Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which inspired a flood of commemorative essays everywhere from Slate to the New York Times.
It also inspired what I think is one of the most hilariously dumb sentences I’ve ever read on The Spearhead. In a post talking about Friedan’s “youthful Bolshevik activism” – she spent a number of years as a labor journalist – Spearhead head boy W.F. Price offers this assessment of the book that jumpstarted feminism’s second wave:
Although I haven’t read the book, it apparently stresses the need for women to engage in work outside the home, which is a basic Communist tenet.
Over at The Spearhead, the boys are thinking about tomorrow – to be more specific, about the year 2020, the date at which an MRA calling himself The Fifth Horseman predicted in an eccentric online manifesto that a convergence of forces would lead to the popping of what he calls “the misandry bubble,” and that the ensuing gender apocalypse would put the uppity ladies of the world firmly in their place.
Happy Valentine’s Day Boycott Day! Every year on Valentine’s Day, MRAs around the world unite in a sacred ritual: the annual Valentine’s Day Blaming of the Ladies parade.
For, you see, Valentine’s Day is little more than a plot by the ladies to extract fancy chocolate and diamonds and other pricey romantic goods from the world’s men. That’s why, for the past I’m-not-going-to-look-up-the-number of years, the lady hating radio personality Marc Rudov has been trying to get other men to boycott the holiday to show the ladies of the world what’s what.
The twitter hashtag wars continue! Apparently still pissed off that feminists pooped on their #INeedMasculismBecause tag the other day, the dudes of the manosphere launched a little counterattack aimed at #TellAFeministThankYou, a hashtag originally started by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to give an opportunity to feminists to thank other feminists for, you know, being awesome and stuff.
Poster at a memorial event for Tom Ball, an MRA who advocated burning down courthouses and police stations.
EDIT 6/15/13: Tom Ball’s manifesto is no longer posted on A Voice for Men, though it isn’t clear if this is a website glitch or a change in policy on AVFM’s part; no announcement about taking it down has been made.
EDITED TO ADD: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it seems even more important to reinterate that influential Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men continues to host, in its “activism” section no less, a terrorist manifesto literally calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations. Until and unless that manifesto is removed, and A Voice for Men apologizes for hosting it, I will be linking to this post every time I mention A Voice for Men.
There has been another courthouse shooting. On Monday morning, the father of a man due in court for a child support hearing pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and shot his son’s ex wife and a friend of hers as they entered the lobby of the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington Delaware. After an exchange of gunfire with police that left two officers wounded, 68-year old Thomas Matusiewicz took his own life. The two women Matusiewcz shot were pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital.
Usually I venture into the manosphere to collect the latest misogyny, but sometimes it’s delivered right to my door. Here, some intriguing thoughts on women, from an MRA who showed up in the comments here yesterday, and who has been delighting the regulars not only with his opinions but with his colorful writing style.
The feminist movement is doomed not because of us MRAs, but because of women. These days most women spend their youth with mouths agape, babbling on their cell phones and strutting around in public with the fatty sacks on their chests manipulated in such a way to attract a man’s attention. That’s literally all they do. Then once they get older they start looking to mortgage their pink clam off for private use in exchange for food and shelter. After that, they could give a shit about the rest of the world. So for your own sanity, I’d recommend you all just drop this feminism project.
I’m of the opinion that women aren’t really capable of love. I mean sure, they’ll barter access to various body parts- temporary bodyguard for butt action, manservant for intercourse, and such- but that’s not really “love” in the way it has been traditionally defined, by men. I suppose the only pure expression of “love” is that found between two men.
Evolution hasn’t programmed women to reciprocate affection. From a reproductive standpoint, they exist to gobble as much hot sour cream as possible and then propagate the species with the best DNA they can wrangle. Men, on the other hand, are programmed for targeted monogamous affection, the better to protect the female who chooses him as her sperm donor. In modern society, this dynamic has changed, as women don’t just require elite semen, but also financial security, which more often than not can be better provided by a biologically inferior male, to whom she transfers access to her love tube sometime in her early thirties.
So the pink clam is now a love tube? So confusing.
Is Dragon Slayer for real? I admit I’m not altogether sure. There’s some suspicion that he’s a sockpuppet of the legendary Man Boobz troll Arks; the writing style is similar, and, like Arks, the new guy puts bromance before ho-mance. Whether or not this is Arks II, I suspect he’s not purely trolling — that is, while trying to be inflammatory, he believes at least some of what he posts. And indeed, aside from the stuff about man-man love and the bit about men being programmed for monogamy, this is all stuff we’ve heard before from the evo-psych-obsessed dudes of the manosphere.
Whatever this kid is saying is guaranteed to be smarter and less offensive than Jacob Ian Stalk’s horrific rant
Cloudiah found this amazingly awful rant — from a prolific manosphere commenter and Spearhead supporter by the name of Jacob Ian Stalk — in the comments section to a piece on feminism in The Tab Oxford, a student paper. She posted it in the comments here on Man Boobz, where it’s already generated a good deal of discussion (see comments here, here, here, and here for starters). But I thought it deserved a post of its own.
So without further ado, I present Jacob Ian Stalk’s “12-Step Program for Recovering Feminists.”
Better than spending an evening with Firepower, I suspect.
I’ve heard tell that some Pickup Artists aren’t actually misogynistic pieces of shit. Unfortunately, I keep running across guys like Firepower here, whose blog I discovered only yesterday, and purely by accident (though evidently I’ve quoted him off the Spearhead a couple of times before)
Here he is doing some wonderful PR work for his fellow PUAs, defending them (and himself) against accusations that they treat women like “disposable blow-up dolls.” Not so, says Firepower:
As regular readers of this blog know all too well, the manosphere has a rather distorted version of feminism. Indeed, MRAs, MGTOWers and other misogynists spend a lot of their timedoing battle against feminists of their own imagining, whose alleged beliefs only have a tangential relationship with anything you or I know as feminism. It’s not always clear if MRAs know they’re battling straw feminists or not, and I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to figure that out.
In the meantime, I’m trying to assemble a little guide to this straw feminism.
I’m wondering what you all think are its central tenets?
(Specific examples and links, to posts and/or discussion on this blog or elsewhere, would be great if you can provide them.)
Ironically, the gang over on the Men’s Rights subreddit had a whack at the “straw feminist” question the other day. They didn’t do too well, with the OP basing his “refutation” of accusations that MRAs spend much of their time attacking straw feminists … on a list that incorporated some not-actually-real feminist quotes. (I factchecked a similar list of EVIL FEMINIST QUOTES here.)
If you want to show someone what sort of website A Voice for Men is, have them look at the following screenshot, which I’m putting below the jump because it may well trigger some readers in its depiction of the effects of domestic violence on women:
