Categories
antifeminism feminism further reading links MRA

>Further Reading: General critiques of the Men’s Rights Movement

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Actual Father’s Rights Demonstrators

This is the first in what will be a series of “Further Reading” posts that will provide links and brief excerpts/summaries of posts, articles and books useful to critics of the Men’s Rights Movement. They will all be permanently listed in my sidebar. I will add more useful links as I run across them.

I’ve also started adding a series of pages that offer information and links rebutting more specific claims typically made by those in the Men’s Rights movement. These will also be permanently listed in my sidebar under the heading “Anti-MRM Info and Resources.”

Here are some useful general critiques of the Men’s Rights Movement:

Kathryn Joyce: “Men’s Rights” Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective”

These men’s rights activists, or MRAs, have long been written off by domestic-violence advocates as a bombastic and fringe group of angry white men, and for good reason. … But lately they’ve become far more polished and savvy about advancing their views.

A generally useful overview, with one caveat: Joyce considerably understates the amount of domestic violence that is perpetrated by women. See here for my thoughts on the subject.

Jezebel and Salon have pieces commenting on Joyce’s article. Amanda Marcotte offers some blunt opinions on the piece, as well as some reflections on her general experience dealing with MRAs.

Michael Flood: Backlash — Angry men’s movements (pdf)

In general, “men’s rights” is an anti-feminist and sometimes misogynist (woman-hating) backlash. Its analysis is wrong, its strategies are misdirected and sometimes harmful, and ultimately it does not serve men well. There are legitimate aspects to the issues it raises, but they will not be addressed when surrounded by its hostile and sexist agendas. … Feminism is a movement and set of ideas to which many men’s rights men show venomous and semi-hysterical hostility. … Men’s rights men in fact offer a bizarre caricature of feminism, a highly ignorant and selective misrepresentation.

A shorter, non-pdf version of the article.

Michael Flood: How the fathers’ rights movement undermines the protections available to victims of violence and protects the perpetrators of violence

While fathers’ rights groups often claim to speak on behalf of male victims of domestic violence, these efforts undermine the policies and services that would protect and gain justice for these same men.

Fathers’ rights advocates also: Make excuses for perpetrators; Act as direct advocates for perpetrators or alleged perpetrators of violence against women; Use abusive strategies themselves; Work to undermine and harass the services and institutions that work with the victims and survivors of violence.

More pieces by Flood and others on MRAs at XYonline.net.

Hugo Schwyzer: Masculinity and the failure of the Men’s Rights Movement

The problem with the men’s rights movement is that they confuse men’s unhappiness with oppression. They assume that if men were in control, they would be happy, because patriarchal oppressors ought to be happy. Therefore, if a man isn’t happy, he isn’t oppressing. Newsflash, folks: Just because you don’t know you’re privileged doesn’t mean you’re not. Just because there are aspects of your power and privilege that you find alienating and burdensome doesn’t mean that you are any less a beneficiary of an oppressive system!

Other useful pieces:

The use of violence by fathers’ rights activists: A compilation of news reports

Jezebel: Should Feminism Be “About Equality For Males?”

Jezebel: In Canada, Men’s Rights Groups Gain Power And A Blogger Supports “Femicide”

Alas, a blog:  Men’s Rights Activists, Anti-Feminists, And Other Misogynists Comment On George Sodini

Amanda Hess: Can’t Feminists and Anti-Misandrists Just Get Along?

Amanda Marcotte and Alas, a blog on MRAs’ legitimate complaints.

Blogging Molly: The misguided, embarrassing war against feminism rages on

Categories
evil women feminism pics

>Stunning photographic proof of the historical oppression of men

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I have discovered stunning new proof of the historical oppression of men. In these photos, from mid-century America, we can see clearly how men are humiliated, annoyed and otherwise held down by The Woman. Just look at the expression on this man’s face as the wily female emasculates him, assaults his ear, and makes him listen to her blab on and on about clothes.

These photos obviously predate the Second Wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, but that just shows how sneaky the feminists are. I blame women’s suffrage. You give them the vote, and the next thing you know, they’ll be wantonly adjusting their girdles, wearing wrinkly stockings, and poking their fingers in your ear.

For more of these deeply disturbing photos, see here.

Categories
Uncategorized

>Hit me with your best shot

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Like this guy, only fighting feminism.

