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A ringing endorsement of immigration from “mean0dean0” in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit:
Categories
>Scary Man-sters and Super Creeps
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| Pablo Picasso had a way with the ladies. |
“Well some people try to pick up girls, and get called assholes,” the song goes. “This never happened to Pablo Picasso. He could walk down your street, and girls could not resist his stare. … Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.” This is more or less true, even though, by almost every account, Picasso was pretty much a complete douchebag.
Life is unfair. Famous men can behave like utter boors and predators towards the opposite sex and get away with it, even win reputations as charming ladykillers. The rest of us, well, we make awkward passes and often get rejected; sometimes we even get called creeps. This makes some men bitter; a few even become Men’s Rights Activists.
In a recent article on AlterNet, feminist sex blogger Clarisse Thorn offers a defense, of sorts, of men unfairly labelled “creeps.” “Why Do We Demonize Men Who Are Honest About Their Sexual Needs?” the article’s title asks, and it’s not a bad question. Women are naturally, and quite justifiably, wary of the attention of strange men, who could easily turn out to be predators. “So it’s completely understandable that we’re all on high alert for predatory expressions of male sexuality,” she writes. What this means is that perfectly decent guys are sometimes seen as creeps until proven innocent.
Her solution? We need to “accept male desire” as natural and legitimate — not something “toxic,” or some kind of macho accomplishment:
It’s hard to disagree with that. I worry, though, that many of the guys in Thorn’s intended audience will only notice the bit about male sexuality being “hot, awesome, delicious and valuable,” and miss her careful caveats about consent — which she repeats three times in two sentences in an attempt to drive home the point. Unfortunately, as Amanda Marcotte puts it in a response to Thorn’s piece:
Looking through the comments Thorn’s article got on AlterNet, Marcotte finds ample evidence of this kind of creepiness — men with both a sense of entitlement and a massive amount of self-pity. That toxic attitude shows up as well in a comment from the perhaps aptly named “jackwripper” in a discussion of Thorn’s piece in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit:
It’s a bizarre and insidious sort of argument: Women need to start having sex with men they don’t want to have sex with, because otherwise some men will have to go through life alone — or, I guess, with “2s” who aren’t too stuck up to go out with them. Why exactly is it women’s job to “fix this?” Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
Jackwripper’s argument eerily echoes the logic of George Sodini, the bitter, dateless antifeminist asshole who shot 12 women in a health club last year because he felt young women had unfairly rejected him. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that Sodini had his defenders in the MRA/pickup artist crowd. As one fan of Sodini put it in a comment at the time on a PUA blog popular with MRAs:
So, women, the message is clear: Date some losers, or someone is going to get shot.
No one “deserves” to get laid. If you’re a creepy asshole who doesn’t understand that any woman is allowed to turn you down for sex, for whatever reason she wants, however stupid it might seem to you, then you don’t deserve shit.
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I had no idea that women’s suffrage was still so controversial. Apparently it is, at least to the guys at the Spearhead, and to the blog Full of Grace, Seasoned with Salt. Without further ado, the quote:
Woman Totally Ruining Everything
I should point out that the author of this fine piece of analysis is a woman. Some women are idiots. Into the Enemies List she goes.
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By now you have probably heard about the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers who threw himself off the George Washington bridge after his roommate broadcast live video of him having sex with another man on the Internet. It’s a terribly sad story in itself, and because, as L.M. Fenton points out on Salon’s Broadsheet blog, the suicide rate among LGBT youths is such an “an enormous, devastating problem.” In the past month four other gay teens have also killed themselves, two of them only 13 years old.
None of these other deaths caught the attention of Pierce Harlan, a prominent Men’s Rights blogger. But today on his False Rape Society blog, Harlan decided to write about Clementi — apparently because the case gave him the perfect excuse to rail against … feminists.
Why? Because the male roommate who broadcast the streaming video, and his female accomplice, weren’t, er, white. And one of them isn’t a man. “Gay tormentors who drove young man to suicide don’t fit the stereotype, do they?” the headline asks.
