We Hunted The Mammoth
Today, in “Things That Are 100 Percent Not True,” we have this strange masturbatory fantasy-disguised-as-a-true story from the DatingAdviceForMen subreddit, either written by a sad middle-aged man or three kids in a trenchcoat. (I’m betting the latter.)
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By David Futrelle
With another month-long-week coming to a close, I thought I would take a few moments to share with you some of the feedback I get from, well, let’s just say these guys aren’t exactly fans.
So I’m on a couple of pickup artist email lists — I always mean to mine them for posts here but somehow never get around to even looking at the emails that pile up in my inbox.
Today, I looked. Because how could you not look at an email that opens like this:
I‘ve said it before, but the imaginary feminists that Men’s Rights Activists spend their lives fighting bear about as much resemblance to real feminists as the imaginary Elders of Zion do to actual Jewish people.
But even by typical MRA standards, the meme above (from A Voice for Men’s Facebook page) is a doozy. It’s hard to say which of these imaginary feminists demands is the most ridiculous. That idea that feminists demand “the entitlement to rape men and young boys” or “the right to take money from men under any pretense?” Or that they want “20 men in prison for each woman who commits a crime?”
As ludicrous as these are, I think the most insidious of the bunch is the complaint that feminists want women to have “the right to intoxication with no consequences.”
No, feminists aren’t campaigning for women to be able to drive drunk with no legal repercussions. The “consequences” being referred to here are, of course, rape and other forms of sexual assault. Yep, AVFM is angry that feminists don’t think that women should face the “consequence” of rape if they go out to a bar on Saturday night. AVFM is angry that feminists want the actual rapists to face the consequences of their actions.
The March of the Straw Feminists continues with more AVFM memes from their Facebook page, below.
I‘ve been so busy with all the shenanigans surrounding AVFM and their little conference that I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting the good old Men’s Rights subreddit. Don’t feel bad, Men’s Rights subreddit, for today I took a few moments out of my hard-core semi-vacationing to pay you a little visit!
While there, I noticed the regulars discussing a terrible quandary that faces all modern men: “As a man, would you help a child in distress?”
Here are some of the answers that got upvoted:
Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
So about a week ago, someone put a petition up on Whitehouse.gov asking the president to classify the Men’s Rights Movement as a terrorist group. The petition, posted in the immediate aftermath of Elliot Rodger ‘s killing spree, seems to be sincerely motivated. But it was a bad idea. The Men’s Rights movement is full of assholes, some of them potentially quite dangerous. Still, not every MRA is an Elliot Rodger in the making, and this kind of hyperbole doesn’t help those who are trying to expose the true terribleness of the Men’s Rights movement.
After their initial outrage wore off, MRAs decided to treat the petition as a golden opportunity for self-martyrdom. Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men urged fellow MRAs – sorry, MHumanRAs – to sign it themselves, perhaps not realizing that it might prove difficult to convince the world they’re being oppressed by a petition if they’re the ones most actively collecting signatures for it. (Esmay also took a moment to compare me to Bull Connor, which seems a tad odd, to say the least.)
Well, now the MRAs are trying a new tack. Perhaps taking a tip from old school rap feuds and all the “answer records” they generated, or possibly just the childish retort, “nuh-uh, YOU are,” one AVFM commenter named Janet Wilkinson struck back against the evil feminists with a Change.org petition announcing to “The Government” that it was “Time To Class Feminism As a Terrorist Group.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
The ManKind Initiative, a UK organization devoted to fighting domestic violence against men, recently put out a video that’s been getting a lot of attention in the media and online, racking up more than six million views on YouTube in a little over a week.
The brief video, titled #ViolenceIsViolence, purports to depict the radically different reactions of bystanders to staged incidents of domestic violence between a couple in a London plaza. When the man was the aggressor, shoving the woman and grabbing her face, bystanders intervened and threatened to call the police. When the woman was the aggressor, the video shows bystanders laughing, and no one does a thing.
The video has been praised by assorted Men’s Rights Activists, naturally enough, but it has also gotten uncritical attention in some prominent media outlets as well, from Marie Claire to the Huffington Post.