One of the running complaints from Men’s Rights Activists who frequent this blog is that I pick on “nobodies” or “fringe elements” in the Men’s Rights movement, with some suggesting erroneously that all I do is pick on individual commenters on MRA blogs who might, for all we know, be evil feminists out to make MRAs looks bad (as if MRAs really need any help in that department).

It’s a silly criticism, given that most of my posts so far have dealt not with anonymous commenters, but with MRA bloggers and others with a history in the MRM, including some fairly prominent names. And the posts I make based on comments on MRA sites? They show what is considered acceptable discourse in the MRM, demonstrating the casual misogyny of all too many MRAs, which all too often goes unchallenged by other MRAs.

But let’s, for a second, pretend all the critiques are true. I ask you, all the MRAs who read this blog: if I’m unfairly picking on nobodies, who are the somebodies I should be focusing on? If I’m focusing on “fringe elements,” websites or forums that don’t really represent the MRM, where are the websites and forums I should be looking at?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s a challenge: I’m inviting you to post the names of blogs, websites, online manifestos, etc. that in your opinion represent the best that the MRM has to offer. Heck, even individual blog posts are fair game here. Books too. Post them in the comments below, with links if possible, and with a short statement explaining why you like that blog, forum, book, whatever.

Note: I feel compelled to add one further point, because I know what will happen if I don’t. I’m not asking this question because I don’t actually know of any MRA “somebodies.” I’m asking because, again, I want to know who you guys think are important. I have several dozen blogs and websites in my “enemies list”; I’ve examined all of them. I’m familiar with Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Sommers, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, Erin Pizzey, and so on and so on. I’ve read The Misandry Bubble and the “Don’t Marry” post. I’m just asking: If I’m focusing on sites and people that misrepresent the MRM, what sites/people do you think represent you best?

Categories
discussion of the day evil women feminism MGTOW misogyny

>Discussion of the day: The Feminist Chair-drag of Doom

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Here’s an enlightening little discussion going on currently on the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) forum. Under the misleadingly jaunty title “Funny Feminist antics at work” Junior MGTOW Member lovekraft describes a horrific new feminist abomination against men: chair dragging! CHAIR DRAGGING!!

Here I am at work, concentrating, when suddenly we hear the loud scraping noise of metal chair legs being dragged across the workfloor. For about a minute this goes on.

The dragger is an old Feminist who likely wouldn’t have thought how irritating this noise was and how easy it would be to just ask a man to carry it for her.

But being the feminist, this thought never crossed her mind and instead everyone had to be irritated.

spidey weighs in with this observation:

That’s what seperates men from women. We can show consideration for others and we like to do things efficiently

dontmarry, a keen student of human nature, offers some possible explanations for her behavior:

Over here where I work, office chairs can be easily carried by the weakest human being. The bigger ones have wheels beneath, so you push them over a carpeted floor.

Unless it was some kind of exceptionally heavy and unusual chair, all I can say is that she’s a cunt deliberately trying to annoy everyone else in the office. That time of the month? Her man didn’t call? Someone she desired didn’t add her on Facebook?

But it is garvan — his name perhaps a misspelled tribute to the legendary Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute? — who offers the most carefully reasoned explanation for the chair-drag:

She knew exactly how annoying it was, and did it for the attention.

When a woman’s looks no longer get attention, she’ll annoy the fuck out of everyone to get it.

Don’t believe me? … Look to the Wal-Mart whales that make a public display of their lack of child rearing skills by having their child cry as they yell and belittle their kid in front of every other customer to see. Look to every “strong” feminist woman who’s every action is to annoy the “patriarchy” by growing underarm hair, and yelling about how oppression is everywhere.

An old lonely woman with only cats as friends will scrape that chair across that floor because of her attention starved natured, and when everyone looks up with a grimace due to her actions, inside a little part of her will be validated. She feels like she almost exists in this world once more.

Let the lonely cunts suffer in their own prison. Had they went through the efforts of learning how to be a decent person when they were younger, they’d actually have friends and people who’d want to spend time with them. Instead they had to be a worthless annoying cunt.

The reality is this: No one wants to be friends with a bitter person who blames their problems on others ...

Hold that thought, dude. That last bit might be truer than you realize.

Somehow I’m thinking the women of the world aren’t missing much as a result of these particular men “going their own way.”

Categories
antifeminst women misogyny pics reactionary bullshit Uncategorized woman's suffrage

>Suffragette Set

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As depressing as the election results were, at least to those of us in the Daily Show demographic, just think how much worse they would have been if women didn’t have the right to vote! You know, like these dudes, and this gal, and this dude wish were still the case.

