Some people probably shouldn’t try to make charts. I mean, take a look at this fucked up Venn diagram here:
Making a Venn diagram is harder than it looks.
There’s so much wrong with this diagram it’s hard to even know where to start. The letters are too small. “Narwhal” should be plural. The Sirens of Greek Mythology did lure sailors to their death with their songs, but they weren’t sea creatures. They were, rather, bird women – you know, with wings and everything. Also, while Miles Davis was indeed a thing (specifically a man) with a horn, to the best of my knowledge he never stood in a pond, at least not while playing said horn. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have made him a sea creature.
I suppose I should acknowledge that I’m the person who made this Venn Diagram. I would like to apologize for its many failings and for any damage it may have caused.
Even Walsh seemed to realize that it was a bit of a turd, and she offered it to her readers with a sort of apology:
I’m not an economist; this is really more of an exercise in common sense, as well as a work in progress.
No, you’re not. No it isn’t. And that’s no excuse. Essentially, Walsh just made up some bullshit, drew lines between different parts of the bullshit, and pretended it all made sense. There are so many things wrong with her flow chart that, as was the case with that Venn diagram above, I don’t know where to start. Graphically, it’s obviously a disaster.
From Hooking Up Smart. Click on this pic to see the full chart. You really need to.
And when you look at the, er, content of the diagram, it’s equally befuddling. Apparently the only possible results of a pregnancy that results from a “casual sexual relationship” being carried to term are “dropping out of school,” “promiscuity,” “substance abuse,” “violence,” and “crime,” followed closely by “prison,” then “EVENTUAL ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!” (And yes, she did use ten exclamation points.)
But my favorite bit of the diagram is the question “was sex consensual?” If it’s not, watch out! Someone might have to go to court! (For some reason she forgets to draw the requisite line to “prison,” perhaps because it is so rare for rapists to actually serve time?)
Here’s the thing, Ms. Walsh: sex that isn’t consensual is no longer an example of a “casual sexual relationship.” Sex that is not consensual is rape. Just as boxing that is not consensual is battery.
Walsh knows all this, of course. It’s just odd that in this diagram she seems to consider the supposedly dire consequences of “promiscuity” as far worse – for individuals and for society – as the consequences of rape.
She might want to make a few adjustments before she puts forth her next version of that chart.A better solution would be to simply delete it from her computer and pretend it never happened. That’s what I’m doing with my Venn diagram.
“Oh those MRA’s just need to get laid” “They are a bunch of lonely neckbeards” “They are just bitter” “They are probably forever alone’s” “They hate women” “Misogynists” ect.
Basically they are trying to make our concerns appear illegitimate because we must be whiny losers. Or because we “hate” women since we don’t adhere to the feminist dogma.
Ok, you say, so far he’s just being sort of irritating. But here is where the “adorable” part comes in. You see, whenever feminist meanies suggest that MRAs are woman-hating losers, xavan512 proposes, MRAs should respond with “hard evidence” to counter this perception. No, not penis pictures. Something even better: pictures of themselves with actual, smiling girlfriends.
Xavan512 started by posting the picture in the top right. Yep, that’s xavan512 and his actual girlfriend, standing in a field, dressed to the nines (or at least the high sixes or sevens). He’s looking dapper in his suit, accented with a bold red tie, and she of course looks lovely in a totally cute dress with an utterly adorable tiny pink purse. I’m not sure if they’re on their way to a prom, or a wedding, of if they just like posing in outdoor settings.
By the way – I didn’t scribble over the faces on the picture. Xavan512 did that himself, because, he insists, “being publicly MRA is socially taboo.”
After posting this photo, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that xavan512 thinks highly enough of at least one human female that he is willing to stand next to her long enough to get a picture taken, this newly self-appointed MR PR guru urged his fellow MRAs “to post a picture of yourself or mention if you have a girlfriend/wife.”
Alas, xavan512’s plan met a certain degree of resistance from fellow Reddit MRAs.
Why post a picture of ourselves with our girlfriends, we do not need the Validation of a Women to make our cause just, i’ll freely admit i’m single and looking for the right person because looking for non-crazy, non-privileged, non-annoyance is a genuine trouble these days, i don’t resent Women for that (Ok i slightly resent their position as sexual selectors for our species because it gives them so much power over men) but on the whole i’m an MRA because i want to defend my rights and the rights of all Men.