It’s a perplexing headline for a perplexing article. Neither of the accused are gay; I will charitably assume Harlan called them “Gay tormenters” because their actions caused harm to a gay man, not because Harlan has somehow convinced himself that they are themselves gay. Or has he? After briefly lamenting the tragedy, Harlan gets to his real agenda:
In the three remaining paragraphs Harlan manages to work in three more references to “white heterosexual males,” and one to “white male jocks,” sexual orientation unspecified. Huh? Neither of the accused are “white heterosexual males,” per se, but they’re both heterosexual, and Dharun Ravi, the one who allegedly set up the camera, put the video feed on the internet, and told other people to come and watch, is definitely male. But no matter. Harlan moves on to his main point:
Because feminists only discuss crimes when the perps are white men? Have you ever heard of OJ? And, actually, the case is being discussed widely by feminists online, on, among other places, explicitly feminist blogs like Feministing and Shakesville, on Salon’s Broadsheet blog and the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, and in Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes subreddit, which is where I first heard about it. It’s also being discussed on numerous feminist-friendly LGBT blogs. Given that the victim in this case was male, wouldn’t it make sense that the case get some attention from MRAs? I haven’t seen it discussed on any Men’s Rights blogs other than Harlan’s. Apparently MRAs don’t care much about gay men, unless their deaths can be used to score a cheap political point.
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| Women are totally into this shit. |
Sperm: It’s What Women Crave. At least according to a post today on What Men Are Saying About Women. So where does that leave lesbians? Up shit creek without a paddle, or, more precisely, up the vagina without a flagellum:
The MRA who posted it, who quite conveniently goes by the name of MRA, is basing his highly scientific conclusion on a weird study from a number of years back which found that women who had unprotected spermy sex with men were happier than women whose partners used condoms; apparently semen is a kind of magic happy juice. Never mind that according to his logic, men who wear condoms should also be considered “sad, pathetic imitators of the real thing” as well.
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| From foreignwomenonly.blogspot.com |
It’s a commonplace fantasy amongst a certain kind of American man: to abandon a world filled with “picky,” “demanding,” “angry” women, infected with feminism and a sense of entitlement, to find paradise in the arms of a nubile, pliable, and above all grateful woman from an exotic place like Thailand, the Philippines, or Eastern Europe.
Not surprisingly, many Men’s Rights websites and forums are filled with angry rants about American (or more broadly, Western) women. “Western men have now had plenty of evidence over recent years of what western wimmin have become as a result of feminist indoctrination and media propaganda,” writes Ledburian, a regular on the AntiMisandry.com message boards. “I reckon it would be a good idea for all western wimmin to be forced to carry tattoos on their foreheads warning all men that they can be a serious threat to male wealth and well being.”
Meanwhile, the “fun bachelor” behind foreignwomenonly.blogspot.com, a site whose URL conveniently encapsulates its message, assures his anxious readers that paradise is within reach of any Western man with a passport: “Date Foreign Women Only, and be treated like a king.”
The reality, of course, is far more sordid and depressing than the fantasy: The reason that some Eastern women are more agreeable to Western men has less to do with culture than it does with economics. Women in the west have more options, and so are less willing to put up with crap from Western men; women in countries where many if not most people are living in abject poverty may decide that putting up with disagreeable Western men is slightly less of a bad bargain than working a poverty-wage job and living in a shithole.
Recently, I watched a sad, powerful short documentary called Bangkok Girl (also known as Falang: Behind Bangkok’s Smile), a portrait of a bar girl in a city overrun with sex tourists from all over the developed world. The whole thing is worth watching — it’s available for instant watching on Netflix and on YouTube — but one scene stood out in particular for me: a street inverview with a drunken British expat who puts his arms around Pla, the girl at the center of the documentary, and declares to the camera that she’s his “girlfriend.” (She’s not.)
It’s immediately and abundantly clear that she wants nothing to do with the creepy lout — but he’s a regular at the bar and she’ll lose her job if she rebuffs him. He’s either completely oblivious to her obvious discomfort, or he simply doesn’t give a shit. This is what “paradise” really looks like, to anyone really paying attention. Watch the scene here.
Categories
>All This Chitter Chatter
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I can’t help it. This is the image that pops into my head when I read a lot of the comments from MRAs on this blog. So much anger, so little sense, so much … well, so much weird, and sometimes bizarrely specific, sexual imagery. Eww. Double eww.
Categories
>Spam Filters and Ban Accusations
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Just a note: If your comments don’t appear immediately, it’s not because I have banned them. I haven’t banned any comments. It’s just Blogger’s oversensitive spam filter at work. I take the comments out of the spam filter as soon as I see them in it. If that takes a while, it’s because I’m not at my computer 24/7.
EDIT 10/1/10: I have been banning some idiot spam posts. I’m not banning anyone else, so if you’re not writing endless posts in which the word “poopy” is used more than any other word, you’re safe from the banhammer.
EDIT 10/5/10: I’ve deleted one non-spam comment. It was vile and hateful. Anything else that bad will be deleted as well.
Categories
>Ain’t That a Shaming Tactic
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There’s something inherently ridiculous about being lambasted for using “shaming tactics” — by someone who has just called you a “mangina.”
