Longtime Friend of Man Boobz Ozy Frantz, cofounder of the No Seriously What About teh Menz blog, is writing a book with fellow NSWATMer Noah Brand about men and feminism titled, naturally, What About the Men. The first chapter, written by Ozy, is up on the Good Men Project web site, NSWATM’s (sort of) new home. It’s even got footnotes, and illustrations by Barry Deutsch!
Ozy explains the book’s central aim:
We live in a sexist society, one where gender programming starts at birth (though the advent of the sonogram has allowed parents to get a head start by painting the nursery pink or blue and stocking up in advance on gendered toys and clothes) and is so pervasive as to be inescapable. Feminism has done an excellent job analyzing and challenging the ways that these assigned and enforced gender roles damage and deform the lives of women. The same tools of analysis can be applied to the damage and deformation that men suffer. And that damage, sad to say, is severe.
Yes, that says “CLICK TO HIT HER!”
Meanwhile, over on The New Statesman, Helen Lewis looks at the continuing harassment of Anita Sarkeesian, the women who dared to ask people to donate money for a video series on sexism in video games and thereby unleashed a misogynistic shitstorm.
One of the most disturbing examples of harassment: an online game in which players are invited to “beat up Anita Sarkeesian.” Lewis censors some of the images, but not others, so let me just put a TRIGGER WARNING for depictions of violence against women, including a grotesquely photoshopped “beaten up” Sarkeesian. Anyone who thinks Sarkeesian and her supporters were making too big a deal of the harassment needs to go look at these images in Lewis’ article here. (The game itself, posted on Newgrounds.com, has now been removed.)
Again, this is all because Sarkeesian asked people to donate for a video project. If they felt like it was worthwhile. That’s all she did. And this is what she got in return: someone so angry that Sarkeesian was pointing out sexism in video games that he literally sat down and made a game inviting angry internetters to “beat this bitch up.” Irony doesn’t even begin to cover it.
[A]nyone who thinks that feminists who push back hard against online harassment are being oversensitive needs to understand that we’re all trying to keep ourselves from becoming Anita Sarkeesians. No matter how strong you are, and no matter how much support you have, this kind of concentrated campaign of harassment affects the targets of it. And the goal of these campaigns is to terrorize people into silence. It’s not disagreement. It’s not creative trolling. It’s deployment of a weapon.
But it’s just as important to point out that Sarkeesian wasn’t silenced; in addition to helping her raise much more money than she had originally asked for, those who attacked her simply reinforced (and helped to further publicize) the argument she was making — in the case of the “beat up Anita Sarkeesian” game, quite directly indeed. The cowards and assholes who try to shut down feminists online with this sort of harassment are not only losers — they’re losing.
Oh, joy! A Voice for Men has now published what is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever written by a human being. Here, from an article titled MGTOW re-understood, is what some dude named Russ Lindquist calls his “ode of MGTOW.”
When in the course of widespread misandrist tyranny, it becomes necessary for men to dissolve the social solder, and reverse the spiritual mutilation which has stuck and imperiled them, so inequitably, to the whines and whims of women. These men must, perhaps, reinvent the wheel of free-association.
Oh MRA dudes, don’t even try to write fancy. Clearly, you can’t handle fancy.
Let it be clear that a man has a right to go his on way. Therefore, let modern men acknowledge and accept – as tearfully as they might – that far too many women, for far too long, have far too well assumed the role of nothing but shined, shaven social-succubi who reflect all of mens vices yet none of mens virtue. Further, these succubi (desirous of everything and deserving of nothing) can offer men nothing but the role of a masochistic self-indentured-servant: he is to work a job he hates; he is to earn money that she spends; he is to live far less comfortably; he is to die far sooner.
A big shout-out to all the “shined, shaven social-succubi” reading this now!
