Do MGTOWers get their notions of modern romance from old Smurf cartoons? I’m beginning to think they do. As you may remember, the world of the Smurfs was an all-male bastion until evil Gargamel created the creature he called Smurfette from a mixture of
Sugar and spice but nothing nice…A dram of crocodile tears…A peck of bird brain…The tip of an adder’s tongue…Half a pack of lies, white, of course…The slyness of a cat…The vanity of a peacock…The chatter of a magpie…The guile of a vixen and the disposition of a shrew…And of course the hardest stone for her heart…..
Initially an evil, deceitful brunette, Smurfette was transformed by Papa Smurf into a glamorous (and less obviously evil) blonde. At which point Smurfs young and old began falling in love with her, supplicating themselves before her Smurfy beauty. Even Papa Smurf himself had the Smurfs for her, as you can see in the video above – even though, as her co-creator, he was basically her father. Ick. Sometimes Smurfette played her smurfy suitors against one another, inspiring them to even greater depths of supplication.
MGTOWers, and a lot of MRAs, basically see this as the basic paradigm of romance: men jumping through hoops to even get noticed by stuck-up women who need do nothing but exist in order to garner male attention. In the Smurf world, this was because there was only one Smurfette in a village full of lonely Smurfs. In the real world, in which men and women balance out more evenly, well, MGTOWers and MRA recreate the weird Smurfy imbalance by simply declaring most women undateable – too old (if they’re over 25 or 30) or too fat (with BMIs over 25). Hey presto! Now men, much like Smurfs, can compete against one another for the same small number of women, making almost everyone miserable in the process, especially themselves.
In Smurf world, of course, Smurfette is chaste and pure; she may kiss the boys but that’s about it. This hardly comports with the MGTOW notion that women are all slutty sluts, bedding down with every thug-boy and alpha male who makes their ‘ginas tingle, to use the peculiarly offputting parlance of the misogynist set. Natually enough, a few creative internetters have reimagined Smurfette as a Smurfslut. Warning: this video may destroy your image of Smurfette forever. This one’s worse.
Oh, and for an interesting discussion of the misogyny and apparent anti-Semitism of Smurf creator Peyo, see here.
As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of Men’s Rights Activists aren’t really activists at all, if by “activists” you mean people who occasionally get off their asses and try to engage in political activity in the real world. As I put in in my piece for the Good Men Project on misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement,
Men’s rights activists aren’t much like any other activists I’ve ever run across. For one thing, for supposed activists they are almost completely inactive. Sure, they complain endlessly about things they see as terrible injustices against men. They just don’t do anything about them. While some of those who consider themselves fathers’ rights activists—a slightly different breed from your garden-variety MRAs—try to influence laws and legislatures, MRAs do little more than cultivate their resentments.
MRAs seem to be good at one thing, and one thing only: posting angry comments on websites, whether their own or on those of their many enemies – whether that’s on blogs like this one or in the comments section on various mainstream media sites they consider “misandrist.” (Actually: that’s not entirely fair – on a few occasions, MRAs have been moved to make threatening phone calls as well.) They don’t raise money for anything but their own web sites and their pet projects. They don’t organize demonstrations that involve more than a tiny handful of people. Like, for example, this one, involving one dude dressed like Batman who climbed up onto a highway sign:
Or this one, which involved a dude dressed up as Batman and a dude dressed up as Robin, climbing up on a bridge.
If your protests typically involve fewer people than, say, the line of people waiting to use the Redbox video rental kiosk outside your local supermarket on a Friday night, I think it’s safe to say that yours is not a mass movement, at least not yet.
Am I being unfair in demanding MRAs actually, literally,get off their asses before I consider them to be activists? Perhaps.
But, as it turns out, MRAs aren’t much good at sitting-on-your-ass activism either. Case in point: For quite some time – weeks? months? — MRA elder Paul Elam has been urging readers of his blog A Voice For Men to sign a petition to disbar a District Attorney he and other MRAs have decided is corrupt. But despite his repeated pleas to his readers to sign the thing, it has not yet garnered the required 1000 signatures, even though at least a few of his readers have talked about signing it more than once. [Edited to add: it has now gotten more than 1000 signaturesd.]
Today, this particular example of internet inactivism prompted Elam to lash out at his non-signing readers. Declaring himself “tired and frustrated” and “sick of this shit,” he once again begged his readers to sign. Then he went a step further, suggesting that he might limit commenting on his site to “activists that are contributing to this site in one way or another” as a way of encouraging activism and discouraging those who are “sucking up air and doing little else.”
