

As feminist human rights activist Nawal El Saadawi told Democracy Now!, “women and girls are beside boys in the streets.”

Do I have any idea what’s next in Egypt? Of course not. The crowds I’ve seen in the news coverage on CNN and elsewhere have been mostly men, and a lot of these men are fundamentalist fanatics. But I think the presence of women alongside the men in the protests is heartening, and gives us some reason for optimism.

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antifeminism douchebaggery misogyny rape reactionary bullshit Uncategorized violence against men/women

>The Republicans take aim at pregnant rape victims.

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He’s not crying for pregnant rape victims.

Let’s take a brief break from the man boobz on the internet to look at the man (and some women) boobz in Congress, specifically the Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) who are trying to push through a truly odious bill, The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, designed to make it harder for women who have been raped to get abortions. Here’s how the SF Chronicle sums it up:

Current law allows federal funds (usually for Medicaid) to be spent on abortions only for women who have been raped or are the victims of incest. We think those restrictions are bad enough, but the new class of House Republicans want more. The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act would outlaw the use of federal funds for abortion except in the case of “forcible rape.” The incest exemption would only apply to minors.

“Forcible rape” doesn’t have a legal definition, but in general the idea is to exclude pregnancies that result from date rape, statutory rape or rapes that happen when women are physically incapacitated.

So if you’re drugged and raped, and you get pregnant, too bad. If your father rapes you, and you get pregnant, too bad. Those rapes apparently don’t count.

As Amanda Marcotte puts it, the bill’s sponsors apparently

believe the misogynist stereotype that all women, especially those who claim to be ill or victims of crimes, are lying whores until proven otherwise.  Or just lying whores, regardless of the evidence they produce.  And so, to make sure those lying whores don’t get their hands on those delicious, orgasm-inducing uterine scrapings, the bill has language in it that, in essence, assumes that 70% of rape victims weren’t really raped.  The exception is only for “forcible rape”, which is vaguely defined, but in practice tends to mean that anything short of getting your ass beat down means you weren’t “really” raped.  Even if you’re a 13-year-old who was impregnated by a 30-year-old.  Also, if you happen to get pregnant by your abusive, rape-y father on your 18th birthday, you will get no funding to make sure you don’t give birth to your own brother.

In Salon, Sady Doyle puts the Republican push for the bill in a larger context, noting that the bill’s reference to “forcible rape”

brings us back to an ancient, long-outdated standard of rape law: “Utmost resistance.” By this standard, a rape verdict depended not on whether the victim consented, but on whether outsiders thought she resisted as hard as humanly possible. Survivors rarely measured up.

Meanwhile, Time magazine’s Amy Sullivan tried to figure out if there really were a lot of “false rape claims” being by made by wily money-hungry young pregnant women in an attempt to bilk the government out of money.  The answer, of course, is no.

Eligibility rules … differ by state, but many states are like Tennessee, which requires a doctor to certify that “there is credible evidence to believe that the pregnancy is the result of rape” and to attach “documentation from a law enforcement agency indicating the patient has made a credible report as the victim of incest or rape” before Medicaid will consider issuing payment for an abortion procedure. …

So that scourge of false rape reports–or even, let’s say, “non-forcible” rapes? It doesn’t exist. I couldn’t find numbers more recent than 2001, but these shocked me. In that year, the total number of abortions covered by Medicaid was 56. That’s all abortions for cases in which the mother’s life was in danger, the pregnancy was a result of incest, or in the case of rape. Another 25 were covered by state Medicaid programs. Even assuming that every single one of those abortions was to end a pregnancy caused by rape, that’s 81 abortions paid for in part with taxpayer dollars. Nationwide. That’s roughly $32,000 total for first trimester procedures.

So, yeah, this is not exactly what is busting the budget. Indeed, I imagine there are many rape victims who choose to pay out of pocket for an abortion, even if they can’t really afford it, rather than going through the humiliation of trying to prove they’ve been raped to the satisfaction of government bureaucrats.

