We Hunted The Mammoth
Our old friend over at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog is angry again. This time he’s mad at a legitimate target: National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre. But not because LaPierre is the head of an organization that has stood athwart every attempt at sensible gun control, making tragedies like the one in Newtown an all-too-predictable side effect of the easy availability of semiautomatic weaponry.
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the top post at the moment (with more than 370 net upvotes) is a link to this image:
If I might hazard a guess: that’s because IT HAS YOU NUMBSKULLS.
Sigh. Let’s look at a little chart showing the striking decline in the incidence of rape we’ve seen in the last 30 years.
This is based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Some have criticized the survey’s methodology and say that it undercounts the incidence of rape, but even if that is true, the trend is clear: Rape has declined significantly over the past three decades, and I think it’s fairly obvious that increased awareness and understanding of rape, largely the result of feminist anti-rape campaigns, has contributed significantly to this decline.
Naturally, those who tried to point this out in r/mensrights found themselves downvoted.
Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
Well, now you’ve gone and done it, you evil feminists: you’ve turned 0bvious_Atheist into a Nazi!
We first met the Men’s Rights subreddit regular the other day, when in a fit of ingenuity he blamed the Newtown school shootings on, er, Title IX. Well, his strange political journey has continued, and on his blog, on Boxing Day, the Canadian MRA officially announced his conversion to neo-Nazism. Literally. Let’s let him explain:
What a year!
The Men’s Rights movement, the most important human rights movement of the 21st century, got 2012 off to a flying start in February with an event in Bozeman, Montana that was quite literally attended by no one. After that, the year was a whirlwind of activity. Let’s go to the timeline:
It’s official: Men’s Rights Activists are more obsessed with their “precious bodily fluids” than Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper. Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, many of the regulars are celebrating Boxing Day by sitting around on their computers worrying about evil predatory succubi burgling their sperm. Check out this little post, which has gotten 90 upvotes so far:
Among those who celebrate Christmas, the holiday is often (for better or worse) a time to celebrate family, and to bring usually distant family members together – parents and their adult children, grandparents and their grandchildren, and so on.
A proposal from the guy behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog would mean a bit of a change in this tradition: it would eliminate grandchildren from the equation utterly. Not just by excluding them from the holiday celebrations, but by eliminating them altogether – at least until his demands are met.
So the other day someone went to the Men’s Rights subreddit with some concerns about the movement’s inclusiveness – or, rather, its lack thereof. “I’d be a lot more inclined to follow this movement,” this person wrote,
if it was more inclusive of the issues of other men, such as those of colour, homosexuality and those who identify as males. But as it stands even when you quote prison statistics as a form of sexism, you flat out ignore the ethnic make up of those statistics and the last time I saw y’all chatting about queer rights? I can’t actually remember, it’s been even longer since something along those lines came on the front page.
Naturally, the fine folks of the subreddit responded with a big “nuh-uh!”
I don’t want to make this blog the A Voice for Men Show, but that little hangout of angry dudes has really been outdoing itself in recent days. Take site founder and chief egomaniac Paul Elam’s post the other day reading the riot act to another Men’s Rights activist for being a homophobic asshole.
Specifically, an Australian bloke named Chris Key, whom Elam describes as “a true misogynist, homophobe and all around asshole who claims to be an MRA.”
Over on Reddit, Men’s Rights subreddit regular 0bvious_Atheist has offered the most, well, inventive explanation for the Newtown school shootings I’ve seen thus far. Apparently channeling the old Man Boobz troll NWOslave, he argues that they were the result of … Title IX.
The only good news here is that this theory was too weird and opportunistic for even the Men’s Rights subreddit, and 0bvious_Atheist’s post got many more downvotes than upvotes.
Also, the 4Chan thing hasn’t been confirmed by any reputable media source. Here’s something from the not-exactly-100%-credible Daily Mail on it is definitely a fake.
Thanks to r/againstmensrights for pointing me to 0bvious_Atheist’s post.