I’m sure you propose this with the best of intentions, but I’m with OThomson on this. Trying to engineer some kind of phoney boloney PR campaign with cherry picked images of smiling couples professionally photographed in semi-formal dress in pastoral settings seems like a pretty dramatic mischaracterization of many MRA’s experiences and subtly subverts the movement and concerns that drives many of us to be MRA’s in the first place.
Maybe it’s a separation or divorce situation, maybe we’ve been subject to a false rape or domestic violence accusation, maybe we’re sick of being stereotyped by the media as dim-witted psycho-violent timebombs just waiting to be tripped, or are just generally sick of being treated by second-class citizens by “empowered women” who can judge our sexuality, shame us, and even inflict physical violence on us almost entirely without consequence.
Someone woke up cranky today!
Here’s the thing: the adorableness of xavan512’s picture aside, if MRAs are tired of people calling them misogynists, there’s a much more direct way to challenge this perception – and that is to challenge the rampant misogyny in the MRM. You want examples? Check the archives here. I’m kind of a lazy bastard, and I don’t like doing any more research than I have to, yet over the relatively brief lifetime of this blog I’ve managed to post literally hundreds of pretty outrageous examples of misogyny from the mouths of (or, rather, the keyboards of) MRAs. And that’s only scratching the surface. I don’t read every MRA blog every day. And I only post a tiny, tiny fraction of the misogyny I run across. It is everywhere in the MRM.
If you’re an MRA, and you’re NOT a flaming misogynist, and you want your issues to be taken seriously, don’t post pictures of yourself with your smiling girlfriend. Challenge the misogyny that surrounds you. Get together with other MRAs, and drum the misogynists out of the movement. Build bridges with feminists working on men’s rights issues. Just say no to the douchebags.
Courtesy of SomeGreyBloke, here’s a cartoon depicting one man’s — well, more specifically, one grey bloke’s — moment of Man-lightenment! And ladies, if you find yourself irresistibly drawn to this grey man with the yellow teeth, you’ll be pleased to know that he’s single!
Chicago New Wave pioneers Phil 'n' the Blanks (pictured above) want you to FILL IN the blanks.
Last night, 540-or-so comments into the Atheist Elevator thread, Ion took a moment to school us all in the cold, hard realities of love in our time. Offering his own formerly flailing but now highly successful sexual career as evidence of this theories, he explained why it’s better to be called creepy than courteous. And apparently, acting like a five-year old will score you heaps of hot poon. Who knew?
As much as I learned from Ion’s autobiographic account, I feel as though there is much more wisdom to be gained from reading the stories of other commenters here. So, using Ion’s tale as a template, I would like to offer the first in what I hope will be a long and successful series of Man Boobz Mad Libs. Simply fill in the blanks in the text below to tell your own tale of heartbreak and triumph, and post your results in the comments below. We will all be the wiser for it.
You know what’s funny? You try to come off as [ ] and [ ], but in fact, I actually used to think like you when I was younger and [ ]. I bought into all the “men are [ ], men are natural [ ]” crap spouted by feminist [ ] and their neutered mangina [ ]. I was concerned about not coming off as [ ] or creepy. I was courteous and [ ] and [ ], I respected women, but I forgot to respect [ ]. And while the [ ] boys, playa gangstas, and abusive [ ]bags were [ ]ing around town with an “I take what I want” attitude and a new [ ] on their [ ] every week, I was hearing “Wow, you’re a great [ ], but I like you as a [ ]. Well, see you later, gotta go have [ ] with the [ ] boyfriend I’ve been complaining to [ ] about!”
So you’re right about the [ ]-puffing part, but not so much about the being [ ]. I’m less [ ] now than I ever was. I put myself [ ]. I don’t apologize for being a [ ]. It took me a while to [ ] up, but I did. And let me tell you, things are better than [ ]. I got my first [ ] after acting ‘inappropriate’ and going for a [ ] the night we first met. A day later, she was the one would wouldn’t [ ] me [ ]. So much for “[ ] give in because of [ ] pressures”, I guess. Second [ ], in college, I [ ] like a five-year old [ ]. Totally out of character, even I was ashamed of my [ ]. Afterwards, she was [ ] me to hang out. Sometime later, I met [ ] I really [ ]. Like an [ ], I decided to play it cool, be [ ], be [ ], take [ ] slowly. Guess what? Zero interest. Learned my lesson then and haven’t [ ] back. As for “friends who will [ ] me”… I don’t know what the [ ] are like where you live, but the [ ] I know just don’t fit your [ ] [ ]. Also, currently half my friends are [ ]. Weird, huh. But uh, keep telling yourself you’re so much better for being a neutered [ ]. I’ll be busy having [ ] in the [ ] world meanwhile.
