An MGTOWer-enraging Catbunny. Found on Reddit, in one of the few threads there not full of rape jokes.
The reviews are in! Man Boobz continues to confuse and enrage the Manospherians of the world. Over on MGTOWforums.com, Armageddon15 lays out this 2-point critique:
I went over to that pathetic excuse for a site to see what cherry picked articles they’ve been going through lately, and I have 2 things I’d like to bring up..
1. What the hell is it with that guy and animals? Posting pandas, cats, bears etc. Maybe he should post youtube videos about that full time instead of the shit he calls writing.
2. The comments on the articles are the most unorganized, random thing I’ve ever seen on a discussion board. I can’t even follow what the hell is going on. They go on tangents in every other comment in ways that don’t even relate to the original post. How do you even have a discussion over there? They got an end of the year troll award going on over there, but I don’t know how any troll has the patience to write on that site for any length of time without blowing his brains out.
Boogeyman is also bewildered by the comments here:
Yes, I’ve noticed he’ll get hundreds of comments from his hairy armpitted fans but only a small % have anything to do with the subject. His article will be about date rape and he’ll have 300 comments about coffee cake recipes and Lady Gaga’s fashion sense.
Huh. I think I missed that one. We did have one thread recently that suddenly veered off into a discussion of bra sizing. So there’s that.
But if what we’re doing here is causing so much consternation amongst the MGTOWers of the world, we clearly need to do more of it. And so, a video no MGTOWer can possibly rebut:
Never underestimate the grandiosity of an MRA in a snit. Here, from The Spearhead, is some dude called ConShawnery suggesting that dudes grousing about women are basically the equivalent of superheroes facing down the evilest of supervillains. He also has some thoughts about cunts.
To women, a man who has seen the truth about them is a dangerous animal, a vector of viral information that, if allowed to spread, will bring their matriarchal palace crumbling down. A man like that is literally the most dangerous thing to women and they know this. This is why 18-year-old daughters will abandon their fathers, mothers their sons, wives their husbands, sisters their brothers – as soon as it becomes clear that he’s taken the red pill.
This is also why “cunt” is such a dirty word while “pussy” is not. “Pussy” is adoring (whether it’s derogatory doesn’t matter), “cunt” is not. A man who uses the word “cunt” is a man for whom the magical hold of vagina has worn off, and he must be excluded from polite society at all costs, lest he infect other men.
59 upvotes, 0 downvotes, last I checked. Nothing more courageous than telling a gang of grumpy misogynists exactly what they want to hear.
North quotes me and Hugo Schwyzer on the topic. Here’s the extended remix of my remarks:
Unfortunately, in most cases, I don’t think it’s possible to talk someone out of a Men’s Rights obsession. For most of them, it seems to be driven not by facts — they’re happy to simply make up facts to fit their worldview — but by feelings, most obviously by rage at women. If they were driven by actual interest in issues, they probably would have accomplished something by now; in reality, only the overlapping but more politically focused Father’s Rights movement has actually had much of an effect on the real world, for better or worse. For most MRAs, the closest they come to activism is leaving angry comments everywhere online — or harassing individual women online in a manner similar to the ways abusers stalk the objects of their obsessions.
The one argument I think you can make to MRAs who are not too far gone is this: it’s not healthy for you to spend so much time stewing in your anger online. Instead of trying to help men work through their personal issues with women, the MRM encourages men to cultivate their rages and hatreds, to remain stuck. That’s not healthy for them, or for society at large.
North’s post was inspired by a recent Dear Prudence question on Slate from a girl whose dad had recently gone all MRA on her. (It’s here, scroll down a bit to the question that starts “Dad-Related Dilemma.:)
The guys at The Spearhead also had a whack at the Dear Prudence question here. Needless to say their perspective is a little different than mine or Hugo’s.
As far as I can tell from the badly Google-translated version of her blog, the Brazilian versions of Man Boobz (Homens Idiotas?) are pretty much identical to our Man Boobz, right on down to their obsessions with alphas and betas and all that crap.
In olden days of rough village justice she’d have gotten the scold’s bridle, or the the ducking stool, or the stocks. And quite right.
