It’s Saturday, so I guess that would make it time for Steely Dan Cover Band Saturday, something I just made up. Here are a couple of Steely Dan cover bands doing their Steely Danniest versions of two Steely Dan classics. It’s Steely Dannerific! With an added bonus of what may literally be the worst band in the world playing Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.”
Don’t feel obligated to watch them. It might be better for everyone if you didn’t. If you’re only going to watch one, watch the last one.
Tom Martin, a former gender studies student at the London School of Economics, recently became a minor celebrity amongst Men’s Rights activists and other angry men when he sued his alma mater for alleged sexism against men.
He’s now had his case thrown out of court. Let’s go to the Camden New Journal for details:
Tom Martin, 39, who lives in Covent Garden, claimed he suffered “anti-male discrimination” while studying for a master’s degree in gender, media and culture at the world-famous university in Holborn.
Representing himself at his application for a trial at the Central London County Court on Tuesday, Mr Martin complained of a lack of men-only sessions in the university’s gym and the preponderance of posters in the corridors advertising services for women without the presence of similar materials geared towards men.
Mr Martin, who describes himself as a feminist, said “hard” chairs in the library were uncomfortable for men and that a “male blaming culture” was evident in course materials, which “ignored men’s issues” and focused on wrongs done by them.
Damn those misandrist chairs and their man-hating hardness!
The judge didn’t buy it, saying Martin’s case had essentially no chance of success. He threw out the case and ordered Martin to pay LSE’s legal costs.
Martin, welcome to reality.
On Twitter, Martin responded to the news by calling his critics “whores.” One of many examples:
But I was really discriminated against, you whores!
My legal complaint did NOT involve a complaint about the seating. You have been misled by the press – The Times and the West End Extra/Camden New Journal both mysteriously got it wrong.
One year prior to joining the university, when visiting its library, I did complain, that the seating being hard created a greater disadvantage for men than for women, as men have considerably smaller weight-bearing buttock pads than women, and men are heavier too – so for men, on average heavier than women, have more weight bearing down onto a pad which is approximately four times smaller than women’s on average – according to a BBC documentary on the subject.
He then details his attempts to fight this grave injustice. Also, there’s this:
[S]everal comments here are confusing ‘whore’ with ‘slut’. A slut has sex freely, which I am all for. Freedom of association is the ultimate in humanity. A whore charges for sex. Even if a woman is a virgin, but is waiting for Mr Right to buy her something, she’s a whore.
It’s counter-intuitive, but a lot of professional feminists are whores. They expect the government and men to do them special favours. They make up stories to convince men and government to believe that we all owe women something.
But really, if someone were keeping a tab, then…
Women owe men five years pension. Women owe men some National Service. Women owe men some inventions. Women owe men positive discrimination in university curricula. Women owe men some child access. It’s women’s round at the bar too.
UPDATE: I have no reason to believe that the harassment alleged by Kyle Lovett — which I discuss below — involved anyone even tangentially connected to this site, or indeed that it ever happened. The “evidence” he provided only showed that he got traffic from a link on this site. He never provided any evidence that the alleged harassment occurred or that, if if did, it was perpetrated by anyone who found his site through my site.The rest of my piece still stands.
The other day, a commenter here linked to the blog published by one of the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit. Kyle Lovett, the mod in question, says that not long afterwards, someone contacted his workplace saying that he was a member of a “hate group.” Claiming to be concerned about his safety, he temporarily hid his blog. And stepped down as mod.
Lovett says he suspects that this person who he says contacted his work is a Man Boobz reader, and has now provided evidence that seems to back up this suspicion. If Kyle is indeed telling the truth about the harassment, it was a Man Boobz reader who contacted his workplace. (There is no evidence it was one of the regulars here, merely someone who was reading the comments in that one thread. Nor am I completely convinced that the alleged harassment happened; Lovett has lied about things in the past.)
But if the harassment happened let me be blunt: That’s not cool. I don’t like that sort of harassment when it’s directed at feminists, and I don’t like it when it’s directed at MRAs. As Rebecca Watson once said, in a different context, “guys, don’t do that.” Seriously, DON’T DO THAT.
