We Hunted the Mammoth: The FAQ-ening
Q) A mammoth, huh? What’s this blog about?
A) Misogyny, not mammoths.
Specifically, this blog focuses on what I call the “New Misogyny,” an angry antifeminist backlash that has emerged like a boil on the ass of the internet over the last decade or so. These aren’t your traditional misogynists – the social conservatives and religious fundamentalists who make up much of the far right.
These are guys, mostly, who range in age from their teens to their fifties, who have embraced misogyny as an ideology, as a sort of symbolic solution to the frustrations in their lives – whether financial, social, or sexual.
Some of them identify as Men’s Rights Activists, trying to cast their peculiar struggle against what they see as the excess of feminism and the advantages of women as a civil rights issue of sorts. Alongside those who explicitly label themselves MRAs we find a great number of antifeminist and antiwomen activists we might call Men’s Rights-adjacent – like those in the Skeptic and Atheist subcultures who still haven’t gotten over an offhand remark Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson made about a dude in an elevator a couple of years ago.
Others proclaim themselves Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), declaring a sort of independence from women – while spending much of their time on message boards talking endlessly about them.
Still others see themselves as Pickup Artists (PUA), or masters of “Game,” espousing elaborate “scientific” theories of male superiority while trading tips on how best to pressure or manipulate drunk women into bed. This misogynistic wing of the PUA subculture has a considerable overlap with a subset of traditionalist and far-right blogs. Many of those in what has come to be called “the manosphere” — hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with that name — don’t simply embrace misogyny; they also proudly embrace “scientific” racism and other bigotries.
Still, while some of the New Misogynists see themselves as conservatives, even “neo-reactionaries,” many identify themselves as libertarians or even as liberals. Theirs is a backlash that frames itself as a step forward.
That said, there are numerous posts here that don’t have anything to do with MRAs or MGTOWers or PUAs or any of their ilk. Sometimes I like to post cat pics.
Q) Ok, but you still haven’t explained the mammoth thing.
A) This is a reference to a quote I once posted from a dude who felt women weren’t sufficiently appreciative of what men had supposedly done for them over the ages. Here’s the quote, in all of its weird glory:
We men built a nice safe world for you all the the coal-mines of death, roads, railroads, bridges and tall office buildings. Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety. Forget about the wars we died in and the sacrifices made just ignore history or is it now hersorty? You are accruing the benefits without ever having to pay the price you still don’t have to sign up for the draft and who will protect you? The Sex and the City girls will fight off the North Koreans with their Manolo Blahniks?
Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted we hunted the mammoth to feed you we died in burning buildings and were gassed in the trenches but that was just for fun right?
How quick and conveniently you forget who made this possible.
We gave you Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy not to mention countless others, Jonas Salk saved half the world from death and you just piss on it all.
This quote is such an amazing clusterfuck of misogyny, entitlement and unwarranted self-importance – not to mention historical ignorance – that the bit about mammoths became a catchphrase around here, neatly conveying pretty much everything this blog is against. And so I decided to make it the name of the blog.
Q) And who exactly are you?
A) David Futrelle. I’m a freelance writer and blogger living in Evanston, IL, and the guy behind the Confused Cats Against Feminism blog. For more on my illustrious career, see the David Futrelle FAQ.
Q) You’re against the Men’s Rights movement. Are you against men having rights?
A) Of course not. As hundreds of posts on this site show pretty clearly, the so-called Men’s Rights Movement is a hateful, reactionary movement driven largely by misogyny and hatred of feminism. It doesn’t help men. It encourages them to scapegoat women and stew in their own bitterness.
Q) Are you secretly funded by the international feminist conspiracy?
A) No. I’m not funded by any organization. Some readers have very kindly given me donations. You can too, if you wish.
Q) What’s with all the cat pictures?
A) I like cats.
As a political scientist, I can assure you that your assessment of statehood and the origins thereof are ahistorical assfax.
The evolution of hunter-gatherer groups to tribes to chiefdoms and finally to modern states is a common anthropological idea( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopolitical_typology ).
Perhaps you don’t agree; it does not mean that it isn’t a significant, peer reviewed theory. I also draw heavily from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies as sources.
Please keep up the creativity. I remember a quote about personal insults and last refuge of intellectual cowards, but I’m sure you can clarify that for me.
Your diploma from the University of Wikipedia only makes me laugh at you harder.
You sound like someone who once read the Cliff Notes for Leviathan and stopped reading political theory right there.
A question for the regulars here: Does the above constitute gaslighting, or is there another name for what trollpan just did?
It’s only gaslighting if we take him to be a trusted authority and he abuses that authority. As it is, it’s just him being twelve years old.
I disagree. Gaslighting can be attempted by anyone. We called it gaslighting when Professor Skull tried to pull it on Tub Boy, and IMHO rightly so.
Ah, the old “I know you are, but what am I” defense. Classic and effective.
I’m mocking you This is a blog for mocking misogyny. Your insistence that any disagreement with you is due to emotion is a pretty serious misogyny tell.
Oh, he’s definitely gaslighting. He’s failed to present even one piece of evidence that PUA works. PUA has never been based on a falsifiable hypothesis and he knows it. So what else can he do but imply that we’re too hysterical to comprehend his incredible and supreme logic.
I don’t know how you guys are arguing with this asshole. shonpan clearly has no idea how science works or arguments or logic. I’m just gonna point and laugh on the sidelines while they bumble along with their nose held high in a faux-academia stupor.
The frothing insanity. Lovely.
Not that I think there’s any real effort at this point for anything approximating science here – for all of the arguments posted, I’ve yet to see really see one study used, but I’l put one here used in research for PUA.