A couple of days later, regular A Voice for Men commenter DruidV, perhaps inspired by Fidebogen’s post, made a strikingly similar suggestion on that site:
I urge all Men here to have a look at wiki’s description of what was commonly known as a scold’s bridle, or the Branks. For whatever foolish reason, this item was done away with some time ago. This invention to end Men’s suffering, needs to be brought back into public acceptance and application, post haste, imo.
A scold’s bridle, sometimes called “the branks”, as well as “brank’s bridle” was a punishment device used primarily on women, as a form of torture and public humiliation.[1] It was an iron muzzle in an iron framework that enclosed the head. The bridle-bit (or curb-plate) was about 2 inches long and 1 inch broad, projected into the mouth and pressed down on top of the tongue[2]. The “curb-plate” was frequently studded with spikes, so that if the tongue moved, it inflicted pain and made speaking impossible.[3] Wives that were seen as witches, shrews and scolds, were forced to wear a brank’s bridle, which had been locked on the head of the woman and sometimes had a ring and chain attached to it so her husband could parade her around town and the town’s people could scold her and treat her with contempt; at times smearing excrement on her and beating her, sometimes to death.
Emphasis mine.
I will be charitable and assume that both Fidelbogen and DruidV were joking. That is, they don’t literally want to strap women’s heads into ghastly torture devices, smear them with shit and beat them to death. They just think that the very notion is hilarious.
Whether the suggestions were made seriously or not, they’re still pretty hateful. Given that Fidelbogen was recently taken aboard as a regular writer for A Voice for Men, and that DruidV’s comment on that site got mostly upvotes (and no criticism) from the regulars there, would it be fair to call A Voice for Men the “underbelly of a hate movement?”
I’m not sure why that particular phrase popped into my head, but somehow it seems all too appropriate.
I’m just going to come out and say it: I will never knowingly enter into a romantic relationship with a feminist. I do have some female relatives and acquaintances who are feminists … and it’s not like they all wear signs that proclaim I’M A FEMINIST. (Some do.)
Aside from obvious telltales (feminist bumper stickers, etc.) or outright asking them “Are you a feminist?”, what are some discreet ways to ferret out a woman’s views on gender activism without creating an awkward situation? Feminism is a minefield topic, and I certainly wouldn’t broach the subject directly with a woman I’ve just started dating.
Naturally, this being the Men’s Rights subreddit, he received much helpful advice. Celda broke it down for him:
You don’t really care whether she identifies as a feminist or not – you care what her views are.
For instance, does she feel women have the right to force men into parental obligations against their will?
Does she feel women are oppressed in Western society?
Does she think that women make less money than men for the same work?
If yes to these questions or similar, then you probably want to avoid her.
Exactly. Always avoid those with a basic grasp on reality. They’re the worst!
Naive1000 suggested looking for more subtle clues.
Ask their thoughts on “benevolent sexism” if they know what your talking about you likely have a feminist. Just to make sure go into male privilege, it’s the feminists’ most popular talking point. Let her talk about it then you can see what she’s really like. But, there are some women who call themselves feminists, but are really egalitarian: they just don’t know the term.
Memymineown also suggests a subtle approach, and holds out hope that some of the younger feminist girls can be won back to the path of righteousness:
Bring Men’s Rights issues into the conversation subtly. I was talking with my family about Justin Beiber and brought up the paternity charge and no rape charges filed against the woman.
That led into a discussion about how women aren’t punished for rape.
Just do things like that.
But you shouldn’t exclude all feminists. I would say that the vast majority are just girls(I do use that word on purpose) who have been lied to. Once you show them the real facts they will probably come around.
Why do you need to be discrete about it? Just ask her. If she is a member of the cult she will start screaming about the patriarchy, then her head will explode.
It’s true. Pretty much every conversation involving feminists quickly devolves into screaming about patriarchy. Heck, a feminist friend and I once screamed about patriarchy for five hours straight. We probably could have gone longer, but the manager at Applebee’s, evidently not a feminist, threw us out. Sometimes I start screaming about patriarchy when no one else is around, just to keep in practice.
