We Hunted The Mammoth
Even after all the time I’ve spent on this blog, I can still be astounded by the appalling hatefulness of the manosphere. The latest example? This post from the influential far-right manospherian who calls himself Vox Day, in which he argues, seriously, that encouraging rape is better for society than encouraging (white) women to work.
No, really.
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which inspired a flood of commemorative essays everywhere from Slate to the New York Times.
It also inspired what I think is one of the most hilariously dumb sentences I’ve ever read on The Spearhead. In a post talking about Friedan’s “youthful Bolshevik activism” – she spent a number of years as a labor journalist – Spearhead head boy W.F. Price offers this assessment of the book that jumpstarted feminism’s second wave:
Although I haven’t read the book, it apparently stresses the need for women to engage in work outside the home, which is a basic Communist tenet.
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And now back to our regularly scheduled post:
Someone posted this picture in the Men’s Rights subreddit yesterday with the title “Equality.”
[Trigger Warning: Depiction of violence against women.]
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And now back to our regularly scheduled post:
Warren Farrell, whose 1993 book The Myth of Male Power essentially set the agenda for the Men’s Rights movement we know (and don’t love) today, did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit yesterday.
Most of the questions he chose to answer were pretty much softballs, and his answers largely reiterated things he’s said before many times. But he was also asked some pointed questions about his views on incest which he chose to answer. Well, sort of. Instead of clearing up the issue, he dug his hole a little deeper.
[TRIGGER WARNING for incest/child abuse apologia.]
MRAs spend an awful lot of time getting worked up by hypothetical injustices. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, angry Men’s Rightsers regularly post links to stories of women behaving badly – or who may have been charged with or convicted of a crime – with indignant headlines suggesting that the women in question would be treated far worse if “she had been a man.”
The latest example of this outrage over imagined injustices? This post, found in r/mensrights today, with 87 net upvotes:
If you follow the link, it goes to a brief story about the alleged incident in The Huffington Post. I say “alleged” because the woman in question has not yet been convicted of anything. As the story reports, the police arrested her because
school staff told them the assembly was halted and the cafeteria cleared after Meaders began dancing onstage and took off some of her clothes.
She’s charged with seven counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of public lewdness.
An Albany City Court clerk says Meaders was arraigned Friday afternoon and ordered held on $3,000 bail. She doesn’t have a lawyer yet.
There is no mention of putting her on a sex offenders registry because, and let me be blunt here, YOU HAVE TO BE CONVICTED OF A CRIME TO GET PUT ON ONE. She’s merely been CHARGED.
There is no “pussy pass” for women that enables them to bypass the sex offenders registry ONCE THEY ARE CONVICTED of public lewdness. The relevant NY State law can be found here; as you can see, the gender of the convicted offender is not an issue. (It took all of 30 seconds on Google to dig that up.) Meaders isn’t getting special treatment because she’s a woman; she’s not on the offenders registry because an arrest is not the same as a conviction.
Enjoy your imagined oppression, fellas.
Happy Valentine’s Day Boycott Day! Every year on Valentine’s Day, MRAs around the world unite in a sacred ritual: the annual Valentine’s Day Blaming of the Ladies parade.
For, you see, Valentine’s Day is little more than a plot by the ladies to extract fancy chocolate and diamonds and other pricey romantic goods from the world’s men. That’s why, for the past I’m-not-going-to-look-up-the-number of years, the lady hating radio personality Marc Rudov has been trying to get other men to boycott the holiday to show the ladies of the world what’s what.
The twitter hashtag wars continue! Apparently still pissed off that feminists pooped on their #INeedMasculismBecause tag the other day, the dudes of the manosphere launched a little counterattack aimed at #TellAFeministThankYou, a hashtag originally started by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to give an opportunity to feminists to thank other feminists for, you know, being awesome and stuff.
EDIT 6/15/13: Tom Ball’s manifesto is no longer posted on A Voice for Men, though it isn’t clear if this is a website glitch or a change in policy on AVFM’s part; no announcement about taking it down has been made.
EDITED TO ADD: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it seems even more important to reinterate that influential Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men continues to host, in its “activism” section no less, a terrorist manifesto literally calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations. Until and unless that manifesto is removed, and A Voice for Men apologizes for hosting it, I will be linking to this post every time I mention A Voice for Men.
There has been another courthouse shooting. On Monday morning, the father of a man due in court for a child support hearing pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and shot his son’s ex wife and a friend of hers as they entered the lobby of the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington Delaware. After an exchange of gunfire with police that left two officers wounded, 68-year old Thomas Matusiewicz took his own life. The two women Matusiewcz shot were pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital.
Usually I venture into the manosphere to collect the latest misogyny, but sometimes it’s delivered right to my door. Here, some intriguing thoughts on women, from an MRA who showed up in the comments here yesterday, and who has been delighting the regulars not only with his opinions but with his colorful writing style.
Here’s the dude calling himself Dragon Slayer, on how young women and their cell phones will bring about the death of feminism:
The feminist movement is doomed not because of us MRAs, but because of women. These days most women spend their youth with mouths agape, babbling on their cell phones and strutting around in public with the fatty sacks on their chests manipulated in such a way to attract a man’s attention. That’s literally all they do. Then once they get older they start looking to mortgage their pink clam off for private use in exchange for food and shelter. After that, they could give a shit about the rest of the world. So for your own sanity, I’d recommend you all just drop this feminism project.
Some thoughts on women and love:
I’m of the opinion that women aren’t really capable of love. I mean sure, they’ll barter access to various body parts- temporary bodyguard for butt action, manservant for intercourse, and such- but that’s not really “love” in the way it has been traditionally defined, by men. I suppose the only pure expression of “love” is that found between two men.
And some further reflections on that subject:
Evolution hasn’t programmed women to reciprocate affection. From a reproductive standpoint, they exist to gobble as much hot sour cream as possible and then propagate the species with the best DNA they can wrangle. Men, on the other hand, are programmed for targeted monogamous affection, the better to protect the female who chooses him as her sperm donor. In modern society, this dynamic has changed, as women don’t just require elite semen, but also financial security, which more often than not can be better provided by a biologically inferior male, to whom she transfers access to her love tube sometime in her early thirties.
So the pink clam is now a love tube? So confusing.
Is Dragon Slayer for real? I admit I’m not altogether sure. There’s some suspicion that he’s a sockpuppet of the legendary Man Boobz troll Arks; the writing style is similar, and, like Arks, the new guy puts bromance before ho-mance. Whether or not this is Arks II, I suspect he’s not purely trolling — that is, while trying to be inflammatory, he believes at least some of what he posts. And indeed, aside from the stuff about man-man love and the bit about men being programmed for monogamy, this is all stuff we’ve heard before from the evo-psych-obsessed dudes of the manosphere.
So: many if not most of you have probably heard about the whole #INeedMasculismBecause thing. For those who aren’t: a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors and other MRAs, inspired by a post on 4Chan, decided to swarm Twitter with #INeedMasculismBecause tweets in response to the #INeedFeminismBecause hashtag. Feminists responded by outswarming the MRAs, flooding their new hashtag with often quite hilarious parodies of MRAspeak, as well as some just plain ridiculousness.