There’s just one problem: The video may be a fraud, using deceptive editing to distort incidents that may well have played out quite differently in real life.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the neverending struggle against imaginary feminists continues apace. Today, one brand-new Redditor, a self-described former feminist, won himself several dozen upvotes from the regulars by bringing them a literally unbelievable tale of his adventures with a coven of slap-happy feminists.
I stopped calling myself a feminist a few years ago when I went to a meeting and was told “men are inly allowed in this safe space if they participate in a slap circle.”
The idea was that it would be harder for me to intimidate with my six foot stature if all the women had a chance to slap me in the face. I left.
Another guy actually did it.
It’s all true. I WAS THAT GUY.
BUT WHO WAS PHONE?
Actually, no. If this dude’s story is true, I will literally eat my cats.
While most of the Men’s Rightsers commenting in the thread seem to have swallowed this story whole, “slap circles” aren’t actually a thing in feminism.
They are a thing, though, amongst bored and/or drunk young men (and sometimes women) around the world, as countless videos on YouTube can attest.
As as site called Hungry Teen explains, a “Slap Circle” is
A great way to bond with friends, release aggression and stimulate the face. The Slap Circle is a game made for the more hardcore, daring person and can be used as a test for finding the manliest of the group. Although adopting female fighting techniques, the slap circle appeals far more to men. Nothing is required for this game, other than a hand, a face and a set of balls.
All you do, is stand in a circle and slap the person to your right in the face, while waiting for a slap from the person on your left. If you’ve had enough, you step out of the circle and the last two standing fight it out for the winner.
I eagerly await stories in the Men’s Rights subreddit detailing Andrea Dworkin’s demand that all men and boys be forced to take the Cinnamon Challenge and all those insidious mandatory nut shot seminars being forced upon all college students unfortunate enough to be born with a pair of balls.
Thanks to Cloudiah for the heads up, and the good people of the AgainstMensRights subreddit for the Hungry Teen quote.
Ok, folks, brace yourself, because this story of anti-male oppression is tough to read. Not because it’s badly written and completely implausible — no, no, not that — but because it reveals the evil workings of the feminazi oppressors at their most vicious: when they are targeting high school juniors for no other reason than because they are walking down the hallway too close to FEMALES involved in the annual Eating of the Fetuses Women’s Mentor Day, during which the school’s FEMALES are given inspiring talks and free lunch and gift certificates for, I dunno, let’s just assume they’re for some of those “Boys are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them” t-shirts.
Anyway, so it’s Women’s Mentor Day, and young Zorfsic is going about his business:
I was walking to my 4th hour class that just so happen to stray near the Women’s Mentor Meeting. Thinking to myself “That time of the mont… I mean year, again!”. When all of a sudden a woman who does not work at the school grabs me by the arm and throws me onto the stairs as if she wanted me to sit. “What are you doing here! This is for females only! That mean girls, if you aren’t smart enough to catch on!”. My friend and my girlfriend came to me and as he planned it for year my buddy yells “Back off! This young man has nothing to do with you Feminist Nazi camp! He was just walk to his class!”. She grabbed him and took him to the office. My girlfriend was trying to help me up but another woman told her to stop and said “Let him do it. He doesn’t deserve your help.” and at that moment the schools security came to take me to the office. After explaining what happened me and my friend got suspended for trying to “stop a school planned event” that we tried to stay away from.
I cannot believe how completely true this story is. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more true than this. It’s true SO HARD I had to put the especially true parts in bold. Apparently a good number of Men’s Rights Redditors agreed, as the post got more than a dozen upvotes, and poor misandried Zorfsic got mostly supportive comments from the crowd.
Granted, one dude — who was quick to point out that he totally thought the story was true — did suggest that Zorfsic might possibly consider trying to improve his writing ability, given that his post was “written with some level of theatrics and could easily be posted on an anti-MRM website to discredit what MRA s work for.” But, you know, every true prophet has his naysayers.
Note: I found this story through a post in the AntiMensRights subreddit. Amazingly, some of the people there doubt its veracity. Or at least they’re pretending that they do.
Note 2: In case any MRAs come by and get mad, yes, I Googled it, there actually is such a thing as Women’s Mentor Day, which is an annual event at one Arizona High School, and, yes, girls do get free lunches and gift bags. It’s the rest of the story that seems a tad made-the-fuck-up.