I don’t think further exhortation on his part – or limiting the comments there to “real” activists only – is likely to make much difference. [Edited to add: Nagging a few more people to spend two minutes signing an online petition is one thing. Actually transforming them into real activists is another.] Elam is running up against the inherent paradox of Men’s Rights “activism” – the fact that most of those complaining the most about alleged injustices against men are not in fact interested in changing anything. Their “activism,” as it were, is little more than an excuse to wallow in their own bitterness, and to blame others for their own problems.
If MRAs really cared about domestic violence against men – as opposed to using the issue as a rhetorical weapon against feminists – they would be raising money and devoting their time to actually building shelters, like the (mostly) women who built the first shelters decades ago, and the (mostly) women who keep these shelters going today. If MRAs were really interested in stopping prison rape, instead of simply complaining about it, they’d be donating money to or working with the advocacy group Just Detention or other groups concerned about the treatment of prisoners. If they were really interested in helping those falsely accused of rape or other crimes, they’d be working with The Innocence Project or some other group fighting for the falsely accused or convicted. Or they would be starting real organizations of their own.
But that’s not, at heart, what the MRM is about. For all but a tiny handful of real activists, it’s not about changing the world. It’s about creating a space where men can kvetch and blame and cultivate their own sense of martyrdom. Actually trying to change the real world would involve , well, going out into the real world, a place where their assertions about the alleged oppression of men are seen as the nonsense they are, a place where their bitterness and hatred of women is seen as bitterness and hatred rather than the righteous anger they like to imagine that it is.
When MRAs do venture out of their self-created bubble they tend to either make fools of themselves – like Batman on the highway sign in the video above – or to reveal themselves to be the angry fanatics they are. Elam, for his part, sometimes even has trouble making his case in the relatively sympathetic environment of the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, and is quickly reduced to sputtering rage when anyone disagrees with him. In the end, sputtering rage seems to be what the MRM is really all about.
In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. And, at least if he’s straight, vaginas. Even if this young man happens to be a not-so-young man, and one who is defiantly Going His Own Way and thus theoretically immune to the vagina’s siren song. At least that’s the case with one regular over on the Happy Bachelors forum who recently set forth some intriguing theories on vaginas. Specifically, vaginas older than 25. What “Superbad” calls his “Golden Vagina Rule” is pretty simple: “Don’t trust any vagina over 25.” As he explained in a recent thread:
Social commentary written (or spoken) by a woman whose vagina is over 25 years old can be considered mostly bullshit. Null and void. And here is why. You cannot expect a woman, whose primary function is to make babies (aka attract men), to be anything but bitter or dishonest after her eggs and looks start to go. …
And why is this? According to Superbad,
when a woman’s sexuality declines (whored out, dried up vagina, menopause, postpartum depression, psychologically-induced frigidity, insanity, etc.) that she starts blaming men and talking a lot of hate and nonsense.
Just a few quick notes here: Female sexuality is not a finite resource; you cannot use it up by having sex on a regular basis. Nor do vaginas dry up like dead flowers when a woman passes the age of 25. Generally speaking, when a woman is interested in having sex with you, and you don’t just shove your dick in her without so much as a “how do you do,” lubrication is not a problem. If it is, for whatever reason, you can purchase bottles of lubricant at the local drug store. (This is also, FYI, how people are able to have butt sex.) Also, the average age of menopause is 51, not 25; though many believe menopause kills libido and “dries up” the vagina, this is probably a myth.
Oh, and also: mocking women for aging and/or suffering postpartum depression is not just a douchey thing to do, it’s practically psychopathic. Yes, physical beauty fades – eventually – for women and men alike. But having a complete and utter lack of empathy for your fellow human beings is an unattractive quality at any age. Speaking of unattractive beliefs, let’s continue:
The down side of people living longer, is that most women are going to be ugly for vast majority of their lives. That is obviously going to breed resentment and animosity. A woman’s time in the sun is brief. A man becomes more powerful with age. But a woman never gets any prettier. … Feminism has become a way for the uglier, older, less-fertile women to CONTROL young, virile girl’s orgasms and their sexuality.
