Author: David Futrelle

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drama feminism internal debate marriage strike

>The Men’s Rights Movement Vs. The People’s Front of Judea

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One of the strangest things about the Men’s Rights Movement is how little actual debate there is within it. Oh there’s plenty of discussion, to be sure, and plenty of arguments about what sort of strategy is most effective in dealing with MRA opponents and the rest of the world in general (see, for example, “Pansygate” and the ongoing sniping between Manhood101 ubermilitants and pretty much everyone else in the MRM). But actual substantive disagreements over major issues? Very few. With most key issues the MRM deals with, there’s a party line, and few within the MRM fold deviate very far from it.

This sort of ideological conformity is far less common outside the insular world of the MRM. Among leftist political groups, of course, internecine battles are so common that Monty Python satirized them in Life of Brian — you no doubt remember the bits about the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. And such battles are hardly confined to the left: just consider the battles between the teabaggers and the Republican party, not to mention the much more substantive battles you see between the various factions that make up the contemporary right, like those between Ayn Randian libertarians and bible-thumping social conservatives.

Among feminists, of course, there have been giant, bloody battles between anti-porn and sex-positive feminists, battles over “difference” feminism, over race and class, and on and on. (For a quick look at a dizzying array of different ideological tendencies within feminism, see here.) I’ve participated in these battles myself: see this piece of mine critiquing anti-porn feminism in general and Andrea Dworkin in particular.

These kinds of battles are inevitably frustrating, sometimes massively silly, and often distract activists from “real” political work. But they’re also necessary, a way to work out and work through issues that are inevitably more complicated than the political slogans with which most movements make their case to the world at large. Within feminism, for example, the “sex wars” have pushed anti-porn feminism from the center of the movement to the margins — a good thing for feminists, and for everyone else. Debates challenge dogmas; they’re symptoms of political health, not signs of weakness.

Indeed, if the Men’s Rights Movement is to have even a small chance of transforming itself from an insular, largely reactionary movement that’s actually harmful to men, into one that actually does men, and the world at large, some good, it’s going to have to have these kinds of debates. Right now the Men’s Rights Movement turns legitimate concern and legitimate anger at real problems faced by men into bitterness aimed at feminist bogey-women and women at large; it’s as destructive for the real cause of men’s rights, and for the world at large, as the Dworkinite branch of feminism was for feminists and for everyone else.

So it’s always interesting to me to see an actual substantive debate break out in the angry-manosophere. The latest: an honest-to-goodness debate over the notion of a “marriage strike” that has recently become an MRA shibboleth.  In a series of posts, the blogger who calls himself Dalrock asks

whether or not there really is, or will be, a marriage strike.  My first answer is that it depends on how we define the term.  If those using it are thinking of a classical strike where men would eschew marriage out of a sense of male solidarity in an effort to extract a better social bargain, this isn’t happening and won’t happen any time in the near future.

Looking over the stats used by MRAs to provide evidence that men in general, not just Men-Going-Their-Own-Way MRA types are, in effect, boycotting marriage, he argues

that the metric published by The National Marriage Project is being widely misinterpreted, and show[s] that the vast majority of current white men and women in the us in their mid 30s have married at some time. … We may yet see a marriage strike by white men in the US, but the data simply isn’t in yet.

As a result of his posts, Dalrock has gotten a lot of what he calls “push-back” from the MRM community, some of it quite personal, so much so that he felt he had to clarify that

For those of you who are refusing to marry, I’m not denying your existence or equating you with UFO conspiracy theorists.  As I’ve said before, we won’t see men banding together against their immediate interests to form a better social bargain longer term.  But this doesn’t mean individual men won’t decide that marriage isn’t a risk they want to take. 

This kind of “push-back” from your ideological allies is actually a sign that you’re moving forward. 

I’ll weigh in on the whole marriage debate in a future post or few, but in the meantime I’m just going to watch how this plays out.

Categories
comments policy

>Registraton is now required to post comments here

>

We’re having a lovely discussion.

In order to cut down on some of the, er, noise in the comment section, from now on only registered users will be allowed to comment here.

It’s a bit of a hassle, but I’d rather do this than to enable comment moderation, which is even more of a hassle for me and for everyone else. I hope that all of you regular posters who are actually trying to have real discussion will stick around. It really doesn’t take much time to register.