So celebrate that tiny little silver lining by taking a look at these horrifyingly amusing anti-suffrage cartoons, and just remember, the assholes drawing them lost.

Categories
debate drama hypocrisy lying liars paul elam Uncategorized violence against men/women

>Debate Drama: Dalrock is a Lying Liar

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Debating Men’s Rights Activists can be a lot like arguing with a kid who puts his hands over his ears and shouts “la la la I can’t hear you!”

During my abortive debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence, I had a hard time getting him to respond to my arguments; instead, he devoted much of his energy to arguing against experts I never cited and arguments I never made.(EDIT: See all my debate posts and some commentary here.)

Now the blogger “Dalrock” has decided to weigh in on the debate — despite the fact that by his own admission he didn’t actually read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, he completely misrepresents my argument:

His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right.

Either he didn’t read more than a paragraph or two of what I wrote, or he’s incapable of understanding logic, or, well, he’s a lying liar.

At the moment I’m leaning towards the first explanation; I’m being generous here.

But it’s hard to see the next bit as anything but, well, that lying liar thing.

Mentioning my post responding to Elam’s disgraceful “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post, which was not even part of the debate proper, Dalrock ignores Elam’s obnoxious provocation and brings up a similarly obnoxious, similarly disgraceful Jezebel post from several years back, in which several Jezebel staffers and a host of commenters there gleefully admitted to beating up boyfriends. (Elam and I both mentioned it in our posts; it was Elam’s excuse for writing his post in the first place.)

According to Dalrock, my response to the Jezebel post went roughly as follows:

The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count.  He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.  Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.  And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway.  Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.

Even aside from the dopey boxing metaphor, this is simply fiction. Let’s break it down.

He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. 

I didn’t say that.

Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.

I didn’t say that.

And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway.  Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.

I didn’t say that. He’s simply making shit up. Or, as some might put it, lying.

If you want to know what I did say, you can see it here.

When I pointed all this out in Dalrock’s comments, he responded with:

You mean you weren’t really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?

Yeah, the fact that you made a dumb boxing joke means it’s totally ok to lie about what I said.

To my regular readers: Sorry about all the drama here. To paraphrase Bob Dole, I’m just trying to get these guys to “stop lying about my record.”

Also: Elam himself poked his head up in the comments to Dalrock’s post to offer a response of sorts to my final debate post; needless to say, it’s pretty feeble. You can read it here, and if you skip down a few posts you should be able to read my response to it; I will also be appending it to my original post.

Categories
feminism

Esther Vilar, very catty

In 1971, writer Esther Vilar banged out what she later called a “pamphlet written in great anger against the women’s movement’s worldwide monopoly of opinion.” This pamphlet became a small book called The Manipulated Man. Largely forgotten today, the book has nonetheless been hailed as an underground classic by many in the Men’s Rights Movement.

It’s not hard to see why. It’s an entertaining rant, written with style and verve, an interesting reminder of the passions (pro and con) that the women’s movement inspired in women in its early-70s heyday. What really endears it to Men’s Rightsers, though, is that it’s full of catty, often quite vicious, attacks on women and enthusiastic paeans to the glories of men. None of these are supported in any way by actual evidence, of course, but that’s rarely a drawback to MRAs. (You can buy the book on Amazon, though I bet that if you look around a bit you might be able to find a pdf of it for free, wink wink.)

Vilar pulls no punches:

Women let men work for them, think for them and take on their responsibilities – in fact, they exploit them. Yet, since men are strong, intelligent and imaginative, while women are weak, unimaginative, and stupid, why isn’t it men who exploit women?

Zing!

Why do women not make use of their intellectual potential? For the simple reason that they do not need to. It is not essential for their survival. Theoretically it is possible for a beautiful woman to have less intelligence than a chimpanzee and still be considered an acceptable member of society.

Oh, snap!

By the age of twelve at the latest, most women have decided to become prostitutes. Or, to put it another way they have planned a future for themselves which consists of choosing a man and letting him do all the work.

Oh no she didn’t!

As zingy as these zingers are, they don’t actually describe any human females I know. (Well, ok, they describe a tiny handful of women I’ve known.) But as I read the book I realized that they described a non-human someone I know very well:

My cat.

Yep, by simply replacing the word “women” in the book with the words “cats,” and making a few other minor adjustments, I discovered that Vilar’s angry, anachronistic rant is actually a detailed and unflinchingly accurate description of life with my cat. Consider these altered passages:

It is true that cats get progressively more elegant, more well-groomed … but their demands on life will always be material, never intellectual.

The sort of independence men have means nothing to cats, because cats don’t feel dependent. They are not even embarrassed by the intellectual superiority of men because they have no ambition in that direction.

There is one great advantage which cats have over men: they have a choice – a choice between the life of an alley cat and the life of a dimwitted, parasitic luxury item. There are … few cats who would not select the latter

A cat will always be pleased if a man turns to look at her … . Her pleasure may be compared to that of a shareholder who finds that his stocks have risen. It will be a matter of complete indifference to a cat if he is attractive or looks intelligent. A shareholder is hardly likely to notice the color of his dividend checks.

A cat’s greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility – yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body … that darling miniature of an adult. It is a child that a cat imitates …  its helplessness, its need for protection. A cat must be cared for; it cannot look after itself. And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring?

A cat takes interest only in subjects that have an immediate personal usefulness to her.

True, true, true, true, true, and true.

It’s too bad Vilar chose to market her book as an attack on women. She could have had a long and happy career as a cat whisperer.

More on Vilar in a bit.

Categories
MRA

>The Devil and Henry Makow, PhD

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Once upon a time, Henry Makow invented the game Scruples. Once upon a more recent time, he was a prominent Men’s Rights Activist, the proprietor of a website called savethemales.ca, and the author of a book, A Long Way to Go for a Date, an account of how he, a self-described “fat and unattractive 47-year old” traveled to the Phillipines to meet and marry a woman 30 years younger than him. (They divorced shortly afterwards.)

Then Makow discovered conspiracy theory. These days, he spends much less time denouncing feminism than he does attacking the secret Satanic-Jewish-Illuminati cabal that (allegedly) rules the world. Take a look at his site for a virtual buffet of conspiracy theory kookiness.

Today being Halloween, Makow treats his readers to a lovely piece by Richard Evans entitled “Halloween is Christmas for Satanists,” and, yes, he’s completely serious about it. Some of the pearls of wisdom found within:

Halloween as we know it was created by interests which we now identify as ‘Illuminati’ and Satanic. … American children used to be protected by laws which no longer exist.  They were protected by families and normal society. Before television it wasn’t so easy for self avowed witches to get inside their heads. The Illuminati recognized Halloween as the opportunity to do that. …

Halloween [has] graduated from benign harvest celebration into a Sex and Death festival. Sex and Death = Thanateros. Don’t tell me that mix of costumes I saw at the grocery store last night dressed either as zombies, or SM sluts, (and I saw two cross dressing males) isn’t a merger of sex and death. 

Despite the fact that he now lives almost entirely in crazyland, Makow still gets some attention from MRAs: here, for example, is the first in a series of YouTube intervews he gave an MRA last year on the evils of feminism. (See here, here, and here for more MRAs citing Makow approvingly.)

Still, I rather doubt there are many MRAs out there who actually agree with Makow that, for example, feminism is part of an evil plan by the Rockefellers to depopulate the world, or that the Satanic cult that secretly rules the world is introducing “Freemasonry … as the New World Religion.”

So where are the MRA critiques of Makow — or of other MRAs who cite Makow? So far I’ve only run across a couple of MRA blog posts actually offering a critique of his tinfoil-hat politics. (Apparently, “conspiracy theorists are manginas” who use their “convoluted conspiracy theories to justify [their] manginaism.” Meanwhile, our good friend Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech is annoyed that Makow has suggested, with his typical loopy logic, that all porn is gay.)

Are there any more MRA critiques of Makow out there I’ve missed?

Categories
feminism idiocy misogyny quote of the day the spearhead Uncategorized

>QuoteOTD: Wisdom from the superior sex

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Wisdom from misterb, aka misterbastard, taken from a discussion on The Spearhead on “Academia and the Politics of Peer Review,” which quickly degenerated from an idiotic discussion about the evils of academia into an idiotic discussion about how women are stupid, selfish and evil. (Isn’t that how discussions on The Spearhead always go?)

Anyway, the wisdom:

I hate to say this. Feminism dumb down society.

Misterb make feminism mad! Feminism stomp misterb!

More wisdom:

In my opinion. Women should never be allowed to hold degrees in soft sciences. And there should be no degrees in regards to soft sciences.