Let each man reject this poisonously pink proposition; let each man end, in whatever way he sees fit, the misandrist fem-anesthetization that is, now, generations old; let each man choose, instead, to live a life of self-direction, self-control, self-reliance and personal responsibility–even if such self-respect means that he must wholly abandon such soul-striping social roles as, for example, womyn’s unpaid bodyguard, womyn’s unpaid moving-company, womyn’s unpaid therapist, womyn’s unpaid accountant, womyn’s financial-lust-object.
I’m sorry, I only made it about a third of the way through this paragraph. I’m sort of stuck on “misandrist fem-anesthetization.”
Men deserve better than these “womyn” are offering. Men have a right to go their own way.
Please, please, please just GO already. Don’t tantalize us like this, you Men Going Their Own Way! JUST GO.
“I’ve found another incredibly dopey statement from JohnTheOther!”
So our blabby friend JohnTheOther has an especially blabby piece up on A Voice for Men at the moment. Its ostensible subject: the pure eeeevil of unnamed anti-MRAs who misrepresent the World’s Greatest 21st Century Human Rights Movement – the Men’s Rights Movement, that is – through the eeevil practice of “quote mining.”
I didn’t read the whole thing. Mr. TheOther is not what you’d call an efficient writer. Here are a few quotes mined from the article more or less at random that I think will give you a good idea of his, um, style:
Biology, or indeed, evolutionary theory is not really the topic of this discussion, rather it is provided here as example of a rhetorical practice increasingly common among opponents of a small but growing human rights movement. …
The developing practice in opposition to human rights, of quote-mining goes beyond pathetic, into the realm of craven, futile depravity. …
However, it seems that no matter how many times it is explained that a thing formed from (bad) ideas – an ideology, and a group of people, identifiable by sex, are two distinct things, gender ideologues continue to conflate them. …
I don’t know if any of this makes any more sense in context, as I didn’t read the context. Let’s continue:
A year ago, I wrote an article focusing on the necessary public repudiation of violence, and the responsibility of open opposition to those who advocated or promoted a climate of acceptable violence, including those who openly advocate murder, such as a group of swedish feminists, and eugenics advocates on the squalid radical-hub. Statements from my original piece were quoted by at least one amoral zombie, and reframed to present my view as one which called for violence.
Of course, the author of those yellow pixels might not have realized that the original article, along with it’s unambiguous opposition to violence was posted on a site with substantially higher traffic than his own. The craven and stupid dishonesty of the quote-miner was apparent to all but a few, blinded by their own ideological goggles.
Oh, wait, I think those last two paragraphs were supposed to be about me. And I think they were supposed to refer to this post of mine, which took a look at a post of his that defended A Voice for Men’s “outing” of a group of Swedish feminists that the AVFM crew had decided, on the basis of a brief video promoting a theatrical production, were “murder advocates.” His post contained the following (unedited) paragraphs.
That’s right manboob, identifying a group of self-declared murder advocates to the public is more important than protecting those murder advocates from the consequences of advocating murder.
In the truth-is-fiction world of Futrelle’s mind, the men’s right advocates calling for public identification of a hate organization have been transmogrified into promoters of violence.
And what if they get killed David? What if rather than be arrested – as promoters of hate, and public advocates of murder, what if these depraved and murderous female supremacists come to harm at the hands of a citizen. If that happens, it will mean that a society’s system of law, designed to prevent hate organizations, and to allow redress of grievance through non violent due process is gone, wiped out by your ideology of violence and hate. That’s what you’re defending, David.
In my post, I quoted the final paragraph; here I have included the two preceding grafs to give it a bit more, what’s that word, context.
Of course, a couple of paragraphs by themselves are still kind of “out of context” I guess. Since I am pretty sure no one would like it if I simply pasted in the entire post from JtO here, I will instead direct you to his original post, here. You may make of it what you wish. I rather doubt that you will see it as a clearheaded treatise of nonviolence. Especially with that line: “And what if they get killed David?” (Which you can read in context above, or, again, in his original post. Let me link to it a sixth time here, just to make sure you know how to find his original words in context. Oops, that’s seven times now)
Interesting that a master debater of Mr. TheOther’s caliber somehow forgot to provide even one link to the controversy he was referring to, so people might be able to see for themselves what had happened, and judge his claims accordingly. I wonder why that might be?
I’ll skip the next bit in Mr. TheOther’s latest post, in which Mr.TheOther suggests that an opponent of his might have taken a quote of his out of context in a way that makes him look racist and homophobic. But since he offers no links to the actual discussion, there’s no way of judging whether this particular quote-mining claim is true. (Perhaps this discussion on the Men’s Rights subreddit could shed some light on it?)
In any case, if we put this particular discussion in a broader, er, context, there is certainly ample evidence of homophobia amongst the A Voice for Men crowd, as I have pointed out here and here. (Protip: If you want to convince people you are not homophobic, you should probably not feature a video mocking “lesbo-bos” in the sidebar of the site you help to run.)
Anyway, this next bit of his definitely has something or other to do with me:
Bottom feeding quote miners indulging in snarky feats of futrelian deceit likely do win rhetorical brownie points, at least when seen through their own ideological goggles. But they are cementing their own a public persona which will wear about as comfortably as klan robes do at a NAACP meeting. The altered landscape this movement is building is not someday, it is now, and it is coming faster all the time.
Uh, dude, my last name has two L’s in it. It should be “Futrellian deceit.” If you’re going to turn my name into a slur, at least spell it correctly.
For individuals in opposition to human rights of men and boys now, whether through lying, repetition of old, false dogmas, or the craven tactic of mis-represented and mis-attributed meaning, the comfort of a formerly one-sided monologue is over. The public squirming we see in attempts to render MRA voices silent or apologetic will escalate before it abates. But that’s okay.
Hey, Mr. TheOther. If you really want to prove my “futrelian” or even my “Futrellian” deceit, how about this: provide specific examples of me taking something you or some other MRA has written out of context in a way that distorts its meaning.
For your convenience, you can find all the Man Boobz posts that reference you here and here.
And for anyone who now has the song “Working In the Coal Mine” stuck in their head, here’s the Lee Dorsey original:
The feminist utopia. (Franz von Stuck, “The Battle over Woman,” 1905)
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit the resident dudes (and small but statistically significant population of dudettes) were getting all worked up at the notion of men standing up for women, and getting into fisticuffs over them, and all that sort of thing.
You know that’s the feminist ideal. You see it blatantly in radfemhub, but I’ve seen more moderate feminists swoon over the idea. Sometimes I wonder if they’d have us living in some wasteland fighting on another over the scraps to survive while occasionally taking one of us, the strongest, hostage for breeding. …
That’s why when some drunk asshole or something comes over to me and tries to start a fight while there are other people around I try to avoid it. I do so because I know somewhere there could be a feminist watching who would be rubbing her hands together over it and getting wet panties of seeing two men duking it out blow for blow while daydreaming about her utopia.
Racists – victim blamers extraordinaire — like to pretend that their racism isn’t their fault, that they’ve been driven to their racism by the bad behavior of some members of the group they’re bigoted against. Do a search for the phrase “I don’t hate blacks, but” and you will find thousands of examples of this “logic” at its crudest. “I don’t think blacks are ignorant just the NIGGERS,” one YouTube commenter writes, encapsulating the racist “logic” in a phrase.
Misogynists are fond of making similar “arguments” about women. As one commenter on the Scott Adams blog puts it:
I don’t hate women, but I have a pretty low opinion of women overall. I think they have poor priorities, they have poor analytical skills, they tend to be disorganized, they tend to be impulsive, and they think the world revolves around their feelings. I don’t think all women are like that, but it’s the impression I have of the gender in general, and I don’t like those traits.
Naturally, variations of this general argument (such as it is) abound in the “manosphere.” “Misogynists are not born they are made,” writes MRA/MGTOW elder and proud misogynist ZenPriest in an oft-cited rant titled “Hate Bounces.”