At this point I feel I should remind Mr. Bad that the word “virile” actually means “manly,” in a general sense; more specifically, it means “capable of functioning as a male in copulation.” If you are interested in women with such capability — hey, let your kink flag fly! – there are several options available to you. (One of them may involve the purchase of equipment; they will all involve the lube I spoke of earlier.) If this isn’t what you want, you may wish to reword your post, and perhaps any dating profiles you may have put up on DoucheMatch.com or PlentyOfCompleteFuckingAssholes or wherever the fuck you may have put them up, so as to ward off any possible confusion on this point.
Superbad continues:
If you think women hate men; trust me, they’d just assume [sic] claw each others eyes out. And here is where a happy bachelor differs. Older men don’t feel the need to compete with younger men. Older men feel a bond with younger men. It is our duty to teach them and pass down any knowledge. We live in a world where the enemy is no longer a bear or tribal war. The enemy is packaged as pretty as a peacock: MARRIAGE. It is a way to sell the old vagina.
Yuck! Send that old hag to Carrousel!
Let’s try to work out the logic here. According to Superbad, marriage is a dastardly plot by evil feminists to bind men to vaginas over the age of 25, and presumably the women hosting them as well, who by definition are dried-up, whored-out ugly monsters (both the women and the vaginas, presumably).
Feminists are also trying to “CONTROL” the sexuality of young, fertile (yet also virile) women/vaginas, presumably by keeping them from having sex with … Superbad, who, as a Man Going His Own Way, doesn’t even want to be with women in the first place?
The ideal world, evidently, is one in which men of all ages get to have sex with under-25 vaginas (and their women), and are free to reject outright all women/vaginas older than that. In order to accommodate men of all ages, of course, these young women/vaginas will have to have sex with lots of different men. This will, of course, make them, by Superbad’s reckoning, “whores.”
Forget the old virgin-whore dichotomy; in Superbad’s sexual utopia all women/vaginas will pass through three stages: starting out virgins, they will, for a brief period in their late teens and early twenties, be whores; then, after the age of 25, they will be consigned to the whore-heap of history and become hags.
Superbad has it all figured out. And, as he explains in another comment, these poor gals will have no one but the feminists to blame:
[N]on-fertile women (read: ugly, old, bitchy) are always mad when they see young girls worshiping our cocks… old habits die hard. women are lazy. feminism requires women to get off their fat asses, work, and compete with smarter/stronger beings. most get a taste of “feminism”: working retail and getting fvcked/chucked monthly… and then end up online, looking for a “real man”. but, unfortunately, all the boys that the last generation of femi-turds raised are wimps. so, ladies, here is the game plan. get on your knees when young (so we can rent your mouth and vagina) and THEN, later, wise up, get angry, and MAN UP… and live alone with your cats. Feel free to get online as an old bat and “school” us men. LOL
Yes, Superbad has appended a “LOL” to the tail end of his comment, as if it were some sort of Internet-age equivalent to the more traditional Q.E.D. (Pro-tip: It’s not.) Still, his comments did make me LOL a little, or at least chuckle quietly to myself. Not with you, Superbad. At you.
NOTE: If you didn’t get that reference to “carrousel” earlier, perhaps this scene from Logan’s Run will jog your memory:
The general line amongst manosphere misogynists is that American women are a bunch of stuck-up princesses whose “ginas” – that is, vaginas – tingle only in the presence of “thugs” and “alpha males.” But one YouTube ranter calling himself LogicJunkie has a somewhat different theory, as he recently explained in a note to the moderator of the Happier Abroad forums. American women, it turns out, are basically all Nazis at heart, “preoccupied with … eugenic perfection in males.” Let’s follow LogicJunkie’s, er, logic:
American females regard as a “creep” any guy who isn’t at least six feet tall, with a pronounced chin, a jock physique, and, in general, Ken doll good Aryan looks. And money is important, too, but not nearly as important as the physiological eugenics. So, in good Germanic fashion, I think what they’re mainly concerned about, is somehow being contaminated by the mere presence of the inferior. …
America is, now more than ever, a Germano-eugenicist death camp, wrapped in the facade of “capitalism” and “corporatism” and “pop culture” and blah, blah, blah. But it’s all about covertly advancing the genetic omnipresence of the Teutonic physiological ideal.
I hate to poop on LogicJunkie’s logic here but, dude, if all the women you’re meeting turn out to be eugenics-obsessed, Aryan-fetishizing Nazis, it does not therefore follow that all American women are eugenics-obsessed, Aryan-fetishizing Nazis. It may just mean you should stop cruising for chicks at Klan meetings.
TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault; rape apologetics.
Journalist Lara Logan recently appeared on 60 Minutes, giving the harrowing details of the brutal sexual and physical assault she sustained at the hands of a mob while covering the protests for (60 Minutes) in Cairo this past February.
When news of the assault first hit the internet, you may recall, it seemed to open the floodgates of misogyny and racism. Looking at one Yahoo News story on the attack, I found hundreds of vile comments – some blaming Logan for her victimization, or doubting it ever happened; others using the assault as an excuse to spout hateful filth about Arabs and Muslims in general. In the “manosphere” itself, the reaction was predictably appalling, with many MRAs not only mocking and belittling the victim but using the case to push their own retrograde agenda. (See my post here for more details.)
Even within this context, the reaction of blogger Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide stood out for its sheer nastiness; I wrote about it here. In his first post on the subject, Bardamu mocked the victim, declared that “she had it coming,” then suggested that she probably hadn’t been raped at all. Based on no evidence whatsoever, he speculated that she may have just “made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. “
Bardamu has now used the occasion of Logan’s new CBS interview as an excuse to mock the victim again — calling her, among other things, an “idiot,” a “moron,” a “strumpet” and a “fake-breasted tart” — and to repeat his contention that she wasn’t “really” raped at all. Indeed, he says, the interview has “vindicated” his skepticism about the rape. Why? Because in her interview of 60 Minutes, Logan had spoken about being penetrated by the hands of her attackers. Bardamu evidently finds this highly risable, and somehow manages to convince himself that Logan was merely groped:
But seriously, “they raped [you] with their hands”?
Look, I’m no scholar, but even with feminists’ constant re-defining of rape, I know for a fact that rape has to involve a penis. Specifically, an penis entering an orifice without invitation. If you didn’t get a dick forced into your mouth, vagina or asshole, you didn’t get raped.
Logan and CBS’ deliberate vagueness about the “sexual assault” back in February was no doubt calculated to make people imagine the worst possible scenario that could happen. A line of hairy, creepy men pulling a train on her. Triple penetration at all times, the hairy sleazy monkey-men shooting jizz in every hole in her body, donkey punching her every time she tried to resist. In reality, she probably got spit on a few times, had her butt slapped, and had her silicone tits felt up. That’s not rape, you strumpet, that’s Spring Break in Cancun!
It’s hard to even know where to start with something this appalling. First of all, as a few dissenters pointed out in the comments on Bardamu’s post, it is still rape – “real” rape – when you are penetrated with fingers, bottles, or any other foreign object. When Abner Louima was brutally sodomized with the handle a bathroom plunger by New York city cops, that was rape, real rape. And what Logan says happened to her was real rape too.
As Logan tells the story of the assault, she and her crew were caught in the midst of a mob. Men grabbed her, groped her, and literally tore the clothes from her body. As she describes it:
I feel them tearing at my clothing. I think my shirt, my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore. They tore the metal clips of my bra. They tore those open. … [T]hey literally just tore my pants to shreds. And then I felt my underwear go.
Some men began beating her with sticks and others, with their hands, penetrated her. In this and the following passages I’ve bolded the statements dealing specifically with the sexual aspect of the assault. Logan again:
I didn’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things, because I couldn’t even feel that. Because I think of the sexual assault, was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over and over and over again. …
They were tearing my body in every direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp … not trying to pull out my hair, holding big wads of it, literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull. And I thought, … I am going to die here.
This assault lasted 25 minutes. Logan says:
[T]hat’s when I said, “Okay, it’s about staying alive now. I have to just surrender to the sexual assault. What more can they do now? They’re inside you everywhere.” So the only thing to fight for, left to fight for, was my life.
Ultimately, Logan was rescued and rushed to the hospital. Logan continues:
I stayed there for four days, which was hard. My muscles were so unbelievably sore, because they were literally stretched from the mob trying to tear my limbs off my body. My joints, every joint in my body was distended. And then they, the more intimate injuries, the injuries, the tearing inside. And the mark of their hands, their fingers all over my body, cuts and everything you could imagine. But no broken bones.
This horrific account bears very little resemblance, it hardly needs to be said, to Spring Break in Cancun.
Naturally, a number of the commenters on Bardamu’s site manage if anything to be even more vile than Bardamu himself.