Oh, and the rest of my comment policy still stands: Don’t say things so vile and hateful that if you said them to Gandhi, he’d punch you in the head. No gratuitously nasty personal attacks. No really hateful slurs. (More specifics here.) Otherwise, go at it.

EDIT: If you try to post a comment and it simply doesn’t show up, that’s not my doing; it’s Blogger’s spam filter at work. I would turn it off if I could. I will un-filter comments as soon as I see them in the spam folder, so long as they aren’t vile/hateful, as spelled out above.

Categories
debate paul elam violence against men/women

>Paul Elam’s big mistake on domestic violence: A case study in MRA self-deception

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I didn’t think I was going to reply to Paul Elam’s latest post in our abortive “debate” on domestic violence  — see here for the details on why it fell apart, and here for details on his childish and unethical behavior since and here for the rest of my debate posts — but he’s really outdone himself this time, with an utterly spectacular misreading of an important research report on violence against women. Indeed, I’ve read over the relevant portion of his post several times, because I can’t quite believe he’s saying what he seems to be saying. If he is, and I have no other explanation for his remarks, his post becomes something of a case study in the way in which antifeminist dogma can distort even the most basic analysis of empirical data.

In the context of my debate with Elam, it’s not an insignificant error. Indeed, Elam sees his erroneous conclusion on this research as a sort of trump card in our debate, the grand finale to his final post in the debate. The only problem is that he’s completely wrong.

You don’t have to take my word for it. To make sure there was absolutely no doubt that Elam was misinterpreting the report, I contacted one of the report’s authors. She indeed confirmed that Elam’s interpretation was flat out wrong. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s get into the details, shall we?

The report in question is one I cited in my initial post, titled Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey. (EDIT: You can find a pdf of it here.) The paper, co-written by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, summarizes the findings of a massive survey on violence jointly undertaken by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, despite the title, also dealt with violence against men. The researchers surveyed 16,000 people, divided equally between men and women, about the violence they had experienced over their lifetimes — specifically, whether or not they had been raped, physically assaulted, or stalked.

Elam’s ideologically driven misreading of the report starts with a misreading of the opening paragraph of the report, a brief historical summary of how the rise of feminism led researchers to start to seriously pay attention to violence against women:

Violence against women first came to be viewed as a serious social problem in the early 1970s, in part because of the reemergence of the Women’s Movement. In unprecedented numbers, scholars trained in such diverse disciplines as philosophy, literature, law, and sociology began to examine violence against women in the context of a feminist ideology.

All of this is a pretty straightforward accounting of what actually happened. But, the researchers continue:

Despite the resulting outpouring of research on violence against women, particularly in the areas of rape and intimate partner violence, many gaps remain in our understanding of violence against women. Until now, empirical data on the relationship between certain types of violence against women, such as childhood victimization and subsequent adult victimization, have been limited. Reliable information on minority women’s experiences with violence and on the consequences of violence against women, including rates of injury and use of medical services, is also limited.

So far, the meaning of these remarks is crystal clear: Though feminism inspired a great outpouring of research on violence against women, there was still insufficient reliable empirical data to measure the true extent of the problem.

The researchers then go on to present the details of the National Violence Against Women Survey, a study designed to provide precisely what they said was lacking: reliable empirical data on the various forms of violence against women.  (In order to provide more context for this data, and to provide a basis for comparison, the study also asked the same questions to an equal number of men.)

Elam, though, reads this relatively straightforward introduction to the report as a sinister statement of purpose. Highlighting the phrases “Women’s Movement” and “in the context of a feminist ideology,” he declares:

Yes, in this the very first paragraph of the study, they identify not as academicians, but feminist ideologues. With a profound lack of erudition that can only be rooted in hubristic hegemony, they inform readers from the beginning that this is a political action. Straight from jump.

Not a promising start for Elam. But we haven’t gotten to Elam’s biggest error. 

Elam’s Great Misunderstanding starts off innocently enough: he cites data from the report on rape and physical assault that shows that, with the exception of the category of rape, men report suffering more violence than women. This is a fairly unsurprising result; numerous studies have found the same thing.

Note that this data measures violence overall, NOT intimate partner violence by itself. Most of the violence against men is in fact perpetrated by other men.

Elam then shows a chart from the study that looks at the incidence of intimate partner violence, broken down into various categories of violence; it shows women more than three times as likely to report being victimized by IPV than men.

It’s what Elam does next that truly boggles the mind. After noting that the data did indeed seem to suggest that women are the primary victims of IPV, he firmly declares this conclusion “wrong.” No, he says, what the dastardly feminist researchers did was to “factor weigh for under reporting [but] to their disgrace they did not figure it in to the graphs.”

As proof for this, Elam quotes a relatively straightforward passage in the text that discusses some of these results, and specifically refers back to the chart in question:

It is important to note that differences between women’s and men’s rates of physical assault by an intimate partner become greater as the seriousness of the assault increases. For example, women were two to three times more likely than men to report that an intimate partner threw something that could hurt or pushed, grabbed, or shoved them. However, they were 7 to 14 times more likely to report that an intimate partner beat them up, choked or tried to drown them, threatened them with a gun, or actually used a gun on them (see exhibit 8).

After quoting this text, Elam triumphantly declares victory:

And so there you have it.  A rough sketch of the math will lead you to a very familiar situation.

Domestic Violence- Women are half the problem.

Huh? The first time I read this I was simply baffled. Elam posts a chart showing that women report being the victim of IPV more often than men do, then a paragraph discussing the very same results, which says exactly the same thing, and which specifically refers back to that very same chart, and somehow concludes that … women are responsible for half the problem?

It took several rereadings for me to even grasp how he might have come to that utterly erroneous conclusion. Apparently, as best as I can figure it, he has interpreted the word “report” in the text to mean “overreport” instead of, you know, “report.” (Or that it indicated in some way that women overreported in comparison to men, who underreported, or something along these lines.) So that, as Elam figures it, the numbers in the text basically cancel out the numbers in the chart. In fact, the numbers in the text reflect the exact same data as the numbers in the chart.

Thus Elam transforms, in his mind at least, an empirical report of survey results that challenge his central claim — that women are half the problem in domestic violence — into one that proves his pet theory, and which reveals the perfidity of devious, cunning feminists.

Just so there would be absolutely no question that Elam is completely mistaken in his conclusion, I got in touch with Patricia Tjaden, one of the key researchers behind the survey, and the co-author of the summary Elam quoted from. She told me that, indeed, his interpretation of the figures in the paper is flat out wrong. As she put it in an email:

Yes, you are right in your interpretation of our results: Generally
speaking, in our study “reported” means respondents disclosed that they had
ever been a victim of a specific type of violent victimization. So, for
example, as presented in Exhibit 3 in our report on intimate partner
violence … 8.5 % of women compared to 0.6% of men
disclosed that they had been beaten up by an intimate partner at some time
in their lifetime.  It should be noted that some were beaten up more than
once, but these estimates reflect only if they “ever had.”  Thus, (surveyed)
women were 14 times more likely than (surveyed) men to report ever being
beaten up by an intimate partner [8.5/0.6 = 14.17.]

I have no idea what your [debate] opponent means when he said our
estimates reflect over-reporting.  Perhaps he meant that women are more
likely than men to report victimization to an interviewer?  There is little
research on what influences women and men to disclose victimization during
telephone surveys.  We conducted a small study during the course of the
NVAWS to see if interviewer gender impacted male respondents’ responses to
survey questions.  (We didn’t do it for women because all the women were
interviewed by female respondents.)  We found that male respondents were
more likely to disclose sensitive information, such as age, income, fear and
accommodation behavior, and recent victimization, to male interviewers.
This contradicts findings from previous research that shows respondents –
male and female alike – feel more comfortable disclosing sensitive
information to female interviews in face-to-face surveys.

The paper she is citing here is this one, available online here (pdf format):

Tjaden, P & Thoennes, N. (2000).  Extent, nature, and consequences of
intimate partner violence:  Findings from the National Violence Against
Women Survey.  Washington, DC: US Department of Justice NCJ 181867.

The only real question is whether Elam has distorted the results of the NVAWS deliberately. I don’t actually think so. He is enough of an ideologue to believe that a report based on a massive government study and which has been exposed to an enormous amount of scrutiny over the years in fact secretly proves his pet theory.

One final note: Elam also makes a big deal of the fact that the NVAW used the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) in its surveys, a research tool which I have criticized in my previous posts in the debate. As is often the case with Elam, this is a half-truth. The survey, as Tjadan noted in her email to me, “used questions similar to those in the CTS, but framed them differently,” and thus got very different results.

