We Hunted The Mammoth
We’re having Fidelbogen for lunch again. In my defense, the Twitter feed of this self-proclaimed philosopher of the non-feminist sector is hands down the most consistently entertaining thing in the manosphere today. In today’s post, Fidey opines on Women’s Suffrage (neither good nor bad), feminist “exit strategies,” and why it’s not necessary for MRAs to offer any evidence when they argue with feminists.
Without further ado, let’s go Fidelbogening!
In a case of spectacularly bad timing, Fox News happened to choose the day before the Zimmerman verdict was handed down to publish an op-ed proclaiming “the White American Male” to be the most oppressed creature on Planet Earth. In a piece entitled “Men — The New Second Class Citizens,” professional antifeminist Suzanne Venker declared that
From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.
What is revealing about this quote, besides its complete disconnection from reality, is that Venker makes no other references to race in the rest of her piece, which runs through a number of tiresome and oh-so-familiar MRA talking points about the alleged oppression of men.
Venker complains about schools being biased towards girls, from grade schools that force students to sit still to colleges with their infernal Title IX. She whines about “sit coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot.”
Quoting antifeminist psychologist Helen Smith, a friend of and sometime contributor to A Voice for Men, she suggests that women can get their boyfriends or husbands locked up on a whim just by claiming abuse.
I’m surprised she didn’t talk about the evils of “friend zoning.”
But when Venker refers to “men” in all of these complaints, she is evidently thinking only of white men — why else would she switch so seamlessly from talking about the alleged oppression of “men” to proclaiming “the White American Male” the ultimate victim?
There’s really no other word for this than, well, racist.
The day after Fox published Venker’s nonsense, we were of course reminded (as if any of us really needed to be reminded) of the very real oppression faced by “the Black American Male.”
Trayvon Martin didn’t die because he happened to see a show featuring a bumbling sitcom dad. He died because George Zimmerman saw a young black man in a hoodie walking home from the store and assumed, apparently because Martin was young and black and wearing a hoodie, that he was up to something sinister.
Trayvon Martin didn’t die because he was male; he died because he was a black male. His killer walked free not because his victim was male, but because his victim was a black male.
Suzanne Venker did us all a favor by revealing the unconscious racism underlying so many Men’s Rights complaints. The Men’s Rights movement is not only a movement that is overwhelmingly made up of white men; it’s a movement that’s almost exclusively about white men, and their largely imaginary oppressions, as well. We might as well call it the White Men’s Rights Movement.
Ladies! Here, fresh from the MensRants subreddit is A Man With Whom You Do Not Want To Be Friends. Or acquaintances. Or anything, really. To be honest, you probably don’t even want this guy to spot you at a distance from the window of a speeding train. Much T.M.I. in this quote:
Dude, I would seriously suggest you start masturbating. A lot. Preferably not in public.
And try not to bother any actual women for a while, at least until you can start conceptualizing of them as something more than objects (like candy or books) that have been set out for you to use as you please.
Also, your “mad and furious master?” “Mad and furious master?” Did you really just write that? I think you mean your boner. If you want to get fancy, your libido. What are you, Heartiste? Can none of you idiots write about sex without getting all purple prosey on us?
Today I’m going to talk about Janet Bloomfield — AKA JudgyBitch — and her bizarre attack on the original Don’t Be That Guy anti-rape posters in Edmonton. But I’m going to take a bit of a detour first, so bear with me.
I recently picked up a copy of Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, a nonfiction account of a scientific feud that provided me with some diverting travel reading and put me in the mood to read more of Koestler’s nonfiction.
But doing some rudimentary Googling I made a rather horrifying discovery about Koestler, whom I’d admired since reading his bracing account of breaking with Communism in the classic The God That Failed anthology: according to a recent biographer, Koestler was a serial rapist and abuser of women.
I‘ve been traveling, so I’m a bit late getting to the whole “Don’t Be That Girl” poster controversy in Edmonton. For those of you who don’t already know all about it: A group called Men’s Rights Edmonton, closely associated with our favorite Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has been putting up some pretty obnoxious posters parodying an anti-rape poster campaign called “Don’t Be That Guy,” turning the anti-date rape message into one that targets alleged false accusers of rape.
So the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit are discussing the Saatchi/Lawson divorce, as we were yesterday, and, well, it’s going better than expected, in that quite a few of them are actually willing to accept that Saatchi actually abused Lawson and that his demand that she defend him against the accusations of abuse thus don’t really make much sense. I guess that’s what happens when the abuse is literally caught on camera and printed on the front page of every British tabloid.
But not everyone there has responded so, well, rationally. Take this fellow:
Dude, I’m pretty sure the rich and/or weird are subject to the same laws (and moral judgements) as the rest of us. Billionaire art collectors don’t get a free pass to choke their wives in public. Nor is that equivalent to a hypothetical Playboy centerfold cheating on you.
Also, as a point of fact, Saatchi isn’t a billionaire. According to Celebrity Net Worth, he’s worth something on the order of $100 million; the site estimates Lawson to be worth $15 million.
It’s a challenge for every serious writer of fiction: how to write convincing characters of the opposite sex.* Some writers can pull it off, some — even eminent ones — can’t. James Joyce is still getting props for the way he got into Molly Bloom’s dirty, dirty mind; Tom Wolfe was nearly laughed out of the sorority by some critics when he wrote a book from the point of view of a college student named Charlotte Simmons. (And it’s not just men who get accused of not being able to think outside their own gender: an essay in Salon not long ago suggested that Girls creator Lena Dunham “can’t write men.”)
We can add one more name to the long list of male authors who can’t write women: The fellow who calls himself fish_finger on Reddit.
So yesterday I had a strange conversation, of sorts, with blabby FeMRA videoblogger Karen Straughan, aka GirlWritesWhat, via private message on Reddit.
Given that, in the recent WoolyBumblebee controversy, she put herself in the position of defending Men Going Their Own Way against WBB’s mostly accurate attacks on them, I found myself wondering what she might think of my post yesterday on the MGTOWers who felt it was appropriate to let a four-year-old-girl drown because she might grow up to be the next Betty Friedan or even the next — gasp! — Amanda Marcotte.
I was especially interested in what she might have to say about MGTOW elder Zed, the friend and mentor of her A Voice for Men boss, Paul Elam; in the MGTOWforums discussion, you may recall, he was firmly in the “don’t rescue little girls” camp.
“Zed,” also known as “The Zen Priest,” was one of the originators of the Men Going Their Own Way “philosophy” and is treated as a wise elder by many longtime MRAs.
WF Price of The Spearhead described a compilation of Zed’s writings as “really quite profound as well as a great read” and used to give it out as a bonus for everyone who signed up for his email newsletter. Paul Elam of A Voice for Men laid it on a bit thicker, saying of the man he described as both a mentor and a friend:
These women clamoring for equal pay — what’s their game? I mean, obviously they don’t want anything as straightforward as equal pay for equal work. What woman wants to work?
Happily, the smart lads in the Men’s Rights subreddit have it all figured out.
Clever girls!
I do feel bad for all the fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit, none of whom presumably work in air-conditioned offices. They probably all have to wrestle lions for a living, with their bare hands, in coal mines, blindfolded. (Them, not the lions.) It’s kind of amazing they find time to post on the internet at all!
h/t to TheBluePill for pointing me towards this manly wisdom.