UPDATE: The Republicans have removed the “forcible rape” language from the bill. But there is still plenty about the bill to hate. 

If you’re American, and want to do something about this bill, here’s one practical suggestion: There are a number of Democrats who have signed on to co-sponsor the bill. I suggest you contact them and let them know how you feel. You can find info on how to contact them on Pandagon.

Or you can contact your representative by clicking on the banner below:


 
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>Lucky McKee at Sundance: The Woman and the White Knight

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The Woman

After a midnight showing of horror director Lucky McKee’s The Woman at Sundance this past Sunday, right before the scheduled Q and A with the director, one irate moviegoer stood up to denouce the film, the director, and Sundance itself. According to film blogger Drew McWeeny, who was there, the unidentified man shouted:

“THIS MOVIE DEGRADES WOMEN! THIS MOVIE DEGRADES MEN! YOU ARE SICK! THIS IS NOT ART! YOU ARE SICK! THIS IS A DISGUSTING MOVIE! SUNDANCE SHOULD BE ASHAMED! HOW DARE YOU SHOW THIS!”

Ultimately, after a bit more of this sort of ranting, he was escorted out of the theater by security guards. You can read more about the incident, and see a couple of videos that capture its aftermath, here; you can read McKee’s response to it all here.

So what’s the connection to this blog? At this point, many of my regular MRA and other manosphere readers will no doubt have concluded that I will be joining the irate moviegoer in denouncing McKee’s alleged misogyny. If so, this will not be the first time (or even the first time today) that they have been utterly and completely wrong.

No, It’s because the incident provides such a clear example of a “White Knight” in action: someone who seems to think that women are delicate flowers that he, as a man, needs to protect from images of women being brutalized.

MRAs and other manosphere men love to denounce feminist men as “White Knights.” And sometimes they are justified in their complaints: there are men who consider themselves feminists who  do indeed put women on a pedestal, and who talk about women as if their shit smells like roses. But that’s not really feminism; it’s a patronizingly traditional view of women masquerading as feminism. Real feminists don’t pretend that women don’t have flaws. White Knights do.* Real feminists don’t assume that women are too sensitive and delicate to see harsh images. White Knights do.

The irony of the kerfuffle at Sundance is that McKee is about as far from a misogynist as any director I know. Though, as far as I know, McKee doesn’t actually call himself a feminist, his films reflect a subtle, nuanced, and sympathetic view of women — at their best and, just as importantly, at their worst — that can only be called feminist. As McWeeny notes, McKee’s

sensitivity towards his actresses, and the perspective each of his films takes, is practically political.  He returns to themes of power inequality and gender struggle, and he externalizes his subtext.  He has been consistent in his interests, and as a result, he hasn’t been making $50 million studio films.

His films May and The Woods, and his Masters of Horror episode “Sick Girl” all center around female lead characters. But he doesn’t, as a real “white knight” would do, portray women as angels or innocent victims. No, he portrays them as, well, human beings. That is, as messy and complicated characters with flaws and evil impulses.

In May, while he is empathetic towards weirdo loner May, he also makes clear she’s out of her fucking mind, a creepy stalker and a violent sociopath to boot; she’s both the protgonist and the villain of the film. Nor does he portray men as mindless evil thugs: in Roman — which he wrote,  but which was directed by his frequent collaborator Angela Bettis, who played the lead in May — he plays, er, Roman, another strange outcast and creepy stalker, and manages to render him quite sympathetic, despite the fact that the socially stunted,  sexually and romantically frustrated character (SPOILER ALERT — highlight to read) actually kills a woman while trying to rape her early on in the film. 

In The Woods, a more mainstream horror film, McKee portrays the almost-all-female world of a private girl’s school in the 1960s; he does a marvellous job getting into the head of the troubled girl at the center of the film, and plays with female stereotypes in a way that challenges and surprises the viewer. (I’m being deliberately vague here so as not to give too much away.) The villains in the film? All female.