“The Dating Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Emerging Science of
Human Courtship”, http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP10899909.pdf
A few final things:
1) Appeals to authority are cute but silly. I don’t need to brandish my degree; it serves nothing and would do nothing given the very real confirmation bias visible here.
2) My personal experiences? The world is a terrible place. These arguments are silly; I’ve had to survive in a warzone. Humanity at its most primal is not a pretty thing.
3) I agree wholly that economic freedom of women has promoted overall economic freedom and growth. One thing which very much inspired my belief on this in specific is Sarah Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved(I can’t wait to see how many people will claim she’s an insane misogynist – given the commentary here). In it, she notes that the advent of technology such as birth control and labor-saving devices reduced the need that early societies had for women to be more exclusively focused on family affairs.
Its a consistent and true maxim: as technology changes, so do people and their roles in society. Biology is not destiny.
Yup. Definitely gaslighting.
So then why the fuck are you evo psyching all over the place trying to claim rape as a “viable reproductive strategy” or whatever, and then whining at us for refusing to detach morals and ethics from rape?
You seem to think that you can crash into someone else’s back yard and demand a reasoned, thoughtful debate using, on your side, a complete and utter lack of actual information that wasn’t pulled directly from your rectum. You seem to think that anyone who doesn’t agree to debate you on those ludicrous terms is somehow breaking an intellectual rule.
I don’t demand that you brandish your degree. I demand that you brandish some demonstrable knowledge. You haven’t. You reference Wikipedia like it’s some kind of legitimate authority, which means that you either haven’t attended college at all, or you didn’t respond to your undergraduate professors’ attempts to beat that stupidity out of you. Referencing Wikipedia as an authority on anything more weighty than superheroes’ backstories is a mark of stupidity, not ignorance. It is stupid to do that. By doing so, you demonstrate that you are literally not worth the time it’s taking me to type out this response to you telling you how you are not worth the time.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
A degree in what? Bartending? Coffee making? Dog psychology? Clown college?
Stop me when I get to it.
Part of me wants to go and tell you to read up, but I’ll save you the effort.
“Many things in nature are terrible. That they are terrible does not mean they do not work.”
I’ve wasted enough time here, but I’ll place an object example of that.
Infanticide. Its horrific by our consideration but happens quite often in nature; infanticide is commonly committed by invading males when they take over a troop or pride, as well as by mothers themselves. Morally, its pretty terrible.
But from the perspective of the selfish gene, it serves the invading male no purpose to raise cubs or children with no genetic similarity to his own. It also wastes energy that the mother may have in raising cubs of his own. Killing the cubs brings the mother into estrus, which allows him to father his own cubs.
Some early tribes do that too: Yanomami are known for murdering children who aren’t their own.
It is a terrible thing. It doesn’t stop being horrible; but it does work. The genes of rival children/cubs cease, the “terrible” persons genes now continue to influence future generations.
This isn’t a complex concept. Something can be terrible but still efficacious. We do not live in a fair world.
And that’s all I have to say. I’m sure you’re more interested in continuing your bias than in considering things, but its worth thinking about – though I would assume the above is obvious.
Masters in Marketeting with a BS in MIS actually, from one of the top ten universities in the country for business 😉
One of the first things I remember being taught in marketing? Freshman year.
“Yes, people will tell you that you’re brainwashing people, but they’re going to spend their money anyway, so you might as well get them to spend it on what you want them to.”
So moral relativism began early. ^^
At last.
Oh, look, the troll has also read the Cliff Notes for The Selfish Gene, and didn’t really understand those notes either!
If you’re going to link to a pdf, it’s polite to excerpt and paste a couple of the main points and maybe the abstract. I’m about to leave for work and am not going to download and read a pdf on my phone.
Side note; I really wish there more options for internet research without opening pdfs. They’re kind of a pain in the ass. Especially for people on phones.
So you have zero background whatsoever in political science, natural science, anthropology, or any of the other sciences you’ve attempted to rally to your side. You admit that your expertise lies somewhere else entirely and you are operating in an absence of non-assfax in those fields.
Good to have that cleared up.
But PoM, he has his Rational Male Brain which means he’s not susceptible to our weak ladybrain biases!
Once, twice, three times a flouncer…
So, troll studied business. Not a “hard” science or a social science. Figures.
I admit to not knowing much about business. But from a lot about what I’ve read, the field is scientifically a mess. Business and finance people tend to prioritize short term gain and will ignore the long term effects of their actions on the economy and on business. They also tend to fail to see imminent crashes because their profits depend on selling the notion that the market is always going up.
I admit to wanting to know which school this is. I’d like to warn everyone off of it. They obviously didn’t manage to teach you that Wikipedia is not a legit source for literally anything. Nobody should attend a school that can’t manage that much.
Humans are now bears instead of being two different species that have evolved in their own specific reproductive cycles do to environment, availability of food, and how social we are. Nope, humans only go into heat once a year so everyone is in a frenzy to fuck in March.
We are also all Yanomami because every society in the world totally loves killing babies. All the time. We all kill babies everywhere, which is why we don’t have condoms or birth control pills to stop us from getting babies in the first place. Or abortions. Nope. We just get pregnant, squeeze that baby out and bash its head with a rock with no consequences.
And those babies that we keep alive don’t require any finite resources we may have, nope. No time taken away from hunting or gathering or taking care of the sick. They just lay there and occasionally need to shit – what they’re shitting? I don’t know because they totally don’t need food that other people could eat or something.
BWHAHAHAHAHAHA!
No wonder you can’t science! No business major can science! They still think “sex sells” even though it’s been proven time and time again that it doesn’t affect sales at all!
You should have went to clown college; they have much better fundamentals.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/H0NUE.gif