“Once, a long time ago when the world was young, I loved women with all my heart and soul,”ZenPriest (also known as Zed) writes. But then along came feminism, which ruined women so thoroughly that poor ZenPriest found himself more or less forced to become a woman-hater:
I began to see women as vicious creatures whose only agenda when it came to me, or any man, was to see how much they could get from the man – then when he had nothing left to give because they had taken it all, toss him out with yesterday’s garbage. In short – as nothing but users. …
I took to avoiding women, particularly groups of them, because I could never sit quietly and put up with the bashing and would always challenge it, which ended me up in a lot of fights and added greatly the count of times that I got called “misogynist.”
Gosh, why would anyone who “see[s] women as vicious creatures” get called a misogynist?
[A]fter 3 decades of listening to it, and hating it, and trying to keep the animosity which had been building in me over it … I caved in and began to really hate women. …
I will not allow most women in my house unless I have known her a long time and she is old enough to have escaped being infected with the plague of man hating or is escorted by someone I trust, nor will I enter theirs except on the same conditions. If I pass a woman stranded on the road, I will not stop to help her because it is as likely as not that she will be afraid of me. …
I changed from a man who loved women and thought they were just about the greatest thing in the world, to a man who can’t stand them, or anything about them.
And of course it is all the fault of women and their alleged incessant man-hatery:
Man bashing and man hating harms women, because it makes men hate them back – eventually. A puppy returns love for love, but if you beat it will eventually turn mean and will one day turn on you when you raise your fist or your stick (or the club of words) to hit it. Men are no different.
As this last bit makes clear, this “she made me do it” logic is the very same logic used by abusers to justify their abuse.
Now our old friend JohnTheOther has offered a similar blame-the-ladies explanation as to why he’s developed what he calls an “indifference to female opinion.” In his telling, the straw that broke the camel’s back was some unnamed feminist who had the temerity to use the word “neckbeard” in an internet posting.
The culture of easy, casual insult by women against average men, creeps, neckbeards, mother’s-basement-dweller and so on, has a effect which might not be recognized by women. Guys generally don’t need to be told they’re held in contempt as a group, our wider culture makes this sparklingly clear. However, individual instances of circumstantial ad-hom have the very real effect of making men not care about women’s opinions.
Yeah, that’s why these guys don’t give a shit about what women say.
Naturally, Mr. TheOther feels the need to tell us that 1) he doesn’t have a neckbeard and 2) he has a (presumably human) girlfriend.
Am I a neck-beard? No, I’m clean shaven, Im not an online gamer, I have a girlfriend, a career, I dress well et-cetera. But whenever I see some casual, throw away comment like creeper, neck-beard or other minor belittling insult used to describe average men, it cements my not giving a shit about the opinions of women.
After being criticized for his blatant misogyny by a commenter in the Men’s Rights subreddit (virtually the only MRA site online where misogyny is ever called out), Mr. TheOther altered that final bit to read “it cements my not giving a shit about the opinions offered.” He evidently thinks that changing the wording of this one sentence, and complaining about “quote-mining” will convince readers that the misogynistic argument set forth in detail in the rest of the post somehow isn’t misogyny. (And, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, that ploy seems to have worked.)
Naturally, like so many misogynists, Mr. TheOther insists he’s really not a woman-hater:
I don’t hate women, I don’t believe in any “back to the kitchen” nonsense, or any other female-targeted belittlement. What I’m talking about is my personal attitude towards women’s opinions, their utterances, their writing, their thoughts, their contribution to society. If you are a woman reading this, that means your thoughts, ideas, speech, writing and so on.
Well, that clears it up. You don’t hate women; you just don’t give a shit what women think or say or do. Obviously there’s no bigotry in that!
Utterly dismissing “female opinion” because some woman called you a neckbeard: Men’s Rights activism at its finest!
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, mgriff2k4 is angry that the picture to the right here showed up on his computer screen. Sorry, make that fucking angry. “Did this really just fucking pop up on my news feed?” he asks in the title of his post, adding in a comment: “sorry about the word “fucking” but im really pissed off about this.”