A few posts back, as you may recall, I took on an odd little rant on The Spearhead which seemed to suggest that Tea Party nutbag Christine O’Donnell’s 14-year-old comments about the evils of masturbation offered proof of sorts that an evil “pussy cartel” was trying to keep American men from taking matters into their own hands, so to speak. The biggest threat to this diabolical female conspiracy, the author wrote, was “men realizing that their hand will do more for them than a woman will.”
The problem, of course, is that this is completely ridiculous. I myself have had sex on a number of occasions over the years — I mean, with other people — and I have to say that my hand, despite its obvious convenience and considerable dexterity, really cannot compete with, you know, an actual naked lady.
And so I suggested that any man who thought so little of women might have a hard time getting a date. This evidently sent the author of the piece, the man behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog, into such a tailspin of shame that he wrote not one but two blog posts about me. In the first, after calling me a mangina, he insisted that he did in fact have a girlfriend. In a comment, I told him I felt sorry for her. And I do. What kind of woman would want to date a man who prefers the company of Susie Palmer and her five friends? So he wrote yet another post, this one spelling out in detail the evil forms of “shaming language” I had used.
Men’s Rights Activists are obsessed with so-called “shaming language.” Or at least they have been since a document called The Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics started making its way around the manosphere; it’s been linked to or posted on virtually every MRA blog or forum at least once.
The Catalogue is basically a list of allegedly unfair debating tactics used by those who think that MRAs are full of shit:
The list spells out 16 different types of “shaming tactics,” from the “Charge of Irascibility” (“You’re bitter!”), to the “Charge of Fanaticism” and the “Charge of Misogyny.”
And it’s true. People do charge MRAs with all of these things. And a lot of the time, they’re guilty as charged. Some MRAs are bitter. Some MRAs are fanatics. Some MRAs are misogynists.
My most grievous crime? I had used the “Threat of Withheld Affection … The Pink Whip,” in which “the target is admonished that his viewpoints or behavior will cause women to reject him as a mate.” I’ll have to plead guilty on that one, since that’s exactly what I did.
In his second blog post, Pro-Male/Anti-Fem added two more counts to the charges against me: that I had accused him of “Preying On Weak/Damaged/Insecure Women” and “Non-Specific ‘Shameful Behavior.'” I’ll plead guilty on the first count, Your Honor, but innocent on the second: I was pretty specific about what I saw as shameful — his idiotic ideas about the “pussy cartel” and the whole hand-better-than-woman nonsense.
The funny thing about the Catalogue is how deadly seriously so many MRAs take it, and how angry they get whenever one of their opponents, tired of fighting a battle of wits against half-wits, pulls one of the “shaming tactics” out of her or his bag in an effort to bring the fruitless discussion to a close.
The irony, of course (and please forgive me if I shout), is that MRAs USE SHAMING TACTICS THEMSELVES ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Just look at the comments on the post of mine that started this whole kerfuffle, posted, presumably, by MRAs who followed the link from Pro-Male/Anti-Fem’s first post. The bravely anonymous first poster starts off the insult parade by saying “just because you’ve let them cut YOUR dick off doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ours.” (This is a classic example of what the Catalogue calls the “Charge of Invirility.”) After a few more insult-laden comments, we come to this, from another brave Mr. Anonymous:
But my favorite? This one:
a dickless wonder’s blog, right here. You’re such a girl, with the nonsensical shaming language.
Yep, the Charge of Invirility again. But even better, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to shout again: HE USES SHAMING LANGUAGE AGAINST ME IN THE VERY SAME SENTENCE IN WHICH HE COMPLAINS ABOUT SHAMING LANGUAGE.
Sadly, our anonymous friend is hardly the first MRA to do exactly this. Take a look at this fine fellow over at (irony alert!) Antimisandry.com:
Can anyone really be this un-self-aware?
In all my travels around the angry-manosphere — Charge of Irascibility FTW! — I have run across exactly one intelligent response to the Catalogue from an actual MRA: an essay on The Spearhead by the mysterious Zed, a sort of MRM elder statesman. Rather than simply lament the use of shaming language by the evil fems, Zed urges men to respond in kind, and not just with the standard anti-woman cliches.
The solution? MRA’s need to “start honing our rhetoric of ridicule so we can sting our opponents as deeply as they are trying to sting us.”
I second his emotion. “Dickless wonder?” “Mangina?” “Cunt?” You can do better than that. The “Little Ms. David” guy shows some promise, but he lacks finesse. Study the masters of insult: Oscar Wilde. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Andrea Dworkin.
And quit whining about “shaming language” like a bunch of damn babies.
That’s The Charge of Hypersensitivity, by the way.
>… suggest that false accusers should be raped. (Here’s the comment in context in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit.)