McGlothin suggests that Logan probably enjoyed the experience:
It’s not impossible that she went all the way to orgasm when the testosterone filled raging men fingered and groped her. That would explain the vagueness of her description: she was way enjoying it so much that she could not remember precisely what happened except that they molested her manually.
This gynbot just wants attention, and is playing the “Arabs are animals” routine for brownie points. She probably got groped a little, in a way that she has never been groped before, and she may be reacting to the fact that she may have gotten a thrill out of it.
She was raped by their hands? LOL. A pretty blond like Logan probably spent her youth getting gang banged by alphas. In this case the men were beneath her (dirty sand niggers) but even they didn’t penetrate. She’s probably more upset about her bruised ego than her bruised body.
Bardamu wrote his post, I should note, before the interview aired, and before anything beyond a few quotes from it had been published. But it is telling that he has not bothered to go back and watch or read the full account. Not that it would matter; he made up his mind on the case a long time ago, and I doubt that anything could change it. Like many in the “manosphere,” Bardamu and his fans see only what they want to see, and use their imagination – and their prejudices — to fill in the rest.
A little over a week ago, a Florida man in the midst of a divorce hearing, apparently upset that he would have to pay child support, reportedly snapped and brutally attacked his wife, leaving her, as one account of the incident notes, “with two black eyes, broken facial bones and split lips.” (You can see the extent of her injuries here.) He’s now being held on felony battery charges. The woman had previously tried to get a restraining order against her husband, but apparently couldn’t convince the court he was dangerous enough to warrant it.
On The Spearhead, sadly but unsurprisingly, it’s the alleged attacker, Paul Gonzalez, who is getting the sympathy. W.F. Price, the site’s head honcho, weighed in on the subject yesterday. In his mind, apparently, the demand that Gonzalez actually provide some financial support for his two children was a provocation of sorts, which led him, as a Marine veteran, to “react … as warriors sometimes do in response to provocation — violently.”
At this point, we know very few details about the case. But that didn’t stop Price from opining confidently on what he imagines are injustices perpetrated against the poor alleged attacker:
What likely happened in that courtroom is that Gonzalez, representing himself, got the shaft. … We don’t know what the child support order was, but it was probably pretty hefty (as usual), and the visitation quite meager. Add to that the fact that his wife was already living with another man, despite having so recently given birth to Mr. Gonzalez’s daughter, and the situation must have seemed absolutely upside-down to the former marine. It was upside down. His wife is obviously a little tramp who has no problem swinging from one dick to another even while raising two babies, and there she was about to get rewarded with an upgrade in lifestyle while the chump father loses his kids and wallet. That’s why Mr. Gonzalez lost it.
Price does acknowledge, in a cursory way, that “beating your wife is always a bad idea” — though he seems less bothered by the beating than by the fact that in this case the divorcing wife “gets to go on camera making herself out to be a poor, innocent little victim. I highly doubt this woman is innocent.”
The commenters to Price’s article rallied around the alleged attacker. In a comment that got three times as many upvotes as downvotes from Spearhead readers, Greyghost celebrated Gonzalez as something of a hero:
I need to send that guy a prison christmas package. He was getting screwed and struck out. To bad he never heard of the spearhead. If about 10 to 15 percent of crapped on fathers did this kind of thing with some murders mixed in there the talk about fathers would sound a lot like the talk when the subject is islam.
Gonzalez may well have been overwhelmed by the realization that being innocent of all his wife’s false accusations made little difference to this fate – he still got treated as if he was worthless. In that case, might as well match the penalty with the appropriate deed…
If the courts won’t dispense justice, someone else will – it’s a law of nature.
That’s right: bashing a woman’s face in is a kind of “justice.” Naturally enough, this being The Spearhead, this comment garnered (at last count) 56 upvotes from readers, and only 2 downvotes.
Mananon, meanwhile, suggested that the alleged attack had:
something to do with a warrior’s instinct for dignified self-reliance. … Strip a man of his dignity and what else is there left?
There will be more and more of these incidents and it will be a long time before women are seen as responsible for them — which they are. …
It will be men who can’t take it any more who will ignite change.
Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) — yes, that’s how he writes his name — took it a step further, saying that:
the only bit I feel sorry about is that he did not arrange to have someone else kill her such that his chances of being caught were minimal. By doing this in the middle of the court he will be put in a cage for a long, long time. And he does not deserve to be there. HE is the VICTIM.