All this said, Lovett and other MRAs are acting as if the link to his blog here was in some way equivalent to “doxing” – that is, tracking down the personal information of someone posting anonymously, and posting it online, for purposes of harassment..
It isn’t. Kyle publishes his blog under his own name, and he regularly posted links to it on Reddit. It was no secret that he posted on Reddit as Qanan, just as my real name Is no secret.
I’m not sure why it’s necessary to point this out, but I will anyway: If you publish things on the internet under your own name, people will indeed connect your name to these things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting a link to someone’s blog. No one here advocated harassment in any way.
Needless to say, the indignation on the Men’s Rights about this is hypocritical, to say the least. MRAs harass feminists all the time.
A Voice for Men, the worst offender in this regard, has published the personal information of feminists, and once put out a thousand dollar bounty in an attempt to find out the identity of one feminist who had been posting anonymously online. AVFM head Paul Elam talks about “stalking” feminists and on his radio show gleefully discussed the prospect of not only revealing the names and addresses of women he considers evil, but also their routes home from work. He orchestrated a harassment campaign against one commenter here, which led to people contacting her workplace in an attempt to get her fired. There are many more examples.
Meanwhile, today on the Men’s Rights subreddit, one commenter’s call to harass a woman got two dozen upvotes from the regulars:
Guys, don’t do that.
EDIT: I have added a few comments in the post above to highlight my concerns that the alleged harassment may be a fabrication; I will remove these comments of Lovett provides proof, publicly or privately, that the harassment occurred.
What’s the best way forward for the Men’s Rights movement today? About the only thing I’ve been able to conclude from this discussion in the Men’s Rights subreddit is that it will more than likely involve heavy use of the word “cunt.” Men’s Rights redditors sure do love the word “cunt.” (See here for the rest of this particular discussion.)
This next bit follows directly from the above:
Yep, you heard it right:
To be classified as a hate group by such a large organization is the first step to gaining wider recognition.
If that’s the case, Men’s Rights Redditors, why are you so mad at the SPLC? Why aren’t you sending it thank-you notes?
Also, just a point of fact: The SPLC report didn’t actually classify the Men’s Rights subreddit as a hate group. It just pointed out that r/mensrights is full of misogynists. But apparently a lot of Men’s Rights Redditors want to take that whole hate group thing and run with it. You go, boys (and sometimes, oddly, girls)!
Beta males! Do you want to score with the pretty ladies? The Heartiste formerly known as Roissy has a suggestion for you: figure out when your favorite pretty lady is having cotton pony rodeo time – sorry, her period — and make your move then! Apparently, according to SCIENCE, that’s when the pretty ladies will be most receptive to your pathetic, hamhanded beta advances.
Let’s let the master explain:
[D]uring the three weeks a woman is not ovulating (and especially during her menstruation) her desire is shifted toward beta provider males. … To put this in the simplest terms possible, a woman who is hot enough to bang greater alphas will subconsciously gravitate to lesser alphas as her ovaries power down for three weeks. A plain jane who makes herself receptive to greater betas when ovulating will subconsciously begin to warm to the attentions of lesser betas reading her poetry after her hormones stabilize post-ovulation.
But fellas, don’t actually expect her to stoop to having sex with the likes of you.
I don’t mean she is suddenly going to be attracted to the opposite of the alpha males she craves when egging out. Instead, I mean she will become more indulgent of men who are somewhat more beta than the last alpha male she banged, or wished to bang, when she was ovulating. …
[B]eta males are not going to suddenly see action for three weeks with the women who aren’t ovulating. What they might see is more receptiveness — more openness — to their sloppy, guileless flirtations from those women.
