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?
Yeah, CC is banned and I deleted a bunch of his shit.
The kitties are temporarily at rest at the moment.
I HAVE SUMMONED THE DARK LORD. (Thanks, David, this dude was f’d up.)
Kittens at rest tend to stay at rest. Kittens in motion will DESTROY YOUR APARTMENT. These are the laws of physics.
fuuuuuuuck. I go out for a nice evening and come back to read CC. I feel dirty. This is a remedy for me, at least.
David, you just can’t handle the truth…about rape jokes and bad metaphors. You are like some sort of fascist dictator whose name eludes me.
Silencing someone for making a few jokes is exactly like a kitten snuggled up on a warm tummy.
… I mean, silencing opinions are just like a puppy nuzzling an outstretched hand, asking to be pet.
… I mean, banning someone is exactly as bad as curing up with a loved one next to a roaring fire, sipping hot cocoa, looking outside at a beautiful blizzard at twilight.
Damn, turns out I’m really bad at metaphors…
I have one of those right now. And I want to go do that second one.
And so, CC’s ramshackle house of bad metaphors, hilariously bad historical analogies, and rape jokes had been swept away by the wind of David’s banhammer.
Well, we’ll always have the memories…
*soft focus montage*
…sigh…
*wistful gaze*
After all that CC nastyness, I think we need more brain bleach. Hopefully embedding works for me this time.
DOGGIEVIDEOSARETHEBESTVIDEOSESPECIALLYBULLDOGS except for kitty videos.
Mikey, dude, if you’re going to sockpuppet you really need to change up your writing style a bit. Did your evil misandric teacher tell you that it was men’s lot in life to be really repetitive or something?
So what the MRM is fighting for is the right, as men, to make feminists stop being bitchy? Truly, this is the greatest civil rights struggle of our time.
And as the Ball of Time rolls towards the Gutter of Eternity and the Moderator of Balance goes “ewww” and flushes his drains – we find it’s the end of the show. Good night from me, the teams, Samantha and a troll.
Chances are he’s going to go back to his echo chamber and say “I was banned for disagreeing with them!”
So according to CC; there’s no such thing as “rape culture”? This post explains it SO frighteningly well:
http://captainawkward.com/2012/08/07/322-323-my-friend-group-has-a-case-of-the-creepy-dude-how-do-we-clear-that-up/#more-3734
Princessbonbon, thank you for that Fifty Shades link – brilliant! (And the clearest article I’ve read yet on just how slimy and horrible the lousy book is.)
If you want a good read in a book with Shades of Grey in the title, just make sure it doesn’t have Fifty on the start.
I’d be interested to hear Jasper Fforde’s opinion…
Chances are he’s going to go back to his echo chamber and say “I was banned for disagreeing with them!” – MorkaisChosen
An accurate prediction, good sir.
http://conservativecrusadersword.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/banned-in-one-night-from-manboobz/
Personally, I’m holding out for Fitty Shades of Grey: Blood on the Sand.
Re: ConservativeCumberbund:
I wouldn’t expect them to see their way out of the whole “they banned me for being right, but I do wonder what got them banned from Tumblr.
Psst—CravatCrapper, it definitely wasn’t because feminists were afraid of you being right.
Ha! And he doesn’t know what censorship is, either. Predictable.
>>>Do people not know that Zyklon B was the poison (cyanide) used in the concentration camps?
Yes, but only because it’s featured in, like, a zillion punk songs about Nazis or things punks find nazi-like.
oh god y’all his blog is supposed to be a fucking novel
maybe it is mkey?
It makes The Turner Diaries sound like high litterature.
maybe it is mkey? – Sharculese
Not enough repetitive word usage and thesaurus-wanking.
He has to be a regular troll (a regular, trolling?) because his blog went up right as he started posting here and he already had some sort of grudge against us.
Btw, I tried to make a make a portmanteau out of “thesaurus” and a word meaning “masturbation”, but it’s really hard. I just ended up with a really perverted sounding dinosaur and a bunch of nonsense words.