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announcements beta males friend zone nice guys

I will be giving a talk at Northwestern on Monday on the Mythology of the Friend Zone

The exquisite pain of the Friend Zone.
The exquisite pain of the Friend Zone.

Hey, Chicago readers: If you can make it up to Evanston this Monday, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Escape from the Planet of the Friend Zone,” exploring some of the mythology of this dreaded place. The talk, like my talk two years ago, will be part of Northwestern’s Annual Sex Week, sponsored by the College Feminists. (The talk itself is cosponsored by NU’s Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault.)

It’s at 7 PM in Kresge Hall 4365, which is on the Southern end of campus, near “the rock.” (Here’s a map.) If you’re taking the el, get off at the Foster stop and head east; then a little ways south when you hit campus. I’ll check about parking for non-students and provide details later.

The last time I gave a talk during Northwestern’s Sex Week, some MRAs got a little overexcited and started making up things about what they assumed my talk was about. (They were wrong.) So, just to make clear: I will not be teaching impressionable college students “how to have good sex,” except insofar as I will be talking about how sexist and self-defeating the concept of the Friend Zone is, which means it’s possible that some dude could attend the lecture and decide to stop whining about getting stuck in the Friend Zone, and thus improve his romantic and sexual prospects with that one simple step.

I haven’t finished writing the talk yet, so if any of you have any thoughts on the Friend Zone — or the closely related topic of the “nice guy” — let me know in the comments below.

I’m also curious about what role the concept of the Friend Zone plays in your everyday lives, so I’m going to spit out a bunch of questions that I may address in the talk and may ask the students as well. I’d be interested in your answers.

Have you ever been put in a situation that you or other people might describe as the Friend Zone? Whose fault do you think it was? Have you ever been accused of putting someone else in the Friend Zone? Did you find this insulting? Has someone else, through their own obsequiousness, put themselves in the Friend Zone with you?

Is the Friend Zone a male thing or are there a significant number of women and girls who find themselves friendzoned as well?

Does the notion of the Friend Zone grow out of male entitlement? Is it a fundamentally manipulative to try to pressure a woman into romance and sex? Or does it grow out of male awkwardness — the inherently difficult situation of shy or perhaps socially awkward guys who are still nonetheless expected to be the ones who pursue women rather than the other way around, as MRA types might argue?

When did the term start getting used? The concept is certainly not new, but I don’t think the term is that old. When did you all first start hearing it?

How can guys (or gals) get out of the Friend Zone?

Can a Friend Zone situation — by which I mean one in which one person is romantically interested and the other isn’t — be transformed into a real friendship, or will the different feelings/expectations of the two people make this impossible?

Alternately, can a Friend Zone situation turn into a real romance?

Is the Friend Zone really a useful concept at all? There are very few relationships — platonic, romantic or purely sexual — in which each partner feels the exact same way about the other. There are mismatches all the time. Shouldn’t we just learn to roll with it? Maybe the answer to the old When Harry Met Sally question — can a man be friends with a woman he’s attracted to? — is, “why the hell not?”

 

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announcements off topic open thread

Under the Weather

How I feel at the moment, pretty much.
How I feel at the moment, pretty much.

Ugh. Not feeling too well, so no post today. (Maybe a short one, later.)

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announcements kitties pledge drive

Pledge Drive: Fluffy Cat Rolling In Money Edition!

catmakeitrain
Making it rain

Welcome to the First Quarter Man Boobz Pledge Drive 2014: Fluffy Cat Rolling In Money Edition!

To repeat my simple pitch from my previous pledge drives: If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below and send a few bucks my way. Or, if you’d prefer, a lot of bucks. You don’t need a PayPal account to donate; you can use a credit card, and there are other options as well. If you’re outside the US, PayPal should be able to handle your weird foreign money.

I appreciate any and all contributions. Of course, if you’re broke and can’t swing a contribution now, I understand. Really.

Your donations — and other forms of support –keep this blog going, by keeping me going. (Yes, the money goes to me. And my cats.)

Enormous thanls to everyone who donated during the last pledge drive. (I know I didn’t get back to everyone personally, and I apologize.) Thanks as well to those who’ve donated since the last pledge drive, and extra special thanks to those who’ve made a point of donating on a regular basis.

Man Boobz has now received more than 13 million page views since its inception on Blogger in 2010. Even more impressive: you all have posted close to 400,000 comments. The community that’s grown up around this blog is, as always, amazing to me. I couldn’t do it without you.

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announcements kitties off topic open thread

Cat discovers snow; David takes a few days off

So, there’s a whole bunch of MRA stuff I should be writing about now, and some Roosh drama, but, you know, my heart just isn’t in it at the moment. So I’m going to take a few more days off to clear my head. In the meantime, I would suggest keeping up with the latest MRA and PUA shenanigans by checking out the AgainstMensRights and TheBluePill subreddits, respectively.

Also, I thought you all might appreciate this video of a cat discovering snow for the first time.

And Happy New Year! Or did I already wish you guys that?

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announcements kitties misandry off topic open thread

A Cat for Christmas. Also, Man Boobz TABLE OF MISANDRY Art Contest WINNER!

Bananananana!
Bananananana!

Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it! And a very happy day in late December, if you don’t! Whatever your religious beliefs, or lack therof, I think you will appreciate this gif of a cat enjoying a traditional Christmas banana.

Also, I’d like to announce the winner of the MAN BOOBZ SLIGHTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS ART CONTEST. It’s Myoo, for this take on the Table of Academic Misandry described by A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam in a recent post. You know, the one that has legs made up of “rape hysteria, demonization of men, fraudulent academic feminism and the continual erosion of due process for men and other Constitutional principles.”

