The face that launched a thousand threatening tweets.
NOTE: Today is Day Two of the Man Boobz Pledge Drive. If you haven’t already, please consider clicking the little button below and sending some bucks my way.
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Mark Minter, a bitter, angry, divorced man in his late fifties, made a name for himself over the last year or so in the tiny world of the misogynist manosphere as that subculture’s most vociferous opponent of marriage.
In a series of little manifestos, deposited as comments on various manosphere blogs, Minter excoriated the institution he thought made a “slave” of men. “Get it through your head,” he wrote in one,
Men are from mars; women are FUCKING IDIOTS.
Never marry. … Duh. Game. Duh. Pump them, dump them, next them. Duh. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO WIN. Duh!!!!!
That was the old Mark Minter. Then, last week, word got out that Minty was getting married. To a single mother (oh no!) over the age of thirty (eek!) that he’s apparently never even met in person (well, actually that does sound a bit worrisome).
Apparently, to a lot of the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit — like the hundreds who upvoted a post of this picture — the notion that men should raise their sons to respect women as equals is nothing more than foul propaganda and MISANDRY of the highest order.
And seriously, those guys in the poster look like total White Knight Beta Manginas.
Some of the Men’s Rightsers were especially offended by the white ribbon at the bottom of the poster, which they saw as a vaguely sinister reminder of a World War I campaign to shame British men into enlisting in the army. Because suggesting to your sons that boys and girls should be treated equally is the same as being guilt-tripped into becoming cannon fodder:
Others used the poster as an opportunity to rail against … marriage. The top comment in the thread, as I write this post, is this one.
Caspian_Drifter responded to the eeeevil poster with a rhetorical question that unintentionally helped to underscore the whole point of the campaign in the first place:
Seriously, ladies, why do gals like to go on and on about “equality” so much when your ladybrains weren’t even smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place? I mean, really, you ungrateful gals, you have a man/men to thank for that.
If I remember correctly, it was T. Reginald Equality who came up with the idea, with some help from his brother Ned (who suggested that he name it after himself).
The fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit are getting worked up over imaginary feminists again!
Yesterday, in a discussion of paternity fraud, a brand-new Redditor who had never posted a comment before posted a completely unsourced screenshot of what quite a few of the regulars took to be some sort of official feminist statement on paternity fraud.
Evil women celebrating the defeat of the Pickup Artists
Well, it’s time for a little celebration, I guess. Because I’ve just received word — straight from the Manosphere itself — that feminism has defeated Pickup Artistry in the battle for control of America.
That, at least, is the message of a blog post from our old acquaintance Firepower. On his Eradica blog, he writes sadly that “[d]espite 15 years [of PUA] Feminism still rules America – NOT men. Certainly not puas.” The problem, to poor feminism-hating Firepower?
Today, a brief foray into racist conspiracy theory, courtesy of the Men’s Rights subreddit. This is from a discussion of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s internet porn ban, which the Men’s Rightsers seem to think was orchestrated by the evil feminist overlords.
Lovely! You may wish to peruse k66ish’s comment history for many other nuggets of wisdom that may involve use of the word “cunt.”
Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing this one out in the comments here.
Men’s Rights activists have discovered something that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the rest of his gang at the Westboro Baptist Church learned a long time ago: outrageously offensive signs can mean media coverage.
This time the MRAs toned down the offensiveness in favor of simple outrageousness, combined with a healthy dose of incomprehensibility. The most incomprehensible of the current lot is probably this one, which comes straight from the A Voice for Men poster page:
But my favorite is this one:
I was originally going to write a sort of rebuttal to this, pointing out that by most measures Canada is, generally speaking, a rather unfrightening place for men (and women), what with its high standard of living, decent health care, relatively low crime rate, and so on.
I mean, if I were to pick a frightening country to live in, as a man (or a woman), I would probably pick someplace like, you know, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan or South Sudan, someplace like that. Syria’s probably not a great place to visit at the moment either.
But then I was thinking: Canada’s main problem, in terms of its international reputation, is that people tend to think of it as boring, not frightening.
Maybe Canada should embrace the whole “most frightening place to be a man” thing, and take advantage of this silly quote from Erin Pizzy to promote itself as scary, edgy, intense, EXTREEEEEMMME!
Maybe with some posters like the one at the top of this post?
I don’t know. I’m not that great at photoshop. Perhaps some of you would like to have a go at it? I know we’ve got some talented MRA poster-parodists here.
Fidelbogen: Even creepier after being run through Photoshop.
We’re having Fidelbogen for lunch again. In my defense, the Twitter feed of this self-proclaimed philosopher of the non-feminist sector is hands down the most consistently entertaining thing in the manosphere today. In today’s post, Fidey opines on Women’s Suffrage (neither good nor bad), feminist “exit strategies,” and why it’s not necessary for MRAs to offer any evidence when they argue with feminists.
In a case of spectacularly bad timing, Fox News happened to choose the day before the Zimmerman verdict was handed down to publish an op-ed proclaiming “the White American Male” to be the most oppressed creature on Planet Earth. In a piece entitled “Men — The New Second Class Citizens,” professional antifeminist Suzanne Venker declared that
From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.
What is revealing about this quote, besides its complete disconnection from reality, is that Venker makes no other references to race in the rest of her piece, which runs through a number of tiresome and oh-so-familiar MRA talking points about the alleged oppression of men.
Venker complains about schools being biased towards girls, from grade schools that force students to sit still to colleges with their infernal Title IX. She whines about “sit coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot.”
I’m surprised she didn’t talk about the evils of “friend zoning.”
But when Venker refers to “men” in all of these complaints, she is evidently thinking only of white men — why else would she switch so seamlessly from talking about the alleged oppression of “men” to proclaiming “the White American Male” the ultimate victim?
There’s really no other word for this than, well, racist.
The day after Fox published Venker’s nonsense, we were of course reminded (as if any of us really needed to be reminded) of the very real oppression faced by “the Black American Male.”
Trayvon Martin didn’t die because he happened to see a show featuring a bumbling sitcom dad. He died because George Zimmerman saw a young black man in a hoodie walking home from the store and assumed, apparently because Martin was young and black and wearing a hoodie, that he was up to something sinister.
Trayvon Martin didn’t die because he was male; he died because he was a black male. His killer walked free not because his victim was male, but because his victim was a black male.
Suzanne Venker did us all a favor by revealing the unconscious racism underlying so many Men’s Rights complaints. The Men’s Rights movement is not only a movement that is overwhelmingly made up of white men; it’s a movement that’s almost exclusively about white men, and their largely imaginary oppressions, as well. We might as well call it the White Men’s Rights Movement.
Today I’m going to talk about Janet Bloomfield — AKA JudgyBitch — and her bizarre attack on the original Don’t Be That Guy anti-rape posters in Edmonton. But I’m going to take a bit of a detour first, so bear with me.
I recently picked up a copy of Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, a nonfiction account of a scientific feud that provided me with some diverting travel reading and put me in the mood to read more of Koestler’s nonfiction.
But doing some rudimentary Googling I made a rather horrifying discovery about Koestler, whom I’d admired since reading his bracing account of breaking with Communism in the classic The God That Failed anthology: according to a recent biographer, Koestler was a serial rapist and abuser of women.