Conversations with feminists pretty much all go like the conversation in the video below, only instead of a cat you need to picture a feminist, and instead of the word “no,” the word “patriarchy.” You can see how annoying that might get, and not just to Hitler.
Click on the pic to see it in its full-sized glory!
So I linked the other day to Kate Beaton’s awesome comic about the obstreperous velocipedrix (inspired by the cartoon I used to illustrate this post). But since then I’ve had bicycle-riding-ladies on the brain and I thought it was worth another post. Besides, it gives me an excuse to use the cartoon above, which Beaton linked to in her Hark, A Vagrant post.
The notion that bicycle- (or velocipede-) riding women are inherently hilarious (or inherently evil) may seem a tad quaint now, but back in the late 19thcentury, when bicycling really took off, these cartoons were every-fucking-where.
The independent mobility of cyclists raised genuine alarm for their physical, if not moral, safety; simply put, the bicycle could easily take women to unsavoury places where they might be endangered physically (for example, by being attacked), or morally (for example, by being seduced into imprudent conduct with intemperate company). . . . Drawing on previous knowledge of the kinds of women who deliberately made themselves conspicuous in public, that is, prostitutes, there would be a strong tendency to conclude that cycling women were far from respectable: not exactly prostitutes, perhaps, but possibly women of loose morals or with an undeveloped sense of propriety.
What actions? Going outside dressed in something more revealing than a nun’s habit. Going outside at night. Not reacting with gratitude when dudes patronizingly lecture them on the perils of being a woman in public. It’s the same old shit: the “independent mobility” of women is pissing off a lot of men even today.
That’s why so many MRAs got so angry about the case of Lara Logan, the CBS news correspondent who was sexually assaulted while covering the protests in Egypt last year — many in the MRA camp weren’t so much angry at those who assaulted Logan as they were at Logan herself, for daring to cover political unrest in another country … while being a woman.
That’s why it always strikes me as a little odd that MRAs routinely describe their movement, such as it is, as a new one. It’s not. Theirs is a reactive movement, and a reactionary one – and not just because some of them literally think women should be denied the right to vote. It’s because so much of what they obsess about is the same old shit that pops up whenever women have stepped up and challenged their traditional roles.
Of course, these guys aren’t simply angry at women doing traditionally masculine things – from going where they like, on bikes or foot, to covering world politics. They’re worried that newly “masculinized” women will turn men into a bunch of emasculated pussies.
While poking around to find more cartoons to illustrate this post with, I happened across several that show just how persistent this worry is. Take a look. The first couple are from the turn-of-the-twentieth century; the third is from the 1970s. Notice a theme here?
This same old theme is handled a bit more subtly today, as this bit of clip art shows. Note the pink apron, in case you didn’t get the point: a man washing dishes is an emasculated wussy.
Of course, in the Manosphere, things are not quite so subtle. It’s telling that amongst MRAs and other modern misogynists the insult of choice for feminist men is “mangina.”
Here’s how one little manifesto defines the term. (I’ve edited out a lot; it’s pretty fucking repetitive, though students of misogynist psychology may wish to read the whole thing here.)
Manginas are pseudo-men who fixate their lives on getting a sniff of the female genitalia (figure of speech) at the expensive of others and by betraying real men.
Manginas see women as an ultimate being, places them on a huge pedestal, mind focuses only on sex or the satisfaction of women all the while not giving two bits a damn about his fellow man. …
A mangina is not a man, and we wouldn’t dare honor them by gracing them with the title. …
A Mangina seeks continuous approval from females thereby becoming their servant.
Manginas support women’s issues which are against his fellow men. Someone who espouses feminism but is really being suckered into a form of chivalry in which women’s interests take precedence over men’s. Unaware that they are merely “useful idiots”, doing what women want in the vain/hope of getting laid. When his usefulness is over she tosses him out with the rest of the rubbish. …
A Mangina is a self-depreciating man who subconsciously hates himself and blindly believes women are superior to him. He has been raised to think masculinity is inherently wrong – perhaps even a genetic/evolutionary/social flaw – and must be corrected by embracing his “feminine side” to the point of losing the very qualities that make him male.
