Reading comprehension: a bit of a problem for the angry dude crowd. So in my post earlier today I wrote about a Redditdude who got so angry reading a relatively innocuous Forbes column by a WOMAN ON TEH INTERNET that he called her a “cunt” and threatened to murder people and got more than a thousand net upvotes. All based on a complete misreading of her article, of which he obviously only skimmed the first paragraph.
Well, now the Men’s Rights subreddit has gotten hold of the Forbes column, and they too are pig-biting mad – not so much at the column itself, which it’s clear not many of them have actually read, but at a straw column they’ve written in their heads which is nothing but EEEVIL MISANDRY.
To reiterate: Kashmir Hill’s column in Forbes notes that some people have come to regard people without Facebook accounts as somehow suspect in our hyper-connected world. Hill finds this a bit silly, and writes:
The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).
Note to the painfully literal: that parenthetical “too much” in the last sentence is what’s called a “joke.”
Naturally, Reddit’s Men’s Rights squad, not having read much beyond the sarcastic title of Hill’s piece (“Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are ‘Suspicious.’”) has concluded that she’s an evil misandrist who’s demonizing men without Facebook as creepy psychopaths. Yes, in addition to getting the argument of her piece completely backwards, they’ve also decided that it’s all about men.
MauraLoona, who submitted the link under the misleading title “Men without Facebook: You’re suspicious and potential stalkers, creeps, and psychopaths” explains in a comment:
While the article uses gender neutral pronouns in some places, the message is obvious: This suspicion is directed at men.
I suspect this might be a case of xenophobia: “I am a woman and love technology, so if you’re a man and don’t share that love for technology, you’re suspicious.”
JohnTheOther, a virtuoso in the fine art of getting things wrong, offers this take:
Forbes, apparently is now in the business of creating boogiemen. No evidence of anything equates to evidence of sinister intent. What utter fear-mongering drivel.
And our old friend Liverotto concludes that when Hill says she doesn’t hold her boyfriend’s lack of a Facebook account against him (much), she’s just lying, like women do:
Yes, of course, she doesn’t hold it against him, that’s why she wrote a full article about people without Facebook being suspicious.
Women are just liars, that’s it, that’s all it is, liars and dissimulators, if you trust what a woman says you are naive.
MRAs really do live in imaginary backwards land, don’t they?
The average reading comprehension of an MRA seems to be somewhere below what you need to graduate from elementary school.
The only explanation I can think of for this (aside from plain old paranoia) is that they’re so used to thinking of only men as people that they forget that’s not objectively true.
(Now watch someone — and I know who — quoting this and saying “see, Hershele doesn’t think men are people.” And probably misgendering me, if that can even happen to cis people)
Wow. Idee fixe: they have one.
These guys could make jumping to conclusions into an Olympic event.
What is this I don’t even
The MRM either can’t or straight up refuses to read for comprehension, I don’t know which. They really are children who think everything is about them.
…wh-wh-what?
I just…this has to be hard work, right? Missing the point THIS hard?
MRA’s are masters at feigning outrage at everything. First they start with the conclusion that all women are man hating meanies, and then work their way back from there.
Yesterday, I read an article in The Washingto Post about a former Facebook employee who is “a Refugee from Facebook.” She’s obviously a misandrist, because men invented the internet.
In other news, a fat baby bulldog makes great brain bleach:
@Freitag: for a myriad of reasons, I needed that. Fat baby bulldog who seems not to know what his feet are for is precious.
Re: Misogyny…
It is amazing what selective reading comprehension can achieve. I am quite sure that these guys can read and comprehend all sorts of things; they’d be dead if they couldn’t. But making sure to read any female author’s literature as “empty drivel” or any female journalist’s article as “proving misandry” sure takes a hell of a lot of work.
The truth is that they start with a raging hatred of women, and then interpret everything they see, hear, read, or otherwise perceive, to justify this hate. They hate smart women, stupid women, pretty women, ugly women; if a woman anywhere does something bad, it’s “See! Women are like that!” But if a woman does something good, it’s “taqqiyah”. Women who have or want children are scheming sperm-traps; women who don’t aren’t “real women”. The fury of these people (some of whom are women) against women is parallelled only by that of Islamophobes against “Mooslins”. And both kinds of hatred appear to be spreading, which makes me suspect that professional agitators are as much at work in the one sphere as in the other. Cui bono?
r/MR has a habit of doing this.
TL;DR: Ryan Gosling saved a woman walking absentmindedly in the street, and the woman who wrote an article about it (because the story blew up on twitter) said that she thanked him. The r/MR interpretation, of course, was that she did not thank him and was an evil bitch.
r/MR is a bastion of clear, unbiased critical thinking.
OMGTHATBULLDOGISSOADORABLE [cloudiah collapses, felled by cuteness]
I really wish these guys would actually Go Their Own Way and go Galt, already. Their stupidity is getting tiresome.
I kind of want to buy a plot of land for the MGTOW guys to just go live on. Partly out of altruism, partly because I’m sick of hearing about them.
It’s hard to read for comprehension when you’re doing so while being filled with Hulk-Rage all the time. Smash!
I read the article and if anything, she’s defending people who aren’t on Facebook, etc. So, you have one group of them complaining when she writes about people being ‘addicted’ to social media, and then another (or probably not, they might be the same) complaining when she makes the joke about her boyfriend not being on Facebook. Bottom line: Anything a woman says will be used against her.
I’ve never really understood the need for Facebook, but I guess my family and I want more privacy than many people. Sometimes I feel very old-fashioned. I even prefer to talk than text.
I’d like to see these overgrown six-year-olds with their own little island somewhere (no animals – animals shouldn’t have to put up with them either). Not only would it make them soooo happy to be away from evil women, it’d make the rest of the world happier to be rid of MRAs. Plus there would be the delicious spectator sport of watching them figure out their little conflict of desires: they don’t want any women around (check); they don’t think women have any right to expect any interaction with men at all ever (check); they expect to be able to have sex with any woman of their choice on demand. Um, could be a problem there. They’ll just have to screw each other, because after all men can’t deny their and desire is a NEED it’s a NEED … oh noes, gay!
No thanks, vibrissimo; I read Lord of the Flies in school way back when.
That puppy is just adorablz. My parents showed bulldogs and bred a couple of litters when I was a kid. One of the litters was eight! Imagine eight of those little guys romping around. They were a lot of trouble, but so much fun.
OMG BABY BULLDOG!
They are the cutest. If I wasn’t allergic to everything in the world, I’d so want a bulldog just so I could name him Sir Wrinklebutt.
I don’t think it quite counts as ‘altruism’ to make MGTOWs put up with each other, but it is pretty funny.
I’m sure it would be altruism for everyone else.
Hesster, I am SOOOO jealous (though my head probably would have exploded from ultimate cuteness x 8).