And if by some weird miracle you beta dudes are actually dating a woman, Heartiste is a little more optimistic for you:
[E]njoy your two or three tepid bangs during the three weeks you are reasonably safe from the depredations of your sweet girlfriend’s behavioral modification egg assault and any interloper alpha males who might be conveniently available to her. No, you won’t ever get her to scream “choke the living shit out of me and plunge your divine cock into my tight puckered asshole as far as it’ll go until I’m bleeding tears of exquisite pain ps I saved my incredibly lubricated pussy all for you” like Olivia Munn, but at least you get to wrap up your two minute tenderly administered intimacy sessions scraping your beta peen along her dry vagina walls with twenty minute cuddleramas and a bloated chickflix queue.
Oy. I can’t really keep up the sarcasm after that. I just feel bad that the genuinely charming and hilarious Olivia Munn (no sarcasm here) has been pulled into Heartiste’s strange fantasy world.
[NOTE: COMPLETELY REVISED WITH ACTUAL USEFUL INFORMATION THIS TIME]
A number of commenters have been getting the error message “”You must be logged in to make
a comment from that address” when they try to comment.
This is because WordPress has made a change to how it handles comments. Here’s their explanation:
Now, if someone tries to comment with an email address that’s attached to a WordPress.com account, they’ll need to sign into WordPress.com before they can comment.
If you don’t have a WordPress account, this shouldn’t affect you.
You can contact the WordPress people if you’re still having problems. Or, presumably, switch to using a non-Wordpress-linked email. (Which will send you to moderation for your first post.)
Thanks to Viscaria for the info.
EDITED TO ADD: Some people are still having trouble even with new emails/accounts. If anyone has any advice, please let me know. Or contact WordPress at the linky link above.
In the war of ideas, it is important to be well-armed. And that’s why one brave antifeminist warrior named Roy Scott Movrich has supplied his fellow warriors with some potent verbal ammunition, a full clip of misogynist insults designed to reduce all women in the immediate area to blubbering tears.
As Roy explains:
Feminists have gotten away with shaming language for too long. Far too long.
Its time we got our own back.
And since women in general have not stood up to defend men, it stands that all women are tarred with the same brush. Therefore ALL women are to be denigrated equally.
Fair’s fair.
Here are a choice sampling of insults to deride women with.
Try them and see. I did. And watch their ordure (translation: s**t) hit the roof!
A few of Roy’s insults are borrowed from literature (mostly from Shakespeare), but most of them are originals. In a manner of speaking.
He starts out with a puzzler:
Your’s is even smaller than mine.
Presumably he is suggesting that cis women/feminists have some sort of symbolic penis, and that this symbolic penis of theirs is smaller than his non-symbolic penis
He continues on with several other comments in this vein:
It’ll be way bigger than anything you’ll ever have.
The one you try to have is even smaller than mine.
And of course this classic:
Mine isn’t too small, your cooch is too wide/large/loose.
Then we get some vibrator-shaming:
Oooh! Bad mood! Did you run out of batteries?
And some wildly unoriginal negs:
You sound really old.
You don’t look your age. [Pause] You look [longer pause] old.
You look good enough to be my great-great grandmother.
This one might not be terribly successful with total strangers:
You were/are a lousy lover.
And then it’s back to the vagina:
You must be having constant periods.
It must be cotton pony rodeo time huh?
Note to self: Find out if anyone in the history of the world has ever referred to a woman’s period as “cotton pony rodeo time.”
Then on to cats, spinster-shaming, and general unpleasantness:
Did one of your cats just die?
You must not be married yet.
Can’t have kids huh?
There’s nothing a woman can do for me that my right hand can’t do better.
Even dung beetles are higher than women and feminists.
And back to the vagina again:
You obviously have one of those super large and deep ginas a man has to strap a plank to his back to prevent him falling into.
Note to self: Find out if there is anyone who refers to vaginas as “ginas” who is not a misogynist asscrack.
If you need more, Roy suggests that you can basically go with
[a]nything that implies her plumbing isn’t clean, has diseases or a foul smell.
After delivering this list (and some Shakespeare quotes), Roy somewhat confusingly concludes that insulting women is actually a waste of time:
[A]t the end of the day, given that women are devoid of logic and wit, using such choice insults is wanton waste.
