On a fairly regular basis, Man Boobz is visited by commenters of an MRAish disposition. There are many varieties. Some start off by trying to post rape threats and other such unpleasantness, and their comments never see the light of day. Some leave a few irritated comments and head off, never to be seen again. Some manage to stick around long enough to become Man Boobz institutions.
One interesting variety: the ones who come here, they claim, to discuss the issues with us in good faith. In most cases it becomes quickly evident that they are not interested in real discussion at all, as they ignore what most of the commenters here say to them to instead argue with the straw feminists who live in their heads.
Soon many of these alleged good-faith arguers drop the pretense entirely and lash out with nasty personal attacks. At this point they go on moderation, or find themselves banned entirely.
The latest such meltdown was a fairly quick one. For those who don’t regularly read the comments, here’s a brief history of John Anderson’s brief career (so far) as an unofficial goodwill ambassador to Man Boobz from planet Good Men Project.
An anti-feminist dude who generally hangs out at the Good Men Project, Mr. Anderson arrived at Man Boobz Prime on July 2nd, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, eager to learn from and about the feminist commenters here, and to convince some of us to join him and the other commenters at the GMP in healthy and fruitful dialogue.
In one of his first comments here, he explained the reason for his coming here:
I promised some feminists, who I really admire, at The Good Men Project that I would initially engage feminists without assuming that they are misandrist, a very difficult task for me at least. I think that I’ve mostly lived up to that promise so far as I’ve asked for clarifications and I’ve used qualifiers like seems. I can understand if this comment was written in frustration, but understand that I and any new visitor to the site won’t understand the back story if there is one and the comment just comes off as being dismissive of male victimization.
In a further comment he explained that he was trying to do his part to save the Men’s Rights movement from the angry ideologues:
I was on a voice for men a while back. They had nothing but contempt for the GMPers. I’m certain that I’ll cross paths with them. It is my heartfelt intent to reclaim my movement from people who would disgrace it.
Five minutes later, alas, we learned that he had determined we were all a bunch of misandrists after all.
I only promised not to assume that feminists were misandrists. Once proven, it is no longer an assumption.
Oh, wait, not all of us. But we are a bunch of meanies:
I don’t think all the commentators hate men or are necessarily closed minded to other view points. I actually stepped away from a safe space to engage people who don’t see things the way I do. The feeling that I get is that there is great hostility to anyone who may consider men to be victims under any circumstance….
I’ve quoted DOJ and CDC statistics and included page numbers or links on an article that says that we shouldn’t be angry over truthful statistics. I’ve been told that the statistics have been spun. Maybe I should have refrained from that SHOCKED bit. I probably should have considered the feelings of the people on this site. I’d consider apologizing, but too many people here seem mean.
As far as I can tell, he determined that I was a misandrist because I downplayed the fact that more men are murdered than women by writing the following sentence in the OP:
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.”
I remain a bit baffled as to how a sentence that starts by noting that four times as many men are murdered than women is downplaying the fact that, well, four times as many men are murdered than women. You can go read the whole discussion yourself and see if you can figure it out.
The meltdown followed not long afterwards. In one comment, Mr. Anderson suggested, as far as I can figure it, that [TW: RAPE APOLOGETICS] women regularly decide whether or not to charge a man with rape after they determine how good their rapist is in bed:
When is a woman responsible for her own rape because it wasn’t worth fighting over? Maybe she liked it and waited to see how good he was before deciding on whether to fight and that whole women don’t report rape thing can’t be a big deal if she didn’t think it was important enough to report. Feminists say you should never blame the victim. What feminists mean is that you should never blame the victim unless the victim is a man.
But he still hoped to lure some of us over to the Good Man Project for more scintillating discussion about how feminists are evil and mean and how dudes like him think women think about rape. Oh, and that movie about the stripper dudes.
Come by and visit. Right now there are discussions focusing around the objectification of men because of the Magic Mike movie. There are also multiple discussions around men and feminism. Come and visit.
Then, for some reason, he decided to bring up his cock:
Kyrie says,
“Fuck. You.”
