While Men’s Rights Activists are quick to label virtually any woman that they disagree with a feminist, they react with outrage when anyone who is not a self-admitted MRA is described as one.
The folks at A Voice for Men are still fuming about what they consider a “trust-shattering” media scandal: the fact that a bunch of news outlets wrote about a supposed Men’s Rights boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, when in fact the virulently antifeminist Youtube blabber calling for the boycott wasn’t technically a Men’s Rights activist at all.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude cluttering up my Twitter mentions with demands I take some sort of action against a tiny handful of commenters on this blog who have referred to the woman-hating mass killer Elliot Rodger as an MRA, even though, as far as we know, he wasn’t one.
To which I can only say: Sorry, guys. You’re Kleenex. And you’d better get used to it.
Uh oh! Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men is outraged by the latest terrible calumny besmirching the good name of the Men’s Rights movement. That Big Lie? That Men’s Rights Activists are boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road.
As Esmay puts it, in his characteristically overheated prose, the very notion that there is such a boycott
is a completely fabricated story by a handful of elitists abusing their power in the media–and betraying their fellow journalists while doing it.
Using his powerful internet detective skills, Esmay has managed to track down “the source of the lie,” which, as he sees it, “appears to have originated from a discredited hate-blogger named David Futrelle … .”
I’ve left off the rest of his sentence, as it is straight-up libel. Well, so is the bit about me being a “discredited hate-blogger,” and the part about the “lie” originating with me. I will give him credit for managing to spell my name correctly.
I’ll cop to the fact that my post on a would-be boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road set off an avalanche of articles on the subject. The Mary Sue, I believe, was the first to pick up the story, and was quickly followed by a few others. And then other writers piggybacked off of them. For better or worse, that’s how it works in online journalism these days.
But if Esmay is looking for the source of the incorrect notion that self-described Men’s Rights activists were behind the “boycott,” well, he’s not going to find it in my post, which contained no mention of Men’s Right Activists at all.
Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.
The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,
You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)
From AVFM’s Facebook page
And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.
Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.
But Esmay seems to think that there is some vast conspiracy afoot, writing that
we are really serious with this question: was anyone paid to put this fake story in the press? If so, who was paid and who did the paying?
Don’t be silly. No money changes hands. At least no human money. We do it under direct orders from our feline overlordsladies.
Apparently, to Dean Esmay at least, posting that Mad Max: Fury Road is being boycotted by MRAs, when most of the boycotters are in fact merely MRA-adjacent, is a greater crime against truth than denying the Holocaust.
So you may have heard vague rumors that there’s a new Mad Max film coming out. You also may have heard that it stars Charlize Theron as a shaven-headed postapocalyptical badass named Furiosa alongside Tom Hardy as Mr. Max.
Well, the manly men of the Manospshere are having none of it. On the always terrible Return of Kings, the most-trafficked blog in the Manosphere, Youtube bloviator Aaron Clarey issues a clarion call to his fellow right-thinking men, urging them to
On Reddit’s MGTOW subreddit, one brave fellow calling himself Isaiah4verse1 lays down some hard truths about the mysterious creatures we call “women” (and sometimes “females”). It turns out that they aren’t actually creatures at all. They’re buses. Buses with vaginas.
Isaiah starts off his sermon by noting that women/vagina buses have pretty much no value outside of said vaginas:
Vox Day: I ran his head through some Photoshop filters this time.
Yesterday, I wrote about Vox Day’s extravagantly evasive — yet highly revealing — interview with David Pakman. But the interview also featured a few striking moments of candor. One of these came when Day — a sometime gave developer as well as the biggest asshole in Sci Fi — offered his answer to the question: “What is Gamergate really about?”
Suggesting that the issue of “corruption in game journalism” was little more than “the spark that set the whole thing off,” Day declared that
what Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being criticized for it.
Which is an. er, interesting perspective, as there is in fact no “right” to be immune from criticism.
No, he fit in fine, ideologically speaking. In a post for Return of Kings, Naso praised the AmRen crowd for “doing a wonderful work,” and “saying the things that others are terrified to say.”
The problem? Well, Mr. Naso got a wee bit drunk and started harassing women at a local bar. As Naso sheepishly admits in his ROK post,
UPDATE 9/19/18: Yes, this is the same Mark Judge who allegedly helped Brett Kavanaugh allegedly try to rape a 15-year-old girl. For more on his creepy writings and even creepier videos, see my post here.
By David Futrelle
I hope you’re happy, white ladies. You have tempted fate with your evil white lady ways, and now you will be paying the price: Some dude named Mark Judge will no longer be dating you.
To be fair, he won’t be dating white men either — he’s straight — but he seems a bit more worked up about the women.
In a post earlier this week on Real Clear Religion, Judge, a right-wing Catholic who is himself white, explained Why I Won’t Date Secular White Women. It’s really quite simple: they’re soulless sluts who don’t know how to love:
Over on Vox Popoli, everyone’s favorite far-right fantasy author Vox Day (Theodore Beale) is pig-biting mad that pizza parlors in Indiana won’t be allowed to refuse service to gay people. And so he’s doing his best to rally the troops for a real-world Culture War Deathmatch, urging Christians — or at least the right kind of Christians — to “stop their cowardly cowering before the world” and start acting like “the apostles and martyrs and crusaders and inquisitors who preceded them.”
Oh, and like the dudes who’ve been having a giant public temper tantrum about video games and evil SJWs with dyed hair for the past 7 months:
I couldn’t find a mushroom cloud shaped like a vagina, so here’s a regular cloud that looks like a kitty.
ATTENTION, MEN OF THE WORLD! More specifically, straight men. Even more specifically, straight men who are gigantic woman-hating douchebags.
Your boy Roosh Valizadeh, pickup guru and rape legalization advocate, would like to warn you about the impending end of the world, at least in terms of you being able to get into women’s pants.
Inspired by the DEFCON system used by the US Military to rate the level of military threat — DEFCON 5 means “chill out, we’ve got this” and DEFCON 1 means “holy crap we’re all gonna die” — Roosh has come up with what he calls the DEFCOCK system — get it? get it? — in order to give dudes “objective and standardized information” on how dude-friendly different countries are.
In countries currently at DEFCOCK 5 — that is, which have what he thinks as the healthiest environment for men — (straight, cis) men benefit from