Women acting like men; men acting like women. These were the bugbears of the velocipedrix-hating, women’s-suffrage-opposing assholes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; they were the bugbears of the protoypical woman’s-lib-hating chauvinist pigs of the seventies; and they remain the bugbears of an astonishingly large number of those in the Men’s Rights movement today.
And that’s why it, too, will end as a joke, remembered as a quaint holdover from earlier times rather than the progressive civil rights movement it sometimes pretends to be.
In the meantime: Kate Beaton, fucking hilarious, right?
NOTE: I found a whole bunch of awesomely retrograde cartoons from bygone days while looking for the illustrations for this post. I’ll be posting some of my favorites soon.
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog disguised as a cat.
Over on the always repugnant In Mala Fide, a guest blogger by the name of What is To Be Done recently offered his comrades in the “anti-establishment / man/ biorealist / HBD/ reactionary / racist / patriarch / tradcon / whatever blogosphere” what he evidently sees as a revolutionary suggestion: instead of trying to fight the evil feminists with “well-reasoned arguments,” why not simply set up fake feminist blogs, and post shit on them to make feminists looks bad?
WITBD explained:
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a saboteur. We are naturally smarter than the feminists (in fact, objectively better in every conceivable way), and in addition, we are well-trained in deception by our studies of game. In other words, it’ll be a piece of cake for us to mimic their arguments and appear to them as really smart girls who really know their shit.
Really? Because no one I’ve ever run across in the manosphere has managed to pull off a particularly convincing impersonation of a really smart anything. And in order to effectively parody something, you have to actually understand it first. Given some of the truly odd things MRAs and manospherians believe about feminism and feminists – see my post on Operation Alimony yesterday for one recent example — I’m somehow thinking that the only people dumb enough to be fooled by these “false-flag-feminist” blogs will be other, yep, MRAs and manosphereians.
Nonetheless, WITBD claimed that’s he’s already started putting his little plan into action:
I have already begun false flag blogging myself. At this stage, giving the link would ruin the whole thing. But it’s out there. And “false flag blogging” returned only 87 results, of which only a few actually seemed to discuss what I’m talking about, so for the time being it seems nobody is watching out for it. Not that they’d be able to tell anyway.
His fantasies got more and more extravagant:
Think long term. The endgame is to build a big enough presence that coming out as a fake feminist generates buzz in and of itself. Imagine if it came out that the founder of Feministing was actually a men’s rights activist.
And that he could fly, and shoot lasers from his eyes! Imagination is fun!
(Note: The founder of Feministing is not actually an MRA, or a man. Nor can she fly or shoot lasers from her eyes.)
WITBD continued fantasizing:
Eventually, our false flag bloggers will coordinate with our legitimate bloggers and have “debates” where both sides are controlled by us.
And where the only people paying attention are you guys.
If you feel you are getting really good at this, attack some prominent feminists for not being feminist enough. I don’t even know what that would mean, but, hey, this is feminism. Nonsense is our bread and butter.
Wheels within wheels!
Some on In Mala Fide thought this was a dandy idea. Frost wrote:
Fuck yeah. Awesome post. …
[W]e need to get bold and creative with how we fight the war for the best minds in the western world. False flag blogging is a wide-open front. Especially if you’re new to writing and aren’t yet confident in your voice – and unless you have written many thousands of words already, the truth is your writing is probably going to suck – a false-flag blog would be a great way to hone your skills while only having to actually write at the level of typical mid-twenties gender studies grad student.
Here’s a post of mine that sadly didn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s one of my own personal favourites:
I submitted it to The Good Men project, Manboobz, and a few other Mangina sites as a guest post, but sadly no one bit. These people are just so easy to parody, it’s ridiculous.
Regular Man Boobz readers may have a rather different assessment of how effective his parody was.
Others on In Mala Fide were a bit more skeptical of the “false-flag” idea. As out-and-proud racist thwak put it:
It sounds like a good idea, but it won’t work. Its been tried by white people on counter racism forums and they always got busted. We used to call it the “nigger impersonation syndrome”.
A white person would sign up with a name like “Jamal” and speak ebonics… but they always got busted cause at some point they hafta come out of “nigger cloak” to practice racism; i.e, say and/or do something a black person would not say/do.
