Women: If you wear skirts here, some MRAs think you should be punished for it
So we, as a society, have “peeping tom” laws to protect people who might unknowingly expose themselves to the creepy peepers of, well, creepy peepers who get their thrills from seeing and sometimes photographing strangers revealing more than they meant to.
It would seem reasonable enough to consider surreptitiously taken “upskirt” photographs as violations of peeping tom laws. But not in Massachusetts: On Wednesday, the Supreme Judicial Court in that state ruled that upskirt photographs are legally ok, as the laws there are written to apply only to protect victims who are “partially nude,” not those who are merely wearing short skirts.
In the wake of the ruling, legislators and women’s rights advocates are saying that the laws — written before cell phone camera were ubiquitous — need an update.
Naturally, this has some of the dedicated Human Rights activists in the Men’s Rights subreddit in an uproar. How dare anyone challenge their sacred right to take pictures of women’s panties on public transportation without their consent!
“Wearing a skirt has consequences!” What a perfect slogan for a “movement” that is about little more than tearing down half of humanity in the name of, what, a man’s right to be a peeping tom? Put it on a t-shirt, Demonspawn, and show the world the kind of creep you are.
So Twitter is a bit depressing today. One of the trending hashtags at the moment is #LiesToldByFemales and, yes, it’s the misogynistic cesspool that you might expect, a vast assortment of not-very-original stereotypes about women — sorry, females — and their allegedly lying ways. The female-bashing tweeters — some of them female themselves — aren’t even terribly original in their complaints, and most of the tweets seem to be reworkings on a few very basic themes.
We have the good-old fashioned trope of the female-as-narcissist, forever obsessed with how she looks — and given to lying about how much work she puts into her appearance.
Sometimes I scour the internet for hours in search of material for this blog. Other times it just plops right in my lap. Today, it plopped, in the form of a new visitor to this blog by the name of J.S., a 52-year-old married farmer (he said) who brought with him some very old-fashioned ideas about love and romance and how men can best access the “secret gardens” of the pretty ladies of the world.
the ‘secret language’( sub and non-verbal communication), the dating game, or how very attractive women go about choosing which men they let into their secret garden and which ones they don’t.
The primary lesson he tried to impart: that the “secret garden” is a little bit like Fight Club: The first rule of Secret Garden is that dudes can never ask to enter Secret Garden.
The pickup artist scene is a haven for manipulative assholes — and manipulative asshole wannabes — so it was hardly a surprise to see a post on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog last week defending some of the internet’s most ubiquitous manipulative assholes: trolls.
Embracing rather than challenging a recent study that found internet trolling “correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,” RoK’s runsonmagic suggested that such “dark triad” traits can serve leaders well and that trolling, handled expertly, can be a form of “provocative art.”
“Trolling can actually contribute to our culture by revealing our societal triggers and emotional weaknesses,” he wrote.
Emotionally secure people are not harmed by others perspectives, genuine or trolling. … If you feel like you are being trolled or become angry at something you read online, see if there is a way you can learn from the experience and be grateful for it.
Well, Roosh’s fans have just undergone quite a learning experience, but they’re not feeling very grateful.
Put on your thinking caps today, because we are going to wade into the highly rarefied world of Red Pill Theory. Our Guest Lecturer today is a totally ALPHA DOG Red Pill Redditor by the name of GayLubeOil — don’t worry, fellas, he’s straight! — who has some important insights for us all on the nature of women.
Namely, that women are basically just overgrown children. Who give blow jobs.
Let’s let him explain, in a post that’s now Number One With A Sticky in the Red Pill Subreddit.
After reading all of that, you may have a few questions. Obviously, the most important question is: why Greek Yogurt? Well, in addition to being very popular with the ladies, it is apparently quite high in iron. Let’s let Professor LubeOil explain why that’s so crucial:
Well, with that critical issue taken care of in a totally not creepy or red-flaggy kind of way, let’s move on to some of the serious discussion Professsor LubeOil’s thesis inspired in the Red Pill Subreddit.