You may not have realized that you wanted to hear dramatic readings of comments from NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum. But, trust me, you do. And so here you go, courtesy of the folks behind Troper (a series of dramatic readings of terrible shit from the TV Tropes message boards). There are two episodes of the NiceGuy series so far, with more (eventually) on the way.
Amanda Marcotte, feminist blogger and Friend of Man Boobz, has been taking a lot of shit from MRAs – and I mean a LOT of shit – for a comment she made here on the Thomas Ball suicide.
As you may already know, Ball burned himself to death outside a New Hampshire courthouse. In a lengthy manifesto he wrote shortly before killing himself, he portrayed his suicide as a protest against a corrupt family court system, and went on to argue that MRAs should quite literally assemble some Molotov cocktails and “start burning down police stations and courthouses.” (You can read the whole manifesto here.) Despite his calls for violence many MRAs have hailed him as an MRA martyr.
Marcotte, in her comment here, suggested that there might have been other, more personal reasons for his suicide – namely, the desire to hurt his ex-wife:
I’ll point out that setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell, and if your anger at losing control over her overwhelms all other desires. Which is common enough with abusers, who will ruin their own lives and their own shit and turn their children against them in an effort to hurt the woman they’ve fixated on.
Marcotte has now responded to this, er, “criticism” with an excellent post on Pandagon. As she points out, correctly,
suicide and threats of suicide are common tactics used by abusers to hurt their victims. Abusers dramatically self-destruct all the time in their desperation to control and hurt the objects of their obsession. There was just recently a big story about this, in fact: Jason Valdez of Utah, who had a long criminal record that included domestic violence, held a woman hostage in a hotel room for 16 hours and kept updates about the situation on Facebook. He eventually committed suicide.
Apparently, I’m supposed to pretend that suicide isn’t a disruptive, selfish act in many cases (especially when the suicide victim commits it in a public and destructive way), and that people who do it, while yes victims of their own mental health problems, are also thinking that they’re going to make everyone pay for not indulging them. In fact, not only is this true in Ball’s case, but he spelled it out in his suicide note. The “make the bastards suffer” theme of his note is the reason that wingnuts are supporting him.
But you don’t have to take her word for it. Read Ball’s entire manifesto, to the end, and ask yourself if this man is an appropriate “martyr” for any political movement.
“Kloo2yoo,” the moderator of Reddit’s Men’s Rights Subreddit, is worried that racists in his subreddit will give Men’s Rights a bad name. So he’s put out a call to some of the more artistic readers of the subreddit to come up with a nice new logo for it, to show how broad-minded and all-inclusive Reddit’s Men’s Rightsers really are. Well, not literally all-inclusive. As Kloo put it in his call for artiistic help:
New logo needed, to emphasize racial and lgbt inclusiveness, but not feminism.
Oh, but even that turned out to be a bit too inclusive for some of the commenters there. Specifically, they objected to the “L” portion of LBGT. And some of the Ts. As white_cloud put it:
I don’t think you need to appeal to the L in LGBT. It is well-known that lesbians are the most radical of all feminists. They will never feel welcome here and we should not go out of our way to make them feel welcome. Male to female trans pretty much the same thing. They’ve already renounced their male gender, they don’t care about male rights
ok i am in favour of inclusivness and im not sure if i am going to word this right so stick with me , the one thing i am curious about is how we bring ourself in line with the lesbian [angle] of it all simply due to the hostility that can arise from that community towards men
Kloo replied:
point taken. we can embrace lesbian mras, without embracing lesbian supremacists.
Apparently these are the only types of lesbians in the world.
In any case, despite these design constraints, I have come up with what I think is a very compelling logo that I think will convey just what Kloo would like to convey. What do you think, guys?
Today, as many of you no doubt know, is Gay Pride Day. Here in Chicago, that means the annual Pride Parade, a celebration of all things LGBTQetc — and a nice aerobic workout for parade participants. (Gyrating on a float for three hours dressed in a leather harness and thong will burn roughly 1000 calories. But beware of chafing!)
