British barrister Barbara Hewson caused a bit of a stir last week when she called for the age of consent in Britain to be lowered to 13 so as to end the alleged “persecution of old men” like those arrested in the wake of the recent Jimmy Savile scandal, which revealed a widespread culture of sexual exploitation of underage girls (and some boys) at the BBC in the 1970s.
Now one female Men’s Rights Activist connected to hate site A Voice for Men has done Hewson one better, arguing that the real culprits in these scandals weren’t the predatory adult men but the girls they victimized.
So WF Price of The Spearhead, who responded to my previous post criticizing his and his commenters’ appalling reactions to the Cleveland abductions with thoughtfulness and maturity (by which I mean a bizarre and weirdly racist personal attack on a commenter here), has now taken offense to a darkly satirical piece the Onion ran in the wake of the revelations of what allegedly went on Ariel Castro’s house for the past 11 years.
The Onion piece wasn’t funny, exactly, nor was it meant to be; it was pretty clearly the raw reaction of someone reacting with appropriate horror to the details of Castro’s alleged crimes, which seem to surpass even the worst “man-hater’s” vision of male depravity. Price, rather missing the point, sees the Onion piece as simple “feminist man-hatred” and suggests that it proves his point all along: that patriarchy is a lie.
The Castro brothers were neither patriarchal nor privileged; they were low-life predators from the bottom of society. Not to say that low-class men are all bad people, either, but men without privilege are the most likely to commit crimes, for obvious reasons. …
The myth of male power and privilege is just that, and the Cleveland case is one more pebble on the mountain of evidence that exposes it for a lie.
Empowering men in their families will not lead to more crimes against women and girls, but fewer.
Huh. So I guess if we make all men rich, and order the police to stop responding to all “domestic disturbance” calls, all our problems will be solved!
Never mind that Ariel Castro seems to have lorded it over his now-dead ex when he was involved with her, reportedly brutalizing and terrorizing her and getting away with it in part because he threatened to further brutalize her if she testified against him. He may not have had much power in the wider world, but he certainly seems to have felt quite “empowered” in his dealings with women and girls, and the “justice” system didn’t provide any justice to his apparent victims, even before the kidnappings.
And never mind that Price continues to refer to the “Castro brothers” although the police are saying that Ariel Castro acted alone.
Despite not knowing the basic facts of the case, Price seems to like the idea of using cases like this one to push his antifeminist agenda. According to him, his attempts to use the case to “refute” the feminist idea that
male privilege [is] tied to abuse of women … really enraged them, because how dare I use one of “their” cases to point out that they are wrong. From their perspective, it should be a sacred feminist right to use these incidents against men as a political bludgeon so as to coerce more concessions, more power, etc. Some went so far as to accuse me of blaming women and feminists for the kidnappings themselves (rubbish), while a few others sent me some hate mail.
But you know, I’m going to keep it up, because they do not have the sole right to the narrative when convenient tragedies occur. …
Feminists will doubtless use examples of outrageous crimes in an effort to remove more men from their families, thereby creating both more victims and more criminals. They will use examples like the Castro brothers’ kidnapping whenever and wherever they can. We must stop them from doing so, and we must not be intimidated by their feigned moral outrage when we speak the truth about their agenda.
Dude. if you think the reactions people are having to the Cleveland abductions — or to the terrible things you and your commenters have said about them — are in any way “feigned,” then I can only suggest that you may have completely lost touch with your humanity.
Once again, the Spearhead’s commenters lived up to their past standards of moral monsterhood, continuing to put the blame for Ariel Castro’s crimes (and pretty much every other ill) on feminism and women in general. Here are some selections. You’ll notice the one wishing death on feminists is officially “well-liked” by the commentariat there.
The only vaguely encouraging thing in the entire discussion? That Dana’s call for urban genocide got a couple of downvotes. To the two Spearhead readers who don’t think wiping out an entire community of decent people because of the behavior of one man is a good idea, I would like to say “thanks.” And also suggest that maybe you should stop reading The Spearhead.
EDITED: Added paragraphs about Ariel Castro’s alleged brutality towards his ex, and clarification that only he has been charged, not his brothers.
So someone on YouTube decided to put together what was intended as a heartwarming and inspirational video — assembled mostly from Russian dash-cam videos — showing an assortment of ordinary fellows taking a few moments from their day to help out their fellow human beings, and even a few animals. We get to see little old ladies walked across the street, cars pushed or pulled from snowbanks, and so on.
But when Paul Elam of A Voice for Men — the alleged Men’s “Human Rights” site that posts an open call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its “activism” section — watched the video, all he saw was what wasn’t there — that is, helpful women.
So The Spearhead has weighed in on the Cleveland abduction cases, and has not failed to disappoint.
Spearhead head boy WF Price uses the terrible unfolding drama as an opportunity to attack the notion of patriarchy. His logic: the alleged abductors weren’t rich dudes, so therefore patriarchy is a lie. No, really, that’s his argument:
This just in: Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most gullible nincompoops in the history of ever.
The latest evidence of this? The regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit were fooled by an obviously fake “screenshot” of an article from Jezebel that had been altered to make it look like a Jezebel staff writer thinks that paternity fraud is justifiable as a way to fight patriarchy.
Men’s Rights elder Warren Farrell is fond of mentioning his academic past — he has taught at a number of colleges — and is not exactly shy about mentioning his Ph.D. (Check the covers of his books if you don’t believe me.) But the books he’s written are for the most part polemical “pop psychology” and “pop sociology” rather than academic works, and most don’t meet academic standards by a long shot.
