We Hunted The Mammoth
So the other day someone asked the Men’s Rights subreddit “Why do people think you guys hate women?”
There were a lot of ridiculous answers to that question, but one of the most ridiculous (and one of the most highly upvoted) responses came from our old friend John Hembling, the blabby Canadian videoblogger and A Voice for Men “Editor in Chief” also known for some dopey reason as John The Other. He explained:
Let’s take a trip down memory lane with this short history of feminism, helpfully prepared for us by mountainmansOG in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
I learn new things about feminism every day! Thanks, Men’s Rights subreddit!
So our old friend Fidelbogen the Counter-Feminist Agent of Male Renaissance has gotten on the Twitter. And even though he hasn’t yet figured out how to replace his generic egg avatar, and has managed to amass only 44 followers (one of them me), he’s been tweeting up a storm in the last couple of days.
Indeed, he’s so proud of his recent tweets that he screenshotted a bunch of them and put them on his blog under the title Casting Your Breadcrumbs Upon the Water. (Huh. I thought the expression was “Cast your bread upon the waters.” Maybe Fidelbogen is hoping to recruit some ducks?)
Anyway, I thought I’d give his timely tweety wisdom a somewhat wider audience. I hope he won’t mind.
Can you all suggest some more Fidelbogenisms for him to post?
So my Mighty White of You post — about the demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit — drew the attention of Obsidian, a longtime Manosphere blogger who has been described by some of his comrades as “the Blackest Man of the Manosphere” (not that this is much of an accomplishment in that lily-white world). He stuck around for some not-terribly productive discussions of race and feminism, pickup artistry, and I can’t remember the rest because I just sort of stopped caring after a while.
But there was one thing he said — a passing remark in a long comment — that stood out to some of the commenters here, and which I thought was revealing enough to warrant highlighting in a post:
I don’t support rape for a very simple reason – because it’s not necessary. A Man with Game doesn’t need to rape anyone.
That … is not a good reason to “not support” rape.
Really, that’s probably the worst reason to “not support” rape besides “I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to rape anyone today” or “I might muss up my new suit raping someone.”
Do you really need to search for reasons to “not support” rape beyond, you know, the idea that violating other people for your own selfish pleasure is wrong?
PUAs: Even the ones who aren’t directly advocating sexual assault have some pretty fucked up ideas about rape.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the AVFM screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
I feel a little guilty. Men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men had to “withdraw” one of its posts earlier this week after I demonstrated conclusively here that the site had used a fake screenshot to try to back up the article’s strange claim that Google searches for “violence against men” in fact returned mostly results related to violence against women. (It doesn’t. Try it.)
Thing is, A Voice for Men had been hoping to use that post to boost its claims that Mens’s Rightsers, and men in general, are being “censored” and otherwise stymied by feminist-dominated Internet power players like Google and Facebook.
So here’s an interesting chart. Guess what it represents?
A) The membership of the David Duke Fan Club
B) The racial breakdown of the most successful Liberace impersonators
C) The demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit
Well, ok, that was too easy. It is of course all of the above. I’m guessing. It’s definitely C, at least, as this chart was prepared to show the results of the 2013 Men’s Rights subreddit demographic survey.
Now, you might say, well, isn’t Reddit itself a pretty white place? And you would be right. But the Men’s Rights subreddit seems to be a bit whiter — and a lot less black — than Reddit as a whole, if Quantcast’s estimates of Reddit’s overall ethnic breakdown are accurate.
In other completely non-surprising news, 89% of Men’s Rights Redditors are men. And a lot of them are libertarians. MRAs complain endlessly that we pigeonhole them as a bunch of entitled white dudes. They’re really not doing much to challenge that assumption.
The most important issue to these fellas (and the small minority that aren’t fellas)? Survey says: False rape accusations.
Other critical issues to the Men’s Rightsers include “custody rights” (which is a bit odd because 92% of those surveyed have no kids), “legal discrimination” (whatever that means), “education discrimination” (this is a thing?), and “male disposability.”
“Male birth control” and “paper abortion,” while relatively less important to the Men’s Rightsers, each got hundreds of votes.
I’m surprised “friendzoning” isn’t at the top of the list, but unfortunately it wasn’t one of the choices. I blame misandry.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.
The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least –that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the “gosh, Paul” paragraph and made a few other changes.]
Sometimes the subtext is much more interesting than the text. On the surface, blabby FeMRA videoblogger Girl Writes What’s recent 3,635 word blog post on the l’affaire TheWoolyBumblebee is a nasty, brutish, but not-at-all-short attack on her former FeMRA comrade at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men, recently kicked out of the clubhouse for telling off libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way. (See here and here for more details on it all.)
But if you read a little more carefully you can see signs that Girl Writes What’s anger and frustration may really be directed at AVFM’s founder and grand pooh-bah Paul Elam.
The WoolyBumbleBattle continues.
A couple of weeks back, you may recall, the excitable antifeminist videoblogger who goes by the name of TheWoolyBumblebee got herself kicked out of the A Voice for Men clubhouse after annoying Paul Elam with her incessant (but actually pretty much justified) attacks on libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way.
Naturally, there has been much drama since then.