Rookh Kshatriya, proprieter of the Anglobitch blog (devoted to the notion that women in the Anglosphere are, well, bitches), has evidently decided to celebrate Pride Weekend by offering us all his theories on gay male sexuality. Which is to say, his theory that there is no such thing as gay male sexuality, and that all those gay men out marching today would much rather be spending their Sunday eating bagels and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with some comely (non-lesbian) lasses.
Yep, in Rookh’s World, gay men – or, as he puts it, “gay” men — are actually nothing more than exceptionally horny straight men who have been unfairly denied sex-on-demand with women of their choosing.
Let’s let him explain this:
Despite their rhetoric about lifestyles and the contemplation of flowers, gay men are clearly entranced by orgasm to an extent far surpassing that of heterosexual men.
Alas, in our Feminazified world, women sometimes refuse to have sex with men. Deprived a natural outlet for their sexy urges, horny dudes have to, well, improvise a bit. Why try to finagle your way into a vagina assiduously guarded by some dumb lady, when other dudes just as horny as you have holes of their own available for the asking?
As Rookh sees it, these uber-horny dudes really have no other choice.
[A]re most gay men just hyper-sexualized males – a self-selecting group whose priapic urges can only be satisfied by rejecting the relative sexual deprivation inescapably attendant on heterosexuality? The more one considers this possibility, the more plausible it seems. Even some badass with the looks of Apollo, the Game of Roissy and the confidence of a warlord would struggle to enter a nightclub and say: “I want sex NOW!” and expect to get it.
A terrible, terrible injustice. But there is a way out:
Yet homosexual men can enter any gay bath house in any Anglosphere city, say the very same words and expected to be sexually serviced by several men in a matter of minutes! In short, the sexual mismatch between the sexes makes the heterosexual lifestyle a poor option for any hyper-sexualized male – a non-option, in fact, if he wants to fully slake his sexual thirsts. By contrast, adopting homosexuality allows him to instantly indulge his every sexual whim in every manner conceivable.
Unless, of course, these whims involve sex with, you know, women. But lust is apparently stronger than mere sexual orientation. As Rookh sees it, homosexuality is the only rational choice for uber-horny men – even if they’d rather be boning women.
Since sex is so scarce and difficult to acquire in a heterosexual context, it simply makes no sense for an Anglo-American male with priapic urges to remain heterosexual – hence the self-selection of hyper-sexualized males towards homosexual lifestyles, not to mention the hyper-sexualized nature of homosexuality itself.
Is this all a prelude to a touching coming-out announcement by our man Rookh?
No such luck. It’s actually an excuse for, yes, more feminism-bashing. For it is the evil feminists who, in Rookh’s world, have been encouraging the “female sexual ostracism” of poor suffering straight men:
As we all know, women seek to control men by limiting sexual supply, be it representational (pornography) or actual (prostitution) – and that feminism is, essentially, an institution created for that purpose.
And so, in Rookh’s world,
homosexuality has advanced in lock-step with feminism. … [F]eminism – by assailing marital monogamy and allowing women to indulge their primordial attraction to dangerous thugs, moronic bullies and swaggering plutocrats – produced an unwanted ‘rump’ of educated, economically stable but sexually disenfranchised males. Given that gay males are disproportionately intelligent, solvent and educated, it is fairly obvious that members of this group have opted for homosexuality as a means of escaping the living death of involuntary celibacy, that the two phenomena are in fact closely related and that feminism is directly responsible for the advancement of homosexuality across the Anglosphere.
Feminism, by encouraging women to say “no” when they don’t actually want to have sex, may have created modern homosexuality, in Rookh’s view. But that doesn’t mean that feminists actually like gay dudes. No. Ick!
[T]he vast majority of Anglo females detest gay men as vehemently as they hate men in general. … the real link between pan-Anglosphere feminism and homosexuality [is that] the latter is a reaction to the former, which hates it with boundless counter-reactionary zeal.
Yeah, seems to me that the only one here who really “detest[s] gay men” is, well, Rookh, so much so that he’s decided to completely erase gay male sexuality – to put “gay” in scare quotes – in order to give himself another opportunity to run down feminists and women in general.