Ah, who am I kidding? They mainly just posted comments about how totally right he was and how women totally are a bunch of overgrown children. But saying women are children is totes not misogyny!
And, heck, even if a dude maybe is a teensy bit of a misogynist, what’s the big deal, so long as it convinces him to treat his women properly — that is, like you would treat special needs children.
Damn those feminazis and their “equality!” Why, it’s almost un-American!
And that is just the beginning of a wondrous little exchange between a self-described “nice guy” trying out some bad boy charm on a not-very receptive woman on OkCupid who nonetheless deals with his ridiculous assholery with aplomb.
Note to “nice guy.” You might want to reconsider some of your assumptions. And work on your typing.
I found this on the endlessly fascinating, if often deeply disturbing, CreepyPMs subreddit, one of Reddit’s few redeeming features. You can read the rest of the conversation here, and the CreepyPM post here.
Sasha’s eloquent words, immortalized in ugly MRA poster form by Cloudiah of Artistry for Feminism. And Kittens.
Meet Sasha. Sasha is an angry young man living in England (allegedly), with a super-HAWT girlfriend (allegedly), and a lot of opinions about feminism (not-so-allegedly). The other day, he decided to share some of these opinions with the world. Or at least with any of those feminists who happened to be reading the Men’s Rights subreddit at the time.
In a topic devoted to a conference on “lad culture” in British universities, Sasha lashed out at feminists for what he sees as their hypocritical attack on boorish, sexist “lads.” Hypocritical, you see, because these very same women allegedly have sex with posh men all the bloody time:
Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of designing posters that aren’t embarrassingly ugly and offputting?
Posters designed by MRAs are so routinely godawful it’s hard not to wonder if there is something inherent about them or their ideas that prevents them from seeing what a complete mess they’re making when they put together something like the poster above, which I recently found amongst a whole collection of similarly terrible posters at the website What Men Are Saying About Women.
In the case of Christian J, the WMASAW poster-designer, there is clearly something more than bad ideas at work here, but I do think the bad ideas of the Men’s Rights movement are a large part of the reason why MRAs can’t design posters to save their lives. Their posters are muddled messes because their ideology is a muddled mess.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are getting worked up about imaginary feminists again. Well, I suppose that’s pretty much all they ever do. But these two have managed to get even more worked up about even more imaginary feminists than they usually do:
Hey ladies! Dean Esmay reaches out to the young women of America
Not that long ago, an 18-year-old student named Carly, appalled by the rampant misogyny on display at A Voice for Men, sent a critical but thoughtful email to a number of the men associated with the site challenging them to rise above their hatred of women.
AVFM “Managing Editor” Dean Esmay decided to take her email as an opportunity to reach out to all the Carlys out there in the world in an attempt to win them over to AVFM’s peculiar brand of “human rights activism,” penning what he called an
open letter … not just to you, but to any young woman who has an open mind and is willing to be challenged on her prejudices.
Naturally, given that Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most verbose douchebags in history, it was long as hell — some 3000 words. But Esmay’s diplomatically worded attempt at outreach didn’t go quite as well as he might have hoped. Carly responded with a note saying that his open letter had merely
reinforced everything I believe. It seems we are at a stalemate, you will never agree with me, and I will never agree with you.
So where might poor Dean Esmay might have gone wrong in his attempt to win Carly’s heart and mind?
Let’s start here, with 5 Arguments Least Likely To Convince A Young Woman That A Voice for Men Isn’t a Woman-Hating Piece of Shit Hate Site, in the form of direct quotes from The Esmay himself. Since Esmay is so long-winded, I’ve highlighted some of my favorite bits in bold.
1)“[Y]ou’re 18, and so, not to put too fine a point on it, you are still a young skull full of mush.”
2) “[M]en have few to no voices speaking about issues that are specific to men, or defending men as a group, in this society. Until very recently in history men never have had such a voice. Because pretty much all civilizations for the last few thousand years have prioritