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.
@Mark: because that’s not what he’s doing here. Sometimes blogs exist to talk about a single issue. This is one of those, and there’s no reason it should be anything else.
And I think if you’re going to ask someone if they feel that there’s “no such thing” as something, you should point out what led you to that conclusion. This blog is about the wacky crap that a very specific subset of people espouse, not about every single one of the ills of the world. Just like literally every other blog on the planet, the writer writes about the things that impel him to write, the things that are important to him.
You could probably go start your own blog about how all of those awful high-powered feminists are keeping you down with their awful institutional man-hate. You could probably even find some suggestions for where to put that blog if you look around at where the posts Our Man David quotes and stuff come from.
Look forward to seeing you in the main body of a post someday, because I bet you’ve got some really……inspiring things to say!
Let me guess, you’re one of those people who thinks reverse racism against white people is a thing, right? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it will just stay at the “Laugh at you” stage indefinitely because you guys are a joke.
actually society is mostly still in the ‘ignore you’ stage, it’s just that a couple of blogs are laughing at you.
but i mean, that’s because youre not a real movement, just a bunch of angry dudes on the internet
Misandry is not the thing you make it out to be, Mark. Come back when men have been systematically discriminated against for a large part of history, then I will entertain your deep thoughts on misandry. Until then, HAHAHA.
Sometimes it works out that way, when you’re actually fighting for a good cause. Sometimes you just get stuck in the ignore or laugh stages. There are still people that argue that the earth is flat. I don’t think they’re going to win any time soon, either. The only reason to argue with a flat earther is for amusement. Likewise, the only reason to argue with MRA’s is because it can be funny.
Can it really be classed as “being ignored” if most people don’t know they even exist?
Shara-you are correct. What you see on these couple of hundred men’s blogs is not a movement. There is no men’s movement on the Internet and it’s just a lot of disconnected bored bloggers with nothing else to do but sit by the computer 24/7. They don’t have the brains or money to be effective and each one is just bitching about his own little gripe.
So this site is devoted to mocking some sexually-frustrated douchebags who make stupid comments on the internet about women. Great, but I don’t really see how this makes you very much better than them. It just seems a bit sad and pointless to attack people who are essentially teenagers or fat guys living in their mom’s basement who have been rejected one too many times. Some women can be douchebags too, so why not adopt an equal opportunity mocking policy, or even better, find a cause that is actually important?
Good thing I clicked on this randomly because Jeff’s magnificient unique insights seem to have gone uncommented on!
Or maybe it was ignored because it’s the same thing for the 5000th time? That would also make sense.
Yeah… folks who troll the FAQ are basically trying to get in a good mock while hiding from the commentariat. Scared it’ll be a fair fight, because they know how that’ll go.
The lowest of the low-hanging fruit, is what I’m saying.
I could point out that these are not just guys living in their mother’s houses, or that David writes about women saying stupid things too, but it’s all just too easy…..
I’m also noticing the phenomenon, lately, of the dudes-with-usernames-that-consist-of-a-single-obviously-male-first-name and how their comments always seem to go. What’s up with that? o.o
Well Jeff isn’t my real name. And yeah, fair point, I couldn’t be bothered to read all the comments. But whatever, having read a bit more of the site, it still seems a little bit pointless to me. This is the internet folks, people are unpleasant here. This blog is pretty much dedicated to feeding the trolls.
“This is the internet folks, people are unpleasant here. This blog is pretty much dedicated to feeding the trolls.”
Honey, I’m about to blow your mind: here, *we hunt trolls for fun*. Or, as they put it on another blog, “FEED THEM TIL THEY EXPLODE”.
Molly – Yep. The last one told me that he didn’t have to provide a source that more men are raped than women because it is a FACT.
But, I think this site can pose some issues in that it doesn’t exactly challenge them. They aren’t hilarious, they are outright scary as they demonstrate the patriarchy in crisis, which like capitalism or anything when it is threatened, it lashes out and becomes more reactionary (in this case – becoming more violent toward women and non-male folks. The basis of their pseudo-movement is indicative that the bourgeois family itself is in crisis, thanks both to feminism and the crises of late capitalism.
This goes back to an earlier comment about radfems. I imagine there could be some radical feminists who are transphobic (just as there are racist and misogynist communists, it is unfortunate but we are all human). The thing though is not that radical feminists are opposed whatsoever to anyone’s identity, completely to the contrary. Opposition comes from what is seen as the binary nature of trans/cis being imposed upon others by a group of folks who very accurately and bravely challenge the original coercive gender binary of male/female. I am female-bodied, yet I do not identify as a cisfemale as I seek to eradicate the coercive gender binary. However, I see that binary as being reproduced and reinforced by the trans/cis binary (also, I don’t find it to be fair for men who challenge the patriarchy they were socialized to support to be told that they are cismale). In a sense, then, I’m told by the binary that I must choose a gender, and my choice is either the gender that was coerced upon me at birth to which I was then socialized within, with all the sexual assault that’s been waged upon me and my fellow women. I don’t and can’t choose to be ‘female’, I was socialized as female and I don’t believe in gender as anything other than social hierarchy. I do choose, though, to dismantle the patriarchy and destroy gender itself.
Also, thanks to the person that called people on shaming schizophrenics! (This got a bit long so I’m glad I didn’t need to.)
howardbann1ster: folks who troll the FAQ are basically trying to get in a good mock while hiding from the commentariat. Scared it’ll be a fair fight, because they know how that’ll go.
Why do you think someone would post a comment if it’s not meant to be read? This comment is meant to be read by anyone, by the way. That’s why I’m posting it to a public blog that can be read by anyone.
Hey, PreggoPunchout! How goes the game designing, you idiot? For anyone who’s newer here, you should know that “idealoguereview” is the designer of the game Preggo Punchout, described here.
Cloudiah, why do you think I am an idiot?
Maybe because anyone who would like to play a game where two pregnant women punch each other to induce labor and/or miscarriage would be an idiot. I think Idiot is putting it kindly.
Ha ha, Fembot got in before me. Basically the answer is “I think you are an idiot because you talk and act like an idiot.” Thanks for asking, I’ll be here all week.
It’s not a real game. It was a troll job designed to solicit death threats from feminists, which it did.
Now, I would like an explanation as to how your mind is somehow superior to mine. All you’ve offered is abstractions and assumptions, which is disingenuous and horribly self-indulgent.
“It’s not a real game. It was a troll job designed to solicit death threats from feminists, which it did.”
You are the one being disingenuous now.
PreggoPunchout, I said that you were an idiot. Now I see that you are horribly pompous, and are demanding an explanation. All I can say to that is this:
Cloudiah: Now I see that you are horribly pompous, and are demanding an explanation.
I demanded nothing from you. I actually offered you a chance to substantiate what you said and you backed down from it. That’s fine, through this you are expressing who you are and I respect your decision.
Me mocking you and not bothering to respond does not equal backing down, you dolt. You are as dumb as a box of cat hair, and less useful.
See, here’s the rub: how to you prove to an idiot that he is an idiot? He is by definition too stupid to understand. But let me try.
Here’s where you said on April 6 on this very thread that you’re finished.
“Finished” is actually a pretty simple concept. Unfortunately you don’t seem to understand its meaning. This is because you are stupid.
Here is what finished is not:
* Saying you’re finished on April 6.
* Confirming that you’re “finished” by posting again about 11 hours later
* Posting again about 2 hours later.
* And again 6 minutes later.
* Then again 3 days later.
* And again 8 days later.
* Look! There you are, the very next day!
* And… a few hours later, you once again poop in the same thread.
* Then you manage to “finish” with this thread, but only until September 26, when you “finish”by posting again. Three more times!
* And once more on September 27.
All this on the blog’s FAQ. Which is an idiotic thing to do.
Also, you tried to design a game called Preggo Punchout, and manage to prove that you are also a stupid racist.
There you go! Your idiocy proved in 5 minutes, providing me with some idle amusement as I watch the Daily Show. So… thanks for that, I guess?
I can see why you would take issue with many people on your Boobroll, David, but I am wondering why Warren Farrell is on there. Why do you have a problem with him?