Now, human sexuality is a weird, messy, complicated, wonderful thing. It may well be that some bisexual men end up having sex with men more often than with women because they find it easier to find male sex partners for casual sex. But guys who are thoroughly gay – who would score a 6 on the famous Kinsey scale – don’t actually want to have sex with women. They really don’t. Drop a beautiful, eligible, horny (straight or mostly straight) woman in the midst of a bunch of Kinsey 6 guys, and this is what you get:
Quiz: Which of the following is an example of female infidelity? (Check all that apply.)
a) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; neither one sleeps with anyone else.
b) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; the man sleeps with someone else.
c) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; the woman sleeps with someone else.
d) A woman, who may or may not be in a monogamous relationship, works hard at a job she enjoys.
ANSWER: If you answered c, congratulations! You are correct. If you also answered d, you are probably PUA guru and freelance internet asshole “Roissy” or one of his douchey fans. In a recent post Roissy argues, quite sincerely, that women who take their careers seriously are committing a sort of psycho-social-sexual crime against men.
In the post, Roissy quotes a reader of his who’d suggested that “female career obsession [is] a form of infidelity to the family and marrage.” Roissy seconds this opinion and goes on to argue that:
Women who place their careers front and center are committing a kind of betrayal of their sex’s biological and psychological imperatives. It’s like a big middle finger to everything that distinguishes the feminine from the masculine, the yin from the yang.
Is it possible that these women are just, you know, really into their careers? That they’re good at what they do and enjoy doing it? That they want to make a difference in the world? That they might have a family to support? Or that, you know, they simply like making a lot of money?
Of course not. For Roissy, careers are little more than psychological crutches for women who are 1) trying to distract themselves from loneliness and/or sexual boredom:
It’s quite possible that the worst offenders — the 14 hour day lawyercunts and the graduate school hermits — embrace the male-oriented rat race and achievement spectacle because it offers a welcome distraction from either spinsterly loneliness or boring beta male partners who, while intellectually are rationalized as good matches, do not viscerally excite them.
Or, 2) imagining themselves as the heroines in some glamorous romance novel:
Maybe, too, these careerist chicks see their jobs as a way to enter the world of the alpha male, to have a taste of what it would be like to be part of his life. The office cubes and doormen and glassy skyscrapers have given legions of plain janes the daily stimulation to mentally masturbate fantasy romances with the alpha males who run their companies or the alpha salesmen who greet them at the front desk with a twinkle in their eyes.
Or, 3) trying to magically ward off the case of the uglies that apparently infects each and every woman when she hits the age of 40:
When a woman’s SMV [Sexual Market Value] inevitably craters in her 40s, her career might be all she has to lift her spirits, especially if she has no husband she loves, no kids, or even just one kid who spends most of his time playing CoD or robbing convenience stores.
Of course, in Roissy’s mind, these women aren’t quite women to begin with, even before they get hit with the 40th birthday ugly stick:
[T]here is something “off” about women who are excessively devoted to their careers and to obtaining an acronymic parade of pointless credentials. Careerist shrikes are some of the most unpleasant, unfeminine women to be around. They must have more androgen receptors than normal women to be so grating to the male sensibility. Sure, they can fuck like Viagra-laced male pornstars, but as soon as you relieve yourself in them you will feel a second powerful urge to escape their aggro nastiness.
Yeah, somehow I’m guessing that urge to flee is pretty strong in these women as well, as soon as they realize that they guy they’ve just had sex with is a pretentious narcissistic windbag who hates women.
Roissy continues, revealing far more about his own sexual insecurities than about any actual career women:
The women for whom career success is their comfort and their purpose are some sort of weird, monstrous amalgam of man and woman, halfway between both worlds, their sexual polarity askew. These types tend to attract either intense short term flings with alphas or plodding marriages with dweeby, effete kitchen bitches.
Roissy is vaguely aware that feminists – not to mention pretty much anyone who isn’t a complete douchebag misogynist – might have a few issues with his theories here.
The dumbfuck feminists will naturally ask, “Why doesn’t this same theory apply to men? Aren’t they escaping sad love lives by retreating to their careers?”
Don’t you know it’s different for guys? Unlike women, men are evolutionarily programmed to be resource providers for women. It is not a betrayal of a man’s innate purpose in life to ambitiously pursue achievement and accolades. In fact, just the opposite; it’s an affirmation of that ancient purpose.