Every one of these quotes, with the exception of Nolan’s, garnered at least a dozen upvotes from Spearhead readers. (Nolan’s comment so far has gotten no upvotes or downvotes.)
What sort of comment on this case will get you downvoted by the Spearheaders? One like this:
Wow! Nothing justifies violence. I wonder who will care for the baby while the mother recovers. Or doesn’t that matter?
What a coward. Mad at the judge, goes after a woman.
Actually advocating murder, no sweat. Suggesting that violence is wrong and worrying about the welfare of the children, outrageous!
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Hey fellas! Are you tired of dealing with actual women? Would you rather spend a nice evening at home chatting amiably with a tiny virtual woman who lives inside your computer instead? If so, would it be OK if instead of resembling any woman you’ve ever met in real life this tiny virtual woman instead acted as though she’d been designed by some dude who’s never actually spoken with a real woman?
Also, I should add, if you chat her up cleverly enough, she’ll take off her virtual clothes and show you her virtual lady bits.
If this all sounds like heaven to you, you may want to check out a little “game” called Virtual Woman Millennium Edition. A friend of mine found it on Download.com theother day, and naturally thought of me. The game, such as it is, allows you to create the woman of your dreams. As the game publisher, an outfit calling itself CyberPunk Software, put it:
Virtual Woman users can build, talk, and compete against Virtual Women with full artificial intelligence. You choose their ethnic type, personality, location, clothing, etc
By “compete against,” the game makers mean, basically, that you chat with her until she either tells you to fuck off (you lose!) or she takes off her clothes (you win!). Sex, evidently, is something that women own, and the point of dating, for guys at least, is to sweet talk – or wheedle, or con — the ladies into giving it to them. Women “win,” by contrast, when they force guys to listen to their inane blather without giving the poor schmucks even a glimpse of their titties. (I’d like to think that when my dates take off their clothes we both win.)
I played the game the other night – or at least as much of it as I could stand. The first time, the game crashed before the conversation started. The second time, I played as a raging misogynist and offended my date by calling her a “whore” and a “cunt,” and she left in a huff. The third time, I chatted long enough to convince my date to remove her top. At which point real life asserted its demands, and I set the game aside, never to resume it.
Let’s just say that the conversations I had with each of these imaginary women were something less than sparkling. The woman who eventually took off her top blathered happily away about her hair for a few minutes, then segued into a conversation about how she hated going to new supermarkets because she wouldn’t know where to look to find the milk. She was shallow, silly, and self-absorbed, a virtual incarnation of every sexist stereotype of modern womanhood. In other words, she seemed to come straight from MGTOW central casting. My “conversation” with her only lasted a few minutes, but it seemed to take forever. If real women were like this, I think even I would consider Going My Own Way.
the girls are just plane stupid, they … keep repeating themselves over and over again, and allot of what they say makes no sense, I say something to them, and they asked me some silly question that makes no sense, once I said what to one about something stupid it said that made so sense, just to see what it would do, and it said ( why are you so worried about me being what?) and it did that with other things I said to it too, its stupid, don’t waist your time with this.
That pretty much hits the nale on the hed.
So many questions:
Were the makers of this game deliberately trying to make the women as annoying as possible, or do they think women are actually like this? Was the inanity of the conversation a bug – the result of shitty artificial intelligence programming – or a feature? Probably a bit of both.
More to the point: who could possibly enjoy a game like this? You’d have to have a pretty low opinion of women to be able to put up with the game’s casual misogyny. But if you hate women that much, why would you want to spend your evening talking to an imaginary woman about shopping and hair?
Perhaps that’s why the publisher seems to have abandoned the game; the latest update on its web site is from 2008.
As I’ve pointed out before, a small but significant number of “mansosphere” men are eagerly looking forward to the day when sex robots and/or “virtual” women will give men what they see as a real alternative to real women, thus putting supposedly spoiled “western” women in their place and destroying feminism to boot. One of the many fatal flaws in this scenario is that the only people who seem to be interested in making sexbots and VR women are guys who have no fucking clue what actual human women are like. But, hey, if it gets these guys out of the dating pool, that’s pretty much good news for everyone.
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In case anyone is still interested, certified genius Scott Adams has written a little apologia (not an apology) for his recently exposed sockpuppet self-puffery. Actually, it’s not so little. It’s about a bazillion words long, and I couldn’t bring myself to read the whole thing. But I rather liked Mary Elizabeth Williams’ take on Adams’ self-inflicted PR woes in Salon. Adams is turning into a nerdy cartoonist version of Charlie Sheen.
