We Hunted The Mammoth
Even after all the time I’ve spent on this blog, I can still be astounded by the appalling hatefulness of the manosphere. The latest example? This post from the influential far-right manospherian who calls himself Vox Day, in which he argues, seriously, that encouraging rape is better for society than encouraging (white) women to work.
No, really.
Over at The Spearhead, the boys are thinking about tomorrow – to be more specific, about the year 2020, the date at which an MRA calling himself The Fifth Horseman predicted in an eccentric online manifesto that a convergence of forces would lead to the popping of what he calls “the misandry bubble,” and that the ensuing gender apocalypse would put the uppity ladies of the world firmly in their place.
The twitter hashtag wars continue! Apparently still pissed off that feminists pooped on their #INeedMasculismBecause tag the other day, the dudes of the manosphere launched a little counterattack aimed at #TellAFeministThankYou, a hashtag originally started by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to give an opportunity to feminists to thank other feminists for, you know, being awesome and stuff.
So when I was poking around on Roosh’s Return of Kings blog the other day I ran across a guest post from someone calling himself Samseau accusing feminists of using racism to exploit men – that is, of expertly manipulating men of different races to fight one another instead of standing firm against the evil feminists and their evil agenda.
The post, while purporting to be somehow “above” the issue of race, is a muddled mess full of “white men have it worst” nonsense like this:
Well, now you’ve gone and done it, you evil feminists: you’ve turned 0bvious_Atheist into a Nazi!
We first met the Men’s Rights subreddit regular the other day, when in a fit of ingenuity he blamed the Newtown school shootings on, er, Title IX. Well, his strange political journey has continued, and on his blog, on Boxing Day, the Canadian MRA officially announced his conversion to neo-Nazism. Literally. Let’s let him explain:
So the other day someone went to the Men’s Rights subreddit with some concerns about the movement’s inclusiveness – or, rather, its lack thereof. “I’d be a lot more inclined to follow this movement,” this person wrote,
if it was more inclusive of the issues of other men, such as those of colour, homosexuality and those who identify as males. But as it stands even when you quote prison statistics as a form of sexism, you flat out ignore the ethnic make up of those statistics and the last time I saw y’all chatting about queer rights? I can’t actually remember, it’s been even longer since something along those lines came on the front page.
Naturally, the fine folks of the subreddit responded with a big “nuh-uh!”
Manosphere misogynists love fantasizing about a coming apocalypse, invariably caused by the bad behavior of feminists and/or women in general, and invariably resulting in feminists and/or women in general lost and forlorn and realizing their mistakes, returning to men begging for help and asking for forgiveness. Like Doomsday Preppers waiting for the planet to suddenly shift on its axis due to the sudden reversal of the magnetic poles, most of the apocalyptic misogynists don’t seem to have the faintest idea of what they’re talking about.
We’ve heard a lot in recent days from assorted manosphere dudes about how the “slut vote” – and the endless hunger of our nation’s “sluts” for free contraception – helped to bring about a humiliating end to Romney’s presidential hopes. The sluts went for Obama, we heard, because he promised them (and women in general) what they supposedly want most: “free stuff without ever having to work.”
Minus the word “slut,” this was the basic argument we’ve heard over the past week from a lot of right-wingers as well, including such big names as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who’ve been loudly complaining that Obama won over women – and minorities – by promising to give them “stuff.”
Well, today, a new voice joined this chorus: Mitt Romney himself. In a conference call today with some of his big donors – no doubt a fairly dispirited bunch – Romney offered this explanation for his defeat:
The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people. … In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.
Never mind, as the Los Angeles Times points out, that Romney lost in some key states that have a minimal minority population, or that Romney’s promised tax cuts could be considered gigantic gifts to the rich.
While Romney talked less about gender than he did about race and enthnicity, he did single out one group that he said Obama had been especially generous to: young women. And you all know the easiest way to bribe a young female voter. As Romney put it:
Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women.
Apparently the government has been shipping out birth control pills along with those Obama Phones.
More thoughts on the election from the Manosphere. These are from the comments section of Chateau Heartiste, in response to that little manifesto from Mark Minter we talked about the other day, and which Minter also posted at the Chateau.
Here John Salt suggests that “force” works better than voting. And, oh yeah, he’s also as racist as Hitler.
Here Sidewinder offers some “optimism” for the future:
You’ll notice that no one there voices opposition to any of these sentiments.
Leave it to the Men’s Rightsers to come up with an even more ingeniously loopy explanation for Romney’s defeat than even Karl Rove has managed to come up with. According to the anonymous blogger behind the Christian Men’s Defense Network blog, on the far-right fringe of the already pretty fringey Men’s Rights movement, the thing that brought Romney down was “the slut vote.”