Just because a woman holds a degree to some cheap laden science or bad science. It doesn’t make her smart, but in fact it has an opposite effect. it makes her downright stupid.

There’s different between knowledge and wisdom. And today’s lacks both of them. Only thing she’s good at is being worthless

In another comment he corrected what he evidently saw as his one and only mistake in this final paragraph: “today’s” should have been “today’s woman.” 

Yep, that oughtta fix it.

I’m sorry, but idiots going on about their intellectual superiority: always funny. Always.

Categories
drama feminism internal debate marriage strike

>The Men’s Rights Movement Vs. The People’s Front of Judea

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One of the strangest things about the Men’s Rights Movement is how little actual debate there is within it. Oh there’s plenty of discussion, to be sure, and plenty of arguments about what sort of strategy is most effective in dealing with MRA opponents and the rest of the world in general (see, for example, “Pansygate” and the ongoing sniping between Manhood101 ubermilitants and pretty much everyone else in the MRM). But actual substantive disagreements over major issues? Very few. With most key issues the MRM deals with, there’s a party line, and few within the MRM fold deviate very far from it.

This sort of ideological conformity is far less common outside the insular world of the MRM. Among leftist political groups, of course, internecine battles are so common that Monty Python satirized them in Life of Brian — you no doubt remember the bits about the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. And such battles are hardly confined to the left: just consider the battles between the teabaggers and the Republican party, not to mention the much more substantive battles you see between the various factions that make up the contemporary right, like those between Ayn Randian libertarians and bible-thumping social conservatives.

Among feminists, of course, there have been giant, bloody battles between anti-porn and sex-positive feminists, battles over “difference” feminism, over race and class, and on and on. (For a quick look at a dizzying array of different ideological tendencies within feminism, see here.) I’ve participated in these battles myself: see this piece of mine critiquing anti-porn feminism in general and Andrea Dworkin in particular.

These kinds of battles are inevitably frustrating, sometimes massively silly, and often distract activists from “real” political work. But they’re also necessary, a way to work out and work through issues that are inevitably more complicated than the political slogans with which most movements make their case to the world at large. Within feminism, for example, the “sex wars” have pushed anti-porn feminism from the center of the movement to the margins — a good thing for feminists, and for everyone else. Debates challenge dogmas; they’re symptoms of political health, not signs of weakness.

Indeed, if the Men’s Rights Movement is to have even a small chance of transforming itself from an insular, largely reactionary movement that’s actually harmful to men, into one that actually does men, and the world at large, some good, it’s going to have to have these kinds of debates. Right now the Men’s Rights Movement turns legitimate concern and legitimate anger at real problems faced by men into bitterness aimed at feminist bogey-women and women at large; it’s as destructive for the real cause of men’s rights, and for the world at large, as the Dworkinite branch of feminism was for feminists and for everyone else.

So it’s always interesting to me to see an actual substantive debate break out in the angry-manosophere. The latest: an honest-to-goodness debate over the notion of a “marriage strike” that has recently become an MRA shibboleth.  In a series of posts, the blogger who calls himself Dalrock asks

whether or not there really is, or will be, a marriage strike.  My first answer is that it depends on how we define the term.  If those using it are thinking of a classical strike where men would eschew marriage out of a sense of male solidarity in an effort to extract a better social bargain, this isn’t happening and won’t happen any time in the near future.

Looking over the stats used by MRAs to provide evidence that men in general, not just Men-Going-Their-Own-Way MRA types are, in effect, boycotting marriage, he argues

that the metric published by The National Marriage Project is being widely misinterpreted, and show[s] that the vast majority of current white men and women in the us in their mid 30s have married at some time. … We may yet see a marriage strike by white men in the US, but the data simply isn’t in yet.

As a result of his posts, Dalrock has gotten a lot of what he calls “push-back” from the MRM community, some of it quite personal, so much so that he felt he had to clarify that

For those of you who are refusing to marry, I’m not denying your existence or equating you with UFO conspiracy theorists.  As I’ve said before, we won’t see men banding together against their immediate interests to form a better social bargain longer term.  But this doesn’t mean individual men won’t decide that marriage isn’t a risk they want to take. 

This kind of “push-back” from your ideological allies is actually a sign that you’re moving forward. 

I’ll weigh in on the whole marriage debate in a future post or few, but in the meantime I’m just going to watch how this plays out.