You know who’s a much better cartoonist? Kate Beaton of Hark, A Vagrant. This one of hers is my fave. Or maybe this one. This one’s good too. Also, this. Oh, I can’t decide.
Antifeminists regularly charge feminists like me with assuming men and women are the same. Which is a bit silly. I don’t know any feminist who assumes men and women are the same, whether the differences are due to biology (I can’t grow a baby in my belly) or culture (women are far more likely to while away their evenings reading or writing fanfic about Sam and Dean). I think the confusion amongst the antifeminists on this point stems from the fact that the specific things they think are different between men and women are often nothing more than sexist nonsense, and feminists can’t help but point this out.
No, if you want to see the ways men and women really are different, it helps to start with actual data rather than a bunch of retrograde sexist assumptions you pull out of your ass. The folks behind the OkCupid dating site have lots of data – users of the site fill out detailed profiles and answer countless questions about themselves in order to find others like them – and they know how to crunch it. Which means they can tell you with a great deal of precision what the men and women who use their site think about all sorts of things. Which is why OkCupid’s blog is so often a source of wonderment.
Take the latest post – thanks to Feministe for alerting me to it – which presents an assortment of creative charts — like the one above, depicting some of the actual differences between men and women on the site.
Who knew that men who mention “poetry” in their profiles were more likely to be into rough sex than dudes who talk about “boating?”
And what about guys who are into both poetry and boating? There must be some. I mean, many of my favorite poems involve Nantucket, a small island reachable only by boat.
Most of the rest of the charts in the latest post don’t specifically contrast men and women, but are interesting in all sorts of other ways. (You may have to change some of your assumptions about vegetarians.) If you want more on gender differences (not to mention intersting stuff on race), I’d suggest looking back through the OkCupid blog’s back catalogue. Here’s an interesting post on The Mathematics of Beauty. And then there’s this classic, which is probably a big part of why the fortysomething women I know who’ve used the site have gotten so, so many messages from horny guys half their age.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I love the OkCupid blog
And so, I think, will you
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Now it turns out that everybody’s favorite misogynist cartoonist has apparently been posting pro-Scott-Adams comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the super seekret alias PlannedChaos. Today, on Metafilter, PlannedChaos fessed up to the sockpuppetry, admitting that he was Adams; according to Gawker, Adams has also confessed directly to MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey.
In light of this revelation, I would encourage everyone to poke through PlannedChaos’ comment histories on both MetaFilter and Reddit. They are, of course, quite (unintentionally) hilarious.
turned a failing comic into a household word by transforming it from a generic comic into a workplace comic. He wrote a number of best selling books. He was one of the top paid public speakers for a decade. His website has earned him millions while no other comic property has done the same. One of his two restaurants was solidly successful. And now he’s one of the most popular writers in the Wall Street Journal.
Wait, what was that right before the Wall Street Journal bit? “One of his two restaurants?” Boy, now I want to find out the history of that second, non-successful restaurant. What went wrong? Did people not hunger for Ratbert’s Ratburgers? Did it have a rotating floor like Hank’s Look-Around Café?
If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That’s how the idiot mind is wired.
It’s fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can’t rule out the hypothesis that you’re too dumb to understand what he’s saying.
And he’s a certified genius. Just sayin’.
Yeah, but apparently not enough of a genius — “certified” or no — to engage in sockpuppetry without totally giving himself away. Just sayin’.
If you have even the slightest doubt that PlannedChaos is indeed Adams himself, this comment on Reddit from a year ago should lay those doubts to rest immediately:
The people here who are objecting to Adams’ fiction about evolution clearly have some reading comprehension problems. A careful reading of the actual book will give you a different opinion.
By the way, Adams has said the book was designed using hypnotic methods (he’s a trained hypnotist) and it is intended to generate strong opinions, and even some weird amnesia about the content itself. You can see the amnesia and cognitive dissonance in full display in these comments.
Hmm. Reading comprehension problems. The people who disagree with Adams don’t understand him. Where on earth have I heard that before?
Oh, and in his final comment on Metafilter, Adams suggests that his sockpuppetry was all a bit of fun. In other words, like Pee-Wee Herman falling of his bike, he meant to do it. I think I may have heard that somewhere before, too.
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