How far they fall short of academic standards I didn’t fully realize until I started investigating a suspicious footnote in The Myth of Male Power.
Warren Farrell: “We are still requiring men to be the sexual salespersons but now defining them as rapists when they do it well.”
Warren Farrell, as a sort of “elder statesman” of the Men’s Rights movement, may have gained a sort of weird respectability simply by being around as long as he has, and because he’s published books with major publishers. But the myth of Farrell’s intellectual respectability shatters pretty quickly once one takes a good, honest, and unbiased look at what he has actually written, in The Myth of Male Power and elsewhere.
We’ve already taken a look at some of the strange and troubling things he wrote about rape in that book. Farrell is also fond of rape as a metaphor, and regularly compares things that men endure to rape, as a way of bolstering his overall thesis that it is men, not women, who are the “disposable sex,” and who truly suffer.
Apparently this is what Christopher of Oregon thinks happens to women when they hit the age of 40.
Time for another visit into the mind of Christopher in Oregon, a confirmed bachelor best known for posting long screeds on his friend MarkyMark’s blog about how ugly and smelly and disgusting women and their various orifices are. Today, his topic is old women, by which he seems to mean all women above the age of 35 or so.
I’m not even going to bother to comment on this one except to say: if you’re a heterosexual man, with an interest in sex, and you actually believe that all women over the age of 40 are icky and ugly and smelly and wear dentures, you’re not only delusional, you’re probably going to have a very sad second half of your life. (And I’m guessing the first half probably won’t be so great either.)
Here’s Chris:
Face it: Nature doesn’t want CRUSTY OLD WOMEN having children! Basic biology, folks, and I’m no expert on biology. It’s just common sense! …
Old women are supposed to be…..old women. Crabby old women. Ugly old women. Nasssssty old tobacco-chewin’ women. …
A woman should be done spewing out babies by the time she is thirty, and no later. By forty, a woman is OLD! Look around you. Look at the forty-year-old women you see every day. See any of them you want to screw? Any of them? Didn’t think so. (Blow-jobs aren’t good either- their dentures might lock up on your weinie! Imagine THAT 911 call!)
Nature makes women BUTT UGLY fairly early in life to prevent them from breeding. Kind of hard to get pregnant if you’re so gruesome no man in his right mind can get a boner over your appearance. But, women, in their arrogance, fail to realize that men are stimulated VISUALLY!
If you look like an old hag, then the penis just naturally will NOT stand to attention. You’ve got to have some sort of good looks to get our motors running, ladies, and if you look like a bag of wrinkly cellulite, then you had better face it- no one wants you! Contrary to the lie feminists have been telling you, fifty is NOT the new thirty! A fifty-year-old woman has less sex appeal than a sheep. (Ask anyone in Montana.)
I am constantly amazed at the post-forty women that have come on to me lately. Give me a break! Do they think I’m blind?
Ick! …
A woman of forty is not sexual in any sense of the word. She is useless for breeding, and her sex appeal is GONE! Why have women fallen for the lie that they remain sexual into their sixties and seventies? They are NOT! They are putrid, smelly shells of their former selves! Nothing more! By that age, a woman looks like the package her body once came in. All sagging, wrinkly and disgusting! …
If you just have to get laid, and you can close your eyes, and hold your breath (pew!), there is no easier lay than an old woman. They are so desperate. So pathetic. So easy.
Warren Farrell, possibly pondering the mysteries of consent.
NOTE: This is the second installment of The Myth of Warren Farrell, a continuing series examining Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, the most influential book in the Men’s Rights canon. You can see the first post here.
Men’s Rights elder Warren Farrell has been accused of being a “rape apologist,” largely because of one now-notorious sentence he wrote in The Myth of Male Power:
We have forgotten that before we began calling this date rape and date fraud, we called it exciting.
This sentence is at least as puzzling as it is disturbing. Calling date rape “exciting” is pretty foul. But what on earth is “date fraud?”
The Men’s Human Rights Movement: Heading towards inevitable victory.
Our dear friends over at A Voice for Men, the thought-leaders of the Glorious New Men’s Human Rights of The 21st Century Human Rights Movement With Girl Writes What (GNMHROT21CHRMWGWW) have been trying to introduce a new word into the vernacular, as part of their broad-based campaign for the betterment of human rights. That word? Rapetard.
While the portmanteau word has been floating around for some time, with assorted definitions, it took on its modern, human-rightsy definition in mid-April in a little-seen YouTube video by a fellow calling himself “Dick Magnum,” who defined it thusly:
An individual who, for reasons related to intellectual, emotional or moral deficits, cannot distinguish between questioning [the idea of] “rape culture” and supporting rape.
It was picked up in an AVFM post titled “Beware the Rapetard Society” about a week after that. Soon other AFVM writers seemed to forget Mr. Magnum’s careful definition, adopting it as their go-to epithet for feminists they don’t like. Which is pretty much all of them.
In a post having nothing to do with rape or rape culture, Paul Elam talked about “dumbing things down so that even a rapetard could understand.” In the comments to that post, AVFM contributor Dan Perrins joked about “rapetarded quote mining expedition[s].” And in a post yesterday, AVFM’s “Andy Bob” attacked Australian comedian Catherine Deveny for an assortment of alleged offenses against decency — including using the term “retard” – in a post that referred to her as a “rapetard” four times, including once in the title.
You might think that combining the word “rape” with an ableist slur –“tard” – and applying it liberally to feminist women would be a step backwards in the campaign for human rights, but apparently that’s old-fashioned twentieth century thinking on my part.