Better to ignore them completely.
And since modern women, with their over-inflated sense of entitlement cannot abide being ignored, this is just as dramatic and effective as any insult.
In other words, the chance that Roy has ever used any of these insults in a conversation with a woman is roughly zero.
Reading this blog, you might get the impression that Men’s Rights activists lack a sense of humor. Not so! Some of them even make their own hilarious comics! I’d like to celebrate three of the finest MRA cartoons I’ve seen thus far in the first edition of what I’d like to call the MRA Comics Cavalcade. Click the thumbnails to go to the (full-sized) comics themselves.
In this edition of the popular The Pigman Cometh, the aforementioned Pigman, who has apparently killed a woman, dances with her corpse while spouting humorous remarks about how women and marriage suck. This comic is written by one dude, and drawn by another. Yes, it takes two people to produce masterpieces like this.Two separate people.
.
In this NSFW cartoon found on the blog Wimminz, two evil feminists talk evilly about divorce and park in a handicapped parking space. Just like real feminists would! And then a guy has sex with, apparently, some sex dolls?
.
And, finally, in this edition of plasticBrickAutomaton, an evil feminist door-to-door saleswoman tries to sell some dude a weird and incorrect caricature of postmodernism. The guy cleverly parries her attempts to indoctrinate him by attaching a baby to a balloon and letting it float away, to ultimately meet its demise. (One imagines.) This got more than 100 upvotes when it was posted to the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Sometimes I ask myself: what is it that I really hope to accomplish with this website, aside from entertaining myself and my readers, and exposing misogynist assholes for who they are. There’s a part of me that still hopes that someday, something I write will cause some misogynist and/or Men’s Rightser out there to develop a modicum of self-awareness, look at what they’ve been saying or doing, and say to themselves, “I’m really kind of a tool, aren’t I? Maybe I should stop.”
When the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the Men’s Rights movement came out, I hoped it might have a similar sort of effect. Or that, even if it didn’t persuade any MRAs out there that they were wrong, it might at least convince a few that they were going about things the wrong way. Nope. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, at least, it seems to have sent many of the regulars into an indignant tizzy, and they have doubled down on their peculiar brand of politics-by-whining-online.
Then there’s this post, currently the top post on the subreddit:
Wow, if the Men’s Rights subreddit had anything to do with that, that would indeed be a victory. As one regular put it:
Thing is, I read r/mensrights pretty regularly, and I don’t remember any campaign there to protect the rights of fishermen in New Zealand.
Turns out that’s because the campaign, such as it was, consisted of one post some months back, which got all of 11 upvotes at the time. The current post in which r/mensrights congratulates itself for its “victory” has gotten, last I checked, 120 upvotes, more than ten times that. Simplecosine’s self-congratulatory comment in the new thread has gotten 36 upvotes. The comment in the original thread asking r/mensrightsers to send an email to the US Secretary of State’s office got … one upvote. In other words, only a handful of Men’s Rights Redditors even noticed the original post, much less sent along an email.
The Men’s Rights subreddit: Taking Credit for Shit They Didn’t Do Since 2008.
And then there’s this post:
I’ve got nothing to say about this one — it’s basically self-refuting — except that I’m sort of bemused by the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “semi-women group.” Uh, what is that exactly? A group with some women in it? A group that doesn’t think women are all a bunch of evil bitches? The horror!
Oh, Men’s Rights movement. You’ll never change, will you?
EDITED TO ADD: And speaking of never changing, here’s how one Men’s Rights redditor responded to my comments there suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MRAs should actually denounce and distance themselves from someone calling for terrorism:
Let me just highlight that bit at the end again:
[T]he cost to the establishment to maintain the status quo in regards to divorce, custody, etc. must be made so high that it’s just no longer feasible. If that means instilling abject fear into the hearts of judges, cops and legislators by making them think their careers and/or lives could be forfeit unless they change their attitudes towards men, then so be it.
Trying to instill fear for one’s life in your opponents: that is the very definition of terrorism.