Why is he angry? Presumably, he assumes the statistic is untrue, and that it unfairly paints men as evil murderers.
Luckily, in this Age of the Internet it is trivially easy to find out whether statistics like this are true. It involves something called “Google.” mgriff2k4 did not bother to avail himself of this easy-to-use research tool.
But I did. In less than 5 minutes, I confirmed that this factoid is indeed true, at least according to the most recent figures on gender and homicide found on the Department of Justice’s web site, drawn from FBI data covering the years from 1976-2005. According to the FBI, 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by “intimates.” Roughly 20% are killed by husbands or ex-husbands; 10% by boyfriends or girlfriends. (In the overwhelming majority of cases the murderers are boyfriends, not girlfriends; men are ten times more likely to commit murder than women.)
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.” Men kill women more than twice as often as women kill men. Women suffer far more serious injuries from domestic violence than men do; so it is not altogether unexpected that they are also far more likely to be murdered by intimates.
If you want to see what this means on a human level, I suggest you take a look at the excellent if depressing web site Domestic Violence Crime Watch, which links to stories in which men are the perpetrators, and in which men are the victims. There are far more of those in the former category than in the latter.
I should note that (as of this writing) one commenter in the thread also found his way to the DOJ site, and noted that men were more likely to be killed by strangers or acquaintances. But he didn’t bother to tell mkgriff2k4 that the sign in the picture was in fact accurate.
So, as you probably already know, the three female Supreme Court Justices — the Justicesses? — all voted to uphold Obamacare; they made up the majority of the majority in this decision.
This gal isn’t too happy about it:
Hey lady, if you’re right, and ladies are too emotional and illogical to trust to make good decisions, why should we listen to anything you (a lady) have to say about this?
Pic found on Twitter in a tweet from MattyTalks. MattyTalks is hilarious. If you’re on Twitter, follow him.
Also, there are lots of people who are now, in the wake of the Supremes’ decision, threatening to move to Canada to escape the specter of socialized medicine. They’ll be in for a surprise, eh?
EDITED TO ADD: Longtime Man Boobz troll Anthony Zarat and a few friends have marched over to Feministe to argue that the Obamacare decision will “cost the lives of countless thousands of men and boys. This is our darkest hour.” It’s really pretty hilarious. Check it out.
I know someone here did a point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Zarat’s delusional “analysis” of the allegedly anti-male bias of the bill; it would be worth reposting over there if anyone remembers where that was.
This just in: I am a woman! Again. At least according to a blogger calling herself miliefisathand, who recently wrote a post about that “are nice guys sociopaths?” post I wrote a while ago.
Her evidence? When writing her response to me, she repeatedly found herself referring to me using female pronouns — so therefore I must actually be a woman.
Yes, that’s actually her argument:
While editing my article I lost count of the number of times I had to change “her” or “she” to “him” and “he”. I don’t normally make gender pronoun errors so I have a deep suspicion that the author is a woman impersonating a man. I’m spiritually sensitive to such things.
Hate to break it to you, but your guy-dar is way off. Protip: I post under my real name, and if you google that name, you will find ample evidence that I am, in fact, a real, living dude.
In the case of MRA dudes who misgender me as a woman, it’s clearly the result of their misogyny. In the case of miliefisathand, a self-described Smartassed Burmese Transwoman, I don’t quite understand what exactly is going on.
She also misses the point of my post, and the comments from regulars here that offered some pretty sensible criticisms of what I wrote, but at this point it’s not exactly a shock to see a Man Boobz critic arguing against things I didn’t say rather than things I did say.
Some threads on The Spearhead are virtual gold mines of crackpot misogyny. Today, from the same thread I drew upon for a post the other day, I present to you yet another long-winded antifeminist manifesto from a dude who doesn’t know shit about feminism. This time the dude in question is someone calling himself Darryl X.