I will end with another comment from Tjaden, which helps to put this debate in a broader context:

I know this debate over whether men and women are equally likely to
perpetrate violence against their intimate partners is very confusing and I
have spent a good part of my career attempting to convince fellow
researchers and the federal government that we need to spend time and money
figuring out why different studies (i.e. different methodological approaches)
have yielded such disparate findings.  This would be far more fruitful than
pointing fingers at each other and calling each other names.

This is a topic I will take up further in future posts.

Categories
debate douchebaggery drama MRA paul elam Uncategorized violence against men/women

>Paul Elam’s continuing childish and unethical behavior

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When I agreed to debate Paul Elam on domestic violence on his web site, I clearly underestimated how childish, and unethical, he really is.

After I bowed out of the debate — see the details here — he decided to run the whole thing under a childish, gloating headline, and with an introduction labeling me a “fucking moron.” (EDIT: See here for my posts without Elam’s editorializing.)

Because of this behavior, I requested he either remove the headline and the obnoxious introduction, or remove my contributions to the debate from his web site entirely. After getting no response from him to this, I sent another email telling him to simply take down my writings from his web site.

Legally, he does not own any rights to my writings, and because of his behavior he no longer has my permission to run them. I may pursue legal action.

Paul, unfortunately, has chosen to escalate the situation, by running an even more childish post titled “David Futrelle- Covered in Pin Feathers and Clucking,” in which he writes:

let it be known now that any blogger in the sphere, MRA or otherwise, has my permission to repost this debate in full on their blog or website.

Obviously he has no more right to do this than I have the right to take his car on a joy ride.

He’s also apparently pitched the idea of reposting the whole debate on The Spearhead. While he doesn’t have the right to do this, and I’ve told The Spearhead that they do not have the right to reprint my writings, I might agree to the proposition provided that I’d be guaranteed in writing by The Spearhead that it would run with a neutral headline, that my latest response to Paul’s “final” post would be included, and a few other conditions.

And I would have no problem continuing the debate with Paul on The Spearhead until we each post 5 posts, as per our original agreement, were I to work out the necessary details with The Spearhead and get an agreement in writing. Or we could finish the debate right here.

I stand by everything I wrote in the debate, and have no problem continuing it, provided it be on a venue not controlled by Paul Elam and with some basic rules to guarantee fairness set forth in writing. (Paul would have to agree in writing to run the debate under a neutral headline on his site as well.)

Oh, and one final note: Paul has also removed the links back to here from the original debate, thus breaking still another condition I insisted on in order to participate in the debate in the first place. And he’s banned me from commenting in the comments section under the debate posts.

This is all very stupid and very petty.

Let me offer a challenge to anyone in the MRM whose ethics are more developed than Paul’s: Stand up and object to his illegal and unethical behavior. Were a feminist to pull this sort of thing on an MRA, I would certainly stand up and object to it.

Categories
paul elam

>The Domestic Violence Debate has begun

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EDIT: My first response is up, here.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, MRA Paul Elam and I are debating Domestic Violence on his web site A Voice for Men. Elam’s first post has just gone up, a wrongheaded and rather underwhelming start to the debate; my response will appear in a day or two. (I will post a pointer here when it does.)

Instead of allowing open debate on his website, Elam generally segregates those he classifies as, er, “feminists and manginas” on a separate page. (I know, right?) But he says he’s suspended that rule for this debate, so I urge anyone here in that particular demographic to go over there and start picking apart his errors. (Paul and I have agreed to keep out of the comments section for the debate.)
 .

Categories
evil women men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny quote of the day reactionary bullshit

>QuoteOTD: Teh Menz at work

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Another day, another muddled mess of misogynist generalizations completely unsupported by any actual evidence. Today, at A Voice For Men, Theodore Labadie reflects on the Roman Pantheon, and how teh menz made all the cool shit in the world lol, ladies are teh suckkssss! I’m paraphrasing, of course. In his words:

Men do not see the world like women do. The gaze of men projects outward into it; they see it, they take what they need from it, and they remake it anew. The gaze of women falls inward. The world becomes them, it exists for them. And thus, women do not build; they consume. It is not the vicissitudes of society or the education system that makes women like this. It is their nature. And, I hazard a guess … that because of the consumptive nature of women and of men’s desire to give them every comfort and convenience that we are eating ourselves alive.