The Table of Misandry
The Table of Misandry (Click pic for a larger version.)

 

I think this pretty much nails it, though I do feel obliged to point out that technically that is not an octopus.

Thanks to everyone who submitted pics! You can find more in the comments of the original thread.

Categories
announcements misogyny MRA

Check out my review of Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men on The American Prospect

What you'll say to yourself if you don't read my piece right away
What you’ll say to yourself if you don’t read my piece right away

I‘ve got a nice long review essay on Michael Kimmel’s new book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era up at the American Prospect. Check it out!

Categories
actual activism all about the menz announcements

Today is World Toilet Day

07-24-2013toiletday

I was going to write up something today about International Men’s Day, the me-too what-about-the-menz holiday that’s so meaningless that even Men’s Rights activists can barely remember to celebrate it. Do we really need a day to “celebrate [the] achievements and contributions” of men? Don’t we get quite a lot of that already? Do we need a day given over to “highlighting the discrimination against [men]” as if this is really a thing?

But then I discovered that today was also World Toilet Day, and realized it was probably more worthwhile to promote this event, as the lack of toilets and proper sanitation — a widespread problem in parts of the developing world, particularly in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — can have devastating public health consequences.

Some disturbing facts, from the UN, which I clipped from this CNN story:

  • 2.5 billion people — one in three people in the world — do not have a toilet or access to sustainable sanitation
  • Diarrheal diseases are the second most common cause of death in young children in developing countries
  • They kill more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined

Learn more at the official website. Also, Al Jazeera has a useful infographic.

And just a note to the MRAs who have somehow concluded from this post that I am comparing men or men’s issues to toilets (!?), let me try to make my point very clear: I am contrasting a sharply focused activist campaign aimed at a very real problem — lack of toilets and proper sanitation in large parts of the developing world — with large consequences — disease and death, of adults and children alike — with a badly thought out International Men’s Day that seems largely driven by jealousy that “women get a day so why can’t we have one too.”

How halfassed is International Men’s Day? Here’s a screenshot of the International Men’s Day website’s “resources” page.

resources

Generally speaking, you would expect a “resources” page to list facts and figures and possibly link to relevant other groups. All you get at the International Men’s Day site are some posters made from stock photos.

What I found on the site’s “about” page was much more troubling. The site was put online by a group called the Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation, working with the founder of International Men’s Day, Dr Jerome Teelucksingh. The Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation, as I discovered with a bit of Googling, turns out to be a virulently homophobic and transphobic organization that is also behind a site called Gendermatters.com. A quasi-manifesto on the site titled 21 Reasons Why Gender Matters asserts, among other things, that:

Transsexuality signals a deceptively fierce disorder. Elective castration, mastectomy, hysterectomy, etc., are futile non-solutions. The cruel, permanent disfigurement of so-called gender reassignment is not the answer. Transsexuals need psychological and spiritual insight that frees them to celebrate the chromosomes they received at conception.

So, yeah, a halfassed men’s “day” that’s associated with transphobic assholes. Not exactly a winning combination.

Look, if you’re concerned about making a difference in the lives of men, pick the issue that matters most to you, and work on that. If you want to increase funding for prostate cancer research, work on that. If you want to raise money to help male victims of domestic violence, work on that. Actually do the hard work of activism. Don’t just have yourself a “day” and pretend that it means something.

EDIT:  Rewrote part of the first paragraph and added all the stuff after the Al Jazeera link to clarify the point of this post, because clearly some people have missed the point entirely.

Categories
announcements self-promotion

Check out the interview of me on Vitamin W

None of these people were involved in the interview, actually.
None of these people were involved in the interview, actually. Not even Aldo Ray.

The website Vitamin W did a little interview/profile of me; check it out here. When I was talking to the writer I got a bit more ranty than usual, so some of the quotes are a bit blunt.

One point of clarification on the references to my feminism at the start of the piece: what I was trying to convey was that while I was very much a feminist when I started Man Boobz, this was just a sort of taken-for-granted aspect of my life, not something I spent a great deal of time thinking about on a daily basis. Doing Man Boobz has made me much more of a feminist, both ideologically and in terms of how much of my time I spend thinking about and reading about and discussing feminist issues.

Also, the thing about me being driven by how much these guys annoy me was a reference to my motivation when I started the site, not to why I do the site now.

There are a few points where the author, well, oversimplifies things. To say that PUA sites “generally promote rape,” for example, isn’t quite right, though there are certainly PUA sites that encourage various forms of sexual harassment and have seriously problematic notions about consent. Our old nemesis Roosh, of course, has flat-out stated that by the standards of American law he raped a woman who was too intoxicated to consent.  (You can find his confession quoted here.)

Anyway, let me know what you think. I’m sure the MRAs will.

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announcements awesome links MRA

Check out Jaclyn Friedman’s piece on MRAs at the American Prospect

The Men’s Rights Movement inaction. Sorry, in action. Picture from Civilian Media. (Click on pic for link.)

Jaclyn Friedman, who faced off with A Voice for Men’s always charming Paul Elam for that 20/20 story that may eventually air sometime this century, has just published a great piece in the American Prospect on the Men’s Rights movement. Unlike some recent writers on the subject who’ve been taken in by some of the “movement’s” rhetoric and personalities  — *cough*R. Tod Kelly at the Daily Beast*cough* — she fucking nails them.  Check it out.

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announcements

20/20 Story POSTPONED, again

The waiting is the hardest part
The waiting is the hardest part

Just heard that the 20/20 story has been postponed. This may not be news to you all, but I’ve been away from the Internets for a bit. Anyway, I’ll let you know when it will run as soon as I know.