Here’s his little screed:
There is only one kind of feminism. There is no first- or second-wave feminism. There is no ecofeminism or radical feminism or socialist feminism. There is no left and right. No conservative or liberal. (With which many feminists would hope to rationalize their egregious misconduct and criminal behavior – “Oh, but I’m not THAT kind of feminist.”) …
Feminism = the Borg
There is only feminism and it is evil and civilization depends upon its complete and utter elimination. Feminism is the product of false constructs and straw men and false flags and lies and fraud and is a political campaign of hate against men and children. Period.
And apparently Darryl loves the word “and.”
It has coopted our financial and legal and political and social institutions to affect the enslavement
[citation needed]
and murder
[citation needed]
and imprisonment and exile
[citation needed]
of men and the forcible separation of children from their fathers. It is responsible for the collapse of our economies worldwide and the fall of civilization.
[citation … oh, forget it. Every single thing he says needs a citation.
Feminists are comprised of mostly women but there are some men (manginas and white knights and other descriptions).
Manginas represent!
Feminists are psychopaths and malignant narcissists, without conscience and driven to do evil. They are solipsistic, manipulative, opportunistic, parasitic and predatory. They are compulsive pathological liars and deceptive and manipulative. They have no empathy, remorse, shame or guilt. They have no analytical skills and cannot plan ahead and are short-sighted. They are shallow of affect and are remorseless and are insincere and disingenuous. They are faithless and in the absence of any analytical skills, they do not have faith in the analytical skills of others, no matter how much evidence there is of its benefits. They are career and life-long con-artists.
Huh. Are you perhaps familiar with the psychological concept of “projection,” a defense mechanism whereby you project some of your own characteristics – particularly your most unsavory ones – onto someone else, or perhaps a group of people?
Just curious.
No matter how we define or relate to one another as men in the MRM, understanding the distinction between men in the MRM and feminists is more important. That is the enemy which must be destroyed. The other men in the MRM from which each of us are different are our brothers and the only important difference is that between men in the MRM and feminists. That’s the difference which defines us and on which civilization depends.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the future of civilization doesn’t actually depend on a bunch of bitter, hateful dickwads grousing on the internet about how much ladies suck.
So Mr. Paul Elam was apparently so offended by this video from Jay Smooth defending Anita Sarkeesian and her Tropes Vs Women video project against its many misogynistic detractors that he sat down and wrote out a carefully reasoned rebuttal of all of Mr. Smooth’s points.
Nah, I’m kidding. He wrote a snide couple of paragraphs calling Smooth a “leftist scumbucket,” and a “chickenshit feminist quisling,” and invited his readers to jump in with their own dopey insults. And they did. Some highlights (that is, lowlights):
I showed Paul’s comment to an MRA friend, and he said, “dude, you have to stop talking to me. I don’t exist! I’m no more real than Paul Elam’s ‘gay friend.'”
Andybob added this to the debate:
Yes, that’s right, he’s saying Smooth is being a “fag” in order to score with women. Clearly we have a brilliant mind at work here.
Several comments later, Iron John, a man apparently oblivious to irony, weighed in with this gem:
I’m pretty sure you don’t get to complain about “comment mining” for homophobia when 1) you’re the guy behind the site and 2) you’re one of the ones shouting “fag.”
Notice that Zorro’s original comment got an equal number of upvotes and downvotes. Then Elam jumped in to give the homophobia his seal of approval. After that, it was nothing but upvotes for those using or approving of the homophobic slur.
Calling a dude a “fag” on the internet: Men’s Rights Activism at its finest!
Longtime Friend of Man Boobz Ozy Frantz, cofounder of the No Seriously What About teh Menz blog, is writing a book with fellow NSWATMer Noah Brand about men and feminism titled, naturally, What About the Men. The first chapter, written by Ozy, is up on the Good Men Project web site, NSWATM’s (sort of) new home. It’s even got footnotes, and illustrations by Barry Deutsch!