No thanks. Not sure if triple bagging it would help. I’m referring to both my cock and your face. I have to have some fun. 🙂
At this point, I put Mr. Anderson on permanent moderation.
Or tried to anyway. Due to a little glitch, it didn’t take, so Mr. Anderson was able to post freely for a while. Among other things, he tried to explain away that previous comment with this:
David says,
“And that line about cocks and faces wins Mr. Anderson the prize of permanent moderation. Congrats!”
You forgot bags. It’s bags, cocks, and faces. You have to admit, that statement was a classic.
Not so much.
Then he whined about being moderated:
Dude, I can’t even keep up with the comments directed at me. If I have to deal with moderation, the situation would be unworkable. It should earn me props on a voice for men when I decide to return at least until I start commenting on their discussions. It only took two or was it three days to get semi-banned from the site. Gotta be a record.
The only record set was for how quickly Mr. Anderson devolved from an earnest man of alleged good faith to a cock-talking troll.
@BASTA!:
It’d be pretty hard to write responses to you without a single thought in my head, you know. It’d also be pretty hard to interpret your nounification of “ponderable” correctly, or to try to figure out exactly why you decided to insert “(now plural)” into your sentence without the slightest clue of what it could refer to. Is the statement plural? Is the object clause plural? Am I now plural? Maybe someone with a greater quantity of thoughts than I could understand.
Wait, I thought that we were all essentially one person, since they keep referring to us as a hivemind.
@Skylar:
*twitch*
I… *twitch* Erk.
Now you just aren’t playing fair.
Sad… I thought that the first quoted bit had an extra “you think” in it somewhere. I must’ve been thrown off by the formatting. Guess I wasn’t actually mocking anything.
…
I IRONY!
kirbywarp, I miss you so when you’re away.
I’m not sure what’s funnier – the fact that you decided to make up an imaginary case of someone insulting you, despite blog comments being a medium in which everything anyone actually said to you is there for everyone to see, or that you could not see past your own silly ideology long enough to figure out that maybe, when inventing an imaginary insult to be thrown at you by feminists, you should come up with one that feminists are vaguely likely to use. (Hint: people who do not actually think female genitalia is icky and shameful do not generally use insults that boil down to “you’re icky and shameful like GIRL PARTS, ha ha.” Funny how that works!)
It’s a new verb! I irony, you irony, he/she/it ironies.
@CassandraSays:
Irony… Ironying… Ironology, the study of irony? It’s first grade, Cassandra!
@cloudiah:
Aww, thanks. I miss being here too… I feel like I miss out on a lot of great trolls and current events.
Skylar:
Weak metaphor. No obvious relationship between “ears” and “thinking.” A better choice would be something like “holding your ears shut so you never have to hear new ideas.” Also,given the existing syntax it’s unclear what the relationship between the “place” is and the “you” who holds his/her ears shut. A better choice would be “a place where people hold their ears shut.”
These sentences are good, except it undermines your own position when you admit that what the targets of mockery at Manboobz are doing us “say[ing] something dumb.” A better choice would have been “saying something iconoclastic” or something like that.
Good use of sentence fragments for rhetorical emphasis, but you seem to be having problems with your spacing. There should not be a space between the first quote and “Look.” Also, as counterintuitive as it may seem (really, I hate this rule), the period goes inside the closing quotation.
This sentence is extremely unclear. How do you applaud a “can” of anything? Once again, your metaphors are confused: did you mean to say “opens a can of ignorance”?
In the second place, the quoted speech here is, I think, a little too long. Everything after “exclaim how…” is something others are doing and thinking, not you the author, but since it’s so long and complex your reader can easily lose sight of what is going on. Instead, try “exclaim how anything that challenges feminism is evil [and how] feminism is the be all end all of everything.”
The theme of equality comes in from left field, since you didn’t set up the desired contrast between “feminism” and “real equality” earlier in the piece. For maximum rhetorical impact, you need to set this up earlier.
Good use of “among” for exchanges taking place in a group of more than two people. This is the proper usage, but a lot of people forget it. Good job. 🙂 However, where is the theme of human fallibility coming from? While your introduction of the limits of all human knowledge is interesting as an idea, it’s placed into this essay very abruptly, and remains unexplored.
Your conclusion is way too abrupt, and you don’t source that quote. Who said it? When?
It would also be interesting if you tied that quote back to your remarks about the limits of fallible human cognition, too.
In conclusion, B- needs revision.
“Also, as counterintuitive as it may seem (really, I hate this rule), the period goes inside the closing quotation.”
I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t in the UK. This seems to be one of those British versus American issues where I end up arguing with Word.
Also, I’m really not impressed by the Good Men Project. While the patriarchy does cause men suffering, discussing that while never doing anything to dismantle male privilege is worse than doing nothing, since it upholds structures of inequality.
Sorry, Ozy. I think you dropped the ball on this one.
I thought you could specify your desired language/dialect in Word.
Possibly, but since I’m in the US I need to observe American rules.
It seems like you guys are a bunch of man-hating violence-loving Solanas wannabes whose only goal in life is to kill ALL the men. What? I used qualifiers like seems!
Seriously, is this not ALSO the douche who quotes something, writes “are you saying that [completely absurd thing]?” and then argues with his own straw feminists?
Are you saying that round things are vegetables? This is obviously Misandry, because of that one peta commercial.
@VoIP: *hearts you with English teacher lurve*
I’ve knock another half grade off for failure to paragraph (because that’s just the kind of femynyst oppressyon I rock with). One of the best ways to show the structure of one’s points is through paragraphing!
Phooey on dialects! I used to be able to spell and punctuate and grammar and stuff. Then I started using computers, and it kept telling me I was spelling “colour” wrong. And then I started hanging out on the internet and now I’m using apostrophes inappropriately, I can’t spell, and don’t know anything about grammar anymore. And now my job requires me to have my keyboard and language set to English (US) or the main program we use doesn’t understand dates, or some stupid thing.
Still, VoIP, that was masterful! I loved it.
the indignation at the no-paragragh call out is hilarious, too. ‘how DARE YOU give me advice so that i dont completely suck at communicating how much i HATE YOU.’
SQUEEEEEE
A lot of MRAs are like this, actually. Now that I think of it, I remember HOW MAD they get at “grammar police” or whatever. Is it because many high school teachers are women, and they remember chafing under the yoke of their (illegitimate, because female) authority? Is it because (if only in the past 20 years) the study of language is coded feminine in our culture?
Unimaginative, at least you have help from the computer. As far as I know, there is no grammar-check thing for German. (If I’m wrong, will someone please help out?)
@voip
yeah, i can see that as a part of it. i also think a part of it is youthful arrogance, where their so hung up on the substance of the message that they havent thought about what communicating in means, and see anyone who tells them otherwise as denigrating the substance
Skylar Rouse —
“So I see a guy trying to use statistics and studies to show that there are needs for concern a men’s rights movement and a bunch of people ignoring him…”
Any chance you read the thread and saw all that math PsychoDan and I did for him?
“These are kinds of things that make me people that some people actually think using logic is a form of abuse.”
Oh nevermind, math is abuse apparently.
Cassandra — your computer’s annoyance at day/month/year aside, most Americans don’t know enough grammar to know where the punctuation goes, I’d say do what you’re comfortable with and if no one says anything they either didn’t notice, or don’t care. (I seriously once had my boss insisting I have to note that something was “X per diem per day” *bangs head on wall*)
@Skylar
“It’s funny to think that you people actually think that somehow you make sense or are truly mocking anything. All you’re doing is standing in a circle letting someone say something dumb, offensive, or just ignorant and than turning to each to other for validation.”
Funny, I thought you were talking about The Spearhead, or A Voice for Men, there.
Your opinions strike me as so ridiculously ignorant, incorrect, and just plain baffling, that I really can’t even think of a response. You may as well be telling us that the sky is pink. You are just too fucking wrong for words.
@Skylar, Steele, et al
Please please give me a specific quote where someone on this site made an offensive comment against men (that is not specific to MRAs). And provide a link, please. I ask this over and over and over and never get a response. Until I see a link I will just assume you are a bullshitting troll and liar.