I wonder, if the genius of men were fully recognized where would we be now? 

Gosh, I don’t know. We’d probably all be flying around with jet packs while having sex with sexy sex robots. That’s just a guess, though. But I have a question for Mr. Labadie, and for every MRA who gets vicarious man thrills from stuff other dudes have made: how many Roman Pantheons have you personally built?

Also: it sort of undermines your case for inherent man genius when you use the word “bare” to mean “bear.” Real men proofread.

Program Note: I will be man-debating Paul Elam, the man behind A Voice For Men, on the topic of Domestic Violence, starting tonight on his man-site. I will post links when the posts start going up.

Categories
douchebaggery hypocrisy quote of the day Uncategorized

>QuoteOTD: The Nerd Rage Virus

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The last time we checked in with the Pro-Male/Ant-Feminist Technology blog — a blog which, you may recall, is ostensibly devoted to the notion that technology is going to kick feminism’s ass, and how this is a good thing — the resident anonymous blogger was complaining about feminists (including me) who engage in “shaming tactics” that are, like, totally unfair to MRAs, because all MRAs want to do is have an honest debate on the merits of their ideas. Today, however, he talks a bit about a new computer virus, Stuxnet, and fantasizes about a virus designed to take down feminist websites:

Imagine what an anti-feminist Stuxnet would do.  It would specifically target computers belonging to NOW (the National Organization of Women) and other women’s groups, child support agencies, family/divorce courts, women’s studies departments at universities, etc.  Perhaps it could target something as specific as feminist websites and blogs …  An anti-feminist Stuxnet would be [easy] to create. Unless it seriously wants to attack databases, an anti-feminist Stuxnet does not require even a minimum of specialized knowledge besides being able to identify its target systems. Creating an anti-feminist Stuxnet will be within the skills of at least a significant fraction of malware programmers (if not most or all).  This means that in the near future there probably will be an anti-feminist Stuxnet.

 Well, that’s one way to win the war of ideas.

Categories
manly links masculinity

>Manly Links: In the fashion world, manliness is the new black

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Tiring of mere boyish charm, the fashion world is apparently now obsessed with big burly MEN. Well,  not that big or burly, really. This is the fashion world, after all. I have no grand theory on this, so instead I’ll just give you a batch of links:

Salon: The “menaissance” hits the runway: Muscles and chest hair make a comeback as anxiety peaks over masculine roles

Jezebel: Dudes are not immune to body fads

New York Times: New Fashion Trend: Manly men

If the cut and toned dudes on the runway are giving you body issues, guys, Marissa has some advice:

It’s our job to bitch about Barbie, guys; it’s your job to bitch about Ken.

Categories
douchebaggery drama homophobia paul elam Uncategorized

>Famous all over town

>Apparently, they can’t look away. A couple of days after Paul Elam — the MRA elder I am scheduled to debate on the topic of domestic violence later this week — launched a weird tirade against me on his blog, I’m now getting attention (and some traffic) from Ferdinand Bardamu at In Mala Fide, in a post urging MRAs to, er, stop paying attention to me.

As is generally the case with my MRA critics, it’s basically a bunch of empty insults. But as empty insults go, they’re not half bad. He calls me, among other things, a “twerp,” a “feminist quisling,” and “a miserable mediocrity who’s trying to get famous, an ant in our blog ecosphere.” He somehow manages to avoid the term “mangina” altogether.

There is one bit that’s actually obnoxious. In an attempt to explain something he said in a homophobic post of his I quoted last week, he says this:

radical gay activists, in their obnoxious way of shoving their lifestyles in the faces of the heterosexual majority and demonizing them, are poking and prodding an elephant. Elephants are big, heavy and have sharp tusks, and can gore or stomp you to death without breaking a sweat. If gays don’t clean up their act and stop treating straight people with contempt … they could inspire a violent homophobic backlash. Capisce?

Is it just me, or does anyone else suspect that the people given to “warning” gays about a “possible violent homophobic backlash” would be the first to get in line to stomp gays like an elephant in such a backlash?

EDIT: Oops! Speaking of attention, I forgot to add this actual screen capture. Hey, try it yourself.

Categories
masculinity shaming tactics

>Men’s Rights Activists: “Don’t tell me to ‘man up,’ you mangina!”