Sure, they have the option of coming on the discussion board and pretending to be a full time nigger, but how does that advance the racist agenda? …
The “black White Supremacist” stuck out like a nun in a whore house everytime.
And got busted everytime.
Gosh, it’s almost as if black people are actual human beings and not just racist caricatures. And that real black people can somehow magically spot the difference between other real black people and racist assholes posting in “ebonics.”
Huh. Could the same happen with feminists?
In a followup post, WITBD dismissed the critics as uncreative cowards. And it turns out that fake blogs are only the starting point in his grand plan.
The fact is we are not the alt-right. We are the new left. We are the oppressed proles … They are the establishment. We lost “our” country. They control it all now. We have blogs. And a handful of churches and seasteading. Sucks.
Now it’s time to move on. We have to take these pieces of shit down and that means we must use leftist tactics. This kind of blogging operation is the beginning of a long march to infiltrate and undermine their institutions.
Sounds like someone has been reading Mao’s Little Red Book!
Playing around? Real men fight to win, period. We fight feminism specifically because it’s the weak point of liberalism. Read your Sun Tzu. Attacking the entire rainbow coalition at once is madness. You always attack the enemy where he is weakest.
And the weakest links are the ladies, naturally.
[N]ot all women actually benefit from feminism. They may think they win at first, but we know full well that feminist sex and the city-type women lose big time: no kids, no committed alpha, no nothing. Most women don’t benefit, and many women are recognizing this.
Right now among women, feminism is high status and actually being feminine is low status. But all women instinctively want to actually be feminine, and they have better life results when they do. We all know about how to manipulate women’s idea of status. This should be easy to work out.
If we take out or marginally disrupt feminism, and pull lots of white women out of the coalition, it crumbles in short order.
Oh no! Not the white women! Don’t take the white women!
High-IQ thundercunts are major war engines of the regime, and especially the childless ones. They actually run the agencies, corporations, HR departments, universities, etc. Without them, the enemy has a harder time operating. As well, white women are blatantly used as bait to recruit minority men into liberal groups.
Anti-feminism is something that we know well … and it is something that the other elements of the liberal coalition actually somewhat agree with us on because its not like the blacks, Mexicans, Arabs etc. are keen on empowering their women. All men of all races have common ground in dealing with the unique female brand of bullshit and thus are potential sympathizers on this issue.
So this is his grand plan: for racist white dudes like him (and much of In Mala Fide’s readership) to build a sort of antifeminist rainbow coalition with “blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, etc” … in order to take down feminism … in order to weaken liberalism … in order to screw over the “blacks, Mexicans, Arabs, etc.”
Uh oh! I just discovered this, currently the top story over on the Men’s Rights subreddit:
Yes, my sisters (and honorary mangina man-sisters), Russell Brand has dealt a severe blow to Operation Alimony, which (as you well know, at least if you’ve been attending the meetings) is our dastardly Feminazi plot to destroy the patriarchy by getting pretty ladies to marry and divorce rich dudes and take all their money.
You may remember our wild revelry when we heard that comrade-ess Heather Mills had walked off (no jokes please) with £24.3 million of Paul McCartney’s man money. And the joyful tears we shed when we heard that Mel Gibson’s ex-wife had (reportedly) scored a cool $425 million in her divorce settlement.
Russell Brand has just spotted a large pile of Katy Perry's money
But today, we shed only the bitterest of tears. We have not only been thwarted, but we’ve also been exposed! Damn those Men’s Rights Redditors and their evil allies at the Daily Mail!
The comments in the r/mensrights thread show that they understand our evil plans all too well. How can we respond to Aetheralloy’s withering critique?
Feminists see the absurdity of their own pushed polices?
LOL no. No they won’t. I’d sooner expect scientologists to ask their psychiatrist if they are in a cult.
But ladies! Do not despair! Russell Brand may have set back our efforts, but he, and his Reddit allies, shall not defeat us!
Ladies, you know what to do. Get yourself all prettied up, hit the town, and snag yourself some rich dudes! Let’s see how many of these guys we can have married off by the end of the year.
Marrying (and divorcing) rich dudes: it’s the feminist way!