We Hunted The Mammoth
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, a fella named dzogen came by to vent about his unfair divorce.
Seems his “freeloader and loser” of an ex-wife — a former drug addict — sits around the house eating bon bons while happily collecting $2500 a month in child support for the five year old kid they had together. Also, she treats him with disrespect. “Meanwhile,” the poor fella wrote, for an added dose of pathos, “I have to survive on PB&J.”
*cough*shitthatneverhappened*cough*
Matt Forney is desperate for attention; it’s as glaringly obvious as the giant MATT FORNEY that adorns the top of his blog, creatively named MATT FORNEY. And like some caricature of an emo teen “acting out,” the misogynistic manosphere blogger has decided that any attention — even bad attention — is better than no attention.
And so, perhaps at least dimly aware that his ideas are and his prose are both too lackluster to command much attention on their own, he seems to be trying to rile up as much of the internet as possible with posts that are deliberately designed to offend liberals and feminists and pretty much anyone who is not a woman-hating douchebag. He had a minor hit a this spring with a post entitled Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved, which did in fact live up — that is, down — to its title.
Now he’s got an even bigger hit in a post titled The Case Against Female Self-Esteem.
Over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, a fella called EatsTinyBaldBabies offers this, er, insight:
It became quite clear to me some time ago that your typical woman would be fine making most men live in cages under 24/78 supervision if it meant they could feel just slightly safer about their lives. This is why feminists spend so much time lying to make them afraid.
Last I checked, he had gotten 18 upvotes for this BRAVE comment.
H/T to DancingMidgets in the AgainstMen’sRights subreddit for finding this little gem.
When Miriam Carey died in a hail of bullets after leading Capitol police on a car chase from the White House to the Capitol last Thursday, the incident seemed to make no sense. Why had Carey done what she did? She had no weapons on her. She seemed to have no political motive. There seemed to be no real plan to her “attack” on the White House security perimeter. There was a baby in the car with her.
As reporters began to look into her story they discovered that Carey had been suffering from serious mental illness and that her ill-fated trip to Washington DC may have been driven by delusions about Obama. One of her sisters told ABC News that Carey had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis” after the birth of her child about a year ago.
Several months ago, you may recall, feminist activists got Facebook to agree to remove blatant sexist hate speech from its site — much to the chagrin of many Men’s Rights Activists, like Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who declared, in a post filled with alarmist rhetoric, that “feminist ideologues are co-opting Facebook, and they will root out any and all opposition to their worldview.” AVFM’s John Hembling, meanwhile, denounced the feminist activists as “fascists.”
Ever since then, Men’s Rights activists have been playing a game of “gotcha” with Facebook, trying to prove that the hate-speech monitors there only care about misogynist hate speech, and don’t actually care about hate speech directed at men. Every few days, it seems, there is a new thread in the Men’s Rights subreddit purporting to document this alleged “double standard.”
Ten days ago, for example, a Men’s Rights Redditor called dizzy_j got nearly 400 upvotes for a post complaining that “I reported three anti-men Facebook pages for gender-based hate speech today. Only one was removed.” Six days ago, DerDietrich got 580 upvotes for submitting this supposed evidence of a double standard. Trouble is, you can’t actually prove a double standard with a handful of examples.
But I would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis, which also fits the anecdotal data provided thus far by the MRAs, and provide an additional piece of anecdotal evidence that supports my theory and undercuts theirs.
My hypothesis is that Facebook is shitty at recognizing and dealing with hate speech and harassment, no matter whom it’s aimed at.
My evidence for this? Well, yesterday bloggers at Skepchick noticed a Facebook page targeting a specific feminist/skeptic blogger and asking if she “should … be murdered.” The anonymous poster — who identified her by name and posted pictures of her on the page — coyly avoided a literal call for murder, writing instead:
We should not ever break the law. Rather, we should advocate , through lawful land constitutional processes, to have the law changed so that it is legal to kill [name redacted by DF]. Alternatively, we should, where legal, request that [name redacted by DF] kill herself. Relevant laws should be changed so that suicide, and advocating suicide, is legal.
The Skepchick bloggers reported the page to Facebook for its obvious violations of the site’s harassment policies.
And they received this reply from Facebook (I’ve covered up the blogger’s name):
I think it’s fair to say that if Facebook can’t recognize a page calling for the literal murder of someone as harassment there is something very wrong with its system for dealing with harassment and hate speech.
The page has since been taken down, though it’s not clear if it was removed by Facebook or by the original anonymous Facebooker.
Get your act together, Facebook.
I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process of writing this blog. For example, this week, I learned that I’m a “vile, subhuman thing” who “like licking sh*t of feminist’s shoes” and “just wants every man cuckolded.” Also, I have some interesting and specific tastes in porn that even I was unaware of.
I learned all of these things from the always reliable purveyors of accurate and unbiased information in the Men’s Rights subreddit, in a thread ostensibly devoted to my coverage of the recent events in Toronto, but which ended up being more devoted to my various alleged failings and my alleged preferences in the porn realm.
Let’s take a look!
Here’s a man who is evidently also a pig suggesting that I am a man who is also a slug:
But ThePigmanAgain was too late! For I was able to steal EIGHTEEN WHOLE TRAFFICS from the Men’s Rights subreddit that day before the moderators removed this thread from the subreddit, lest any more unwary Men’s Rightsers wander into my evil internet lair where they might find writing critical of the men’s rights movement and its farcical attempts at activism.
Evidently Alisdair isn’t one of those who actually clicked on the link to my post in the thread, because he apparently believes that my post was a do-it-yourself guide to cuckolding other men, or perhaps a guide to getting cuckolded. I’m not sure..
And then there’s JayBopara, a MHRA warrior who seems a bit obsessed with what he for some reason believes are my preferences, porn-wise:
![JayBopara [S] -2 points 4 days ago (5|7) This guy David Futrelle like licking sh*t of feminist's shoes, so this sort of article was predictable. My understanding is he also likes mangina porn. This guy Futrelle is the pits, and the sad thing is, there are so many pathetic manginas exactly like him out there. With so many manginas, I doubt the MHRM will gain too much traction. But here's hoping. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]Dronelisk 2 points 3 days ago (6|4) ok fine no need to insult the author lest we fall into the same category as feminists and their ad hominem logical fallacies. wait did I just do that too? permalink source save parent give gold [–]JayBopara [S] 2 points 3 days ago (4|2) The reason I said those remarks was somewhere I read, and some places he posted he indicated a liking for mangina porn. Therefore I don't believe I've made an ad hominem attack. It appears from my research there is a link with people who are political manginas and those who like mangina pornography.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/maginaporn1.png?resize=539%2C368&ssl=1)
These comments of his raise a few questions for me.
1) Where exactly is he allegedly reading about my alleged preferences in porn? The MakeStuffUpAboutDavidFutrelleWiki?
2) What on earth is “mangina porn,” anyway?
Asked this very question in the thread itself, Jay has this answer:
![JayBopara [S] 2 points 3 days ago (2|0) Mangina porn = femdom porn. Sorry if you guys didn't understand that. Porn which often is not about sex, as it is about women debasing, humiliating and violently abusing men. Apparently manginas get off on this porn. Mangina porn has nothing to do with transexuals or anything like that. Man·gi·na -noun- 1. A women-firster. 2. A pussy-worshipper. 3. A male who behaves or acts toward men in an overly aggressive way once feminist Maxims are questioned.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/manginaporn2.png?resize=539%2C163&ssl=1)
Ah.
Dude, hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure that you’re the only person in the universe who calls that “mangina porn.”
Also, despite the similarities in the first three letters of the words, and the involvement of women in each, there is no real connection between “feminism” and “femdom.” One is a social and political movement; the other is a kink.
Anyway, this is how the HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT FOR MEN AND BOYS OF THE 21ST CENTURY deals with its critics.
Well, its male critics anyway. It treats its female critics much, much worse.
Sometimes posts by Men’s Rights Activists seem like transmissions from some alternate universe, a Bizarro world that bears a superficial resemblance to our own but where everything is backwards and upside down.
Take a recent post on A Voice for Men by FeMRA Diana Davison with the seemingly innocuous title “Women don’t own sex.” Ostensibly a response to a piece about rape in the Irish Times, the piece contains a series of bizarre assertions about relations between men and women that Davison apparently thinks she can use as proof that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s really women, not men, who run the world. And that men only commit crimes in order to make women happy.
Pity the poor MRAs who travelled hundreds — if not thousands — of miles to AVFM’s big weekend in Toronto hoping for a confrontation with the evil feminazis that never happened. They wanted footage of angry women they could watch again and again on YouTube. They wanted new names and faces to put up on Register-Her. In short, they wanted new women to hate.
But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.
So over on A Voice for Men, the regulars are all congratulating one another for their grand victory in Toronto. In AVFM’s official post on Saturday’s tiny “rally,” incongruously titled “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto huge success,” Elam — who in photographs of the events looked rather befuddled by it all — declared that the day had been magical for him:
“This was one of the greatest things I have ever done in my life,” said Elam. “Meeting all of these people and talking to a crowd that was five times bigger than the opposition was a remarkable event.”
Given that most of the opposition made a clear decision to ignore the AVFM/CAFE rally and lecture — much to the obvious disappointment of many MRAs who were there in Toronto or watching on the sidelines on the Internet — this was not much of an accomplishment.
So a helpful Twitterer told me that I was a frequent topic of conversation on A Voice for Men’s Honey Badger “radio” show last night — that’s the one hosted by Karen Straughan (Girl Writes What) and Alison Tieman (Typhon Blue) and a newer addition to AVFM’s FeMRA stable named Della Burton. Bored, I went over to take a listen to the archived show. Well, bits and pieces of it, anyway. Life is short, and every minute of this show felt about an hour long.
Anyway, I missed most of whatever it was they said about me, but I did manage to force myself to sit through a good chunk of the segment featuring none other than Nick Reading, the guy who’s running a joke campaign for city council of Edmonton Alberta as the “Patriarchy Party” candidate. You know, the dude we talked about just yesterday.
The gals did their best to play along with his over-the-top patriarchal schtick, proclaiming themselves submissive inferior females unworthy of his manly phallus, and so on. It was as gratingly unfunny as you might imagine, and it went on and on. Even the Honey Badgers, perhaps wondering if this whole segment wasn’t a rather apt metaphor for their own role within A Voice for Men and the Men’s Rights movement at large, couldn’t quite bring themselves to laugh at any of Nick’s, er, humor.
At least not until, about 49 minutes into the show, he brought out the rape jokes.
Take a listen:
Paul “The Thought of Fucking Your Shit Up Gives Me an Erection” Elam, meet Nick “If They Didn’t Scream No, How Else Would I Get an Erection” Reading.
In case you weren’t able to make all that out, due to the clear-as-mud sound engineering job of AVFM’s James Huff — you may remember him as the guy responsible for this amazing rant — I have transcribed the exchange below as best I could, cutting out a few repeated phrases and ignoring some remarks that got buried under other remarks.
Nick Reading: No never means no. It only means yes. That’s an understanding that we have within the patriarchy.
Karen Straughan: It is.
Alison Tieman: That’s true. Actually “no” should be stricken from the English language because it simply makes no sense. How could any woman ever say no to the holy phallus unless she was criminally insane?
Nick: Criminally insane, yes.
Della Burton [?]: Criminally, yes.
Karen: But, but we shouldn’t strike “no” from all the dictionaries and the lexicons of language simply because there are numerous times in the course of a day when a man loves to say “no” to a woman.
Nick: I would almost insist on striking it from the non-male vernacular but if they didn’t scream it, how else would I get an erection?
[Awkward pause]
[Laughter]
Della [?]: Oh my goodness.
Karen: Right, you’re right.
Della: I hadn’t even thought of that.
Karen: So no is still in.
A Voice for Men: Promoting Human Rights, One Rape Joke at a Time
EDITED TO ADD: Below, a video on YouTube about this episode of Honey Badger radio, which not only looks at the show itself but at what was going on in the official chatroom for the show at the time, which turns out to be even creepier than the stuff said by Nick Reading on the show itself.
Along with the standard MRA misogyny from some of AVFM’s regulars, there were bizarre sexualized comments directed at the so-called Honey Badgers themselves: one commenter went on at length about how he wanted to use Karen Straughan’s breast milk in his coffee (and spike her coffee with his semen). Palani provides screenshots and everything. Some of her commentary is a bit problematic — she refers to them as “retards” at one point — but if you’ve got 15 minutes it’s worth a watch.
[VIDEO REMOVED BY REQUEST OF VIDEOMAKER]