Still, I can see how a less-than-careful viewer might get the impression that McKee hates women: many of his female characters, both women and girls, are crazy, violent, and sometimes simply evil; he isn’t afraid to show women being brutalized — or brutalizing others. In this view, if you portray a female character as evil, you therefore think all women are inherently evil; if you portray violence against women you aid and abet real-world brutalizers of women.

That’s the essential complaint of one putatively feminist critic on Pajiba, Dustin Rowles, who saw The Woman at Sundance:

The more images of sexualized and subjugated women we see, the less likely things are going to improve. They perpetuate steretypes about women. Lucky McKee’s The Woman is the perfect example of this.

Correction: Rowles saw PART of the film at Sundance, then walked out:

I’m certain that, like many rape-revenge fantasies, the men get their commuppance in the end, both the father and his son, who has taken after his father. I wouldn’t know — I couldn’t make it past the scene where the woman is power washed.

Criticizing a film without watching the ending — particularly a horror film based around a rape-revenge plot — is a bit like criticizing a joke without hearing the punchline.

Now, again, I haven’t seen even a minute of The Woman either, so maybe it is really a long exercise in violent misogyny. Given McKee’s past work, and the nature of the complaints against the film, this seems about as unlikely as Sarah Palin sprouting wings, reading a book, and/or endorsing a handgun ban.

What really strikes me is that the complaints directed at The Woman are similar to those directed against numerous other horror films in the past, particularly those centered around rape and revenge, like the notorious low-budget shocker I Spit On Your Grave, which inspired a infamously indignant, and rather White-Knighty, column from Roger Ebert that completely and utterly missed the point of the film. It was, he wrote,

a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theaters. … an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, It flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. “I Spit on Your Grave” does not. It is a geek show.

Ebert was angry about the brutal and graphic sexual violence directed at the female lead in the first part of the film — that is, before she sets out on her (brutal, graphic, violent) revenge against the men who brutalized her. Never mind that the central plot of, say, your typical Western movie features a hero who has to endure horrific violence and pain before exacting his revenge at the end — and that this formula has produced a vast library of amazing films.

Ebert rightly considers The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to be a “masterpiece.” You may recall some of the crazy and brutal shit Clint Eastwood’s Blondie had to endure in that film — you know, like that walk through the desert that left his skin looking like pulled pork. Why is violence against men, in the context of a revenge drama, artistically justified, while violence against women, also in the context of a revenge drama, not?

By allowing its brutalized heroine the same chance for revenge that Westerns offered many generations of heroes, I Spit On Your Grave is, while hardly a great film, a feminist one. Indeed, it offers one of the most memorable depictions of what has come to be known as “the final girl,” a character familiar to horror movie fans — that is, the one victim, invariably female, who manages, through wily evasions and sheer force of will, to survive the assaults of the monster or psycho at the center of the film. Here’s how feminist film critic Carol J. Clover described her in the legendary essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” which first introduced the notion of the”final girl” to film criticism:

The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). She is inevitably female.

Halloween 2: Final Girl in action

As Clover notes, in some horror films, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, the final girl merely endures; in others, like A Nightmare on Elm Street, she triumphs. Most of these final girls don’t start out as badass in the slightest; if anything, they tend to be nerdy, awkward introverts. The brutality they endure is necessary to understand their transformations.

“Protecting” female film characters from violence also “protects” them from having agency in their own stories. Portraying them as free of evil thoughts and urges is similarly patronizing and ultimately disempowering. Women in the real world aren’t angels, and there’s nothing feminist about portraying them as such. Like McKee, most feminists are well aware of this.  True “White Knights” — male or female — do the women they hope to uplift a disservice, treating them as one-dimensional characters in some simplistic morality play. Women, like men, deserve better than that.

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* This is not to say that we should overlook the simple fact that women are more likely to be brutalized by men than vice versa — that men commit far more violent crimes and sexual assaults against women than women do against men, that men cause the majority of serious injuries associated with domestic violence. Women, like men, have violent impulses. But they are less likely than men to act upon them in ways that seriously damage others, male or female. To point this out is to recognize reality; it is not a case of White Knighting.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.