>If you’re ever looking for a pretty much sure-fire way to get a Men’s Rights Activist to blow his top — not that this is a particularly difficult feat — just tell him to “man up.” Indeed, the phrase is so infuriating to some MRAs that it causes them to spew typos like a mad man. “Few phrases in the world make an MRAs [sic] want to rip our [sic] their spines and beat people to a bloody pulp with them,” writes TheZetaMale on his Zeta blog. “‘Man Up’ has to be one of them.” Meanwhile, on the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, a fellow calling himself olythoreau seconds this emotion:

I noticed that people using the phrase “man up” or “be a man” really fucking pisses me off. A trigger of sorts. Fuck everyone who has any expectation that I or any other man perform masculinity to their liking. Yes, I’m a man, but I’m a fucking individual… and I’ll perform masculinity any way I fucking please!

Thing is, I completely agree with this sentiment: telling a guy to “man up” is an obnoxious thing to do. Oh, sure, I sometimes agree with the message people are trying to send by using this phrase: stop whining about trivial shit and get on with your life.

Indeed, no group of people I’ve ever run across is so expert in turning molehills into Mt. Everest than the MRA crowd; they put the whiniest of “victim feminists” to shame. Do you really need to boycott half the companies in the Fortune 500* because they ran “misandrist” ads featuring doofus husbands failing in their doofusy attempts to cook dinner? Does the fact that some random hot chick finds you repellent really mean that evil women rule the world? Does the fact that some anti-MRA blogger calls a dumb old sexist cartoon a dumb old sexist cartoon really mean that “feminists and manginas .. would love to enforce a world where the very thought that men experience problems with women in relationships is taboo[?]”

So I can certainly understand the exasperation so many people feel towards the MRM, as the very existence of this blog attests. But the phrase “man up” is absolutely the wrong way to make these points, for precisely the reasons olythoreau outlines. And I’d add: the phrase is sexist as hell, suggesting implicitly that non-men and non-manly men are a bunch of, well, pussies. (It’s telling that the most common alternate way to tell someone to “man up” is to tell him to “stop being a pussy.”)

I’m hardly the only feminist-ish person to dislike the phrase “man up”: Jezebel ran a story called “Stop Telling Men to ‘Man Up'” the other day, noting the sudden ubiquity of the phrase in the political world, and making the point that the phrase implies “that the worst thing to be is not-a-man — weak, lacking in courage.” (Of course, there are some MRAs who have no problem with the phrase “man up” for exactly this reason.)

But there is an irony to MRAs’ distaste with the phrase. No, scratch that, a HUMONGOUS GIGANTIC FUCKING IRONY. While they complain about the phrase “man up” being applied to them, they are the first to question the masculinity of anyone who disagrees with them or who displays their masculinity in any other way than they do — hence their almost ritualistic use of the gender-bending term “mangina” (NSFW link) to indicate anyone not-them. (For ample proof of this, just scroll down to the comments on virtually any post on this blog.) As cat points out in a comment on this very subject on this very blog:

The thing about MRA patriarchy foot soldiers is that they can’t seem to get the old slogan of “the patriarchy hurts men too”. First, they complain about not being able to express emotions and variety, then they turn around the first chance they get to bash the guys that do. You know, if you stopped doing all this gay-bashing gender shaming, you would be able to express your emotions verbally, dress in different colors, admit you enjoy musicals and baking, etc. You’re slitting your own damned throats and blaming it on everyone but yourselves.

I’d only add one little caveat to this: the people attacking “manginas” aren’t always the exact same people in the MRM who are complaining about being told to “man up.” Indeed, TheZetaMale — the first guy I quoted above — actually took his fellow MRAs to task in an earlier post for using “shaming language like ‘Faggot’ and ‘Emasculated Mangina.'” Unfortunately, his attitude is rarer than rare in the MRM.

So here’s a challenge for any MRM who hates being told to “man up”: take a stand against the term “mangina” and all the other obnoxious gender-questioning slurs that litter every message board or comment section populated by MRAs. Post a denunciation of this shit right here, in the comments to this post. Just human up, and do it.

NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL READERS: *I realize that they’re not literally advocating boycotting half the companies in the Fortune 500. Sometimes I keed.

EDIT: Amanda Marcotte posted an excellent piece on how “man up” fucks stuff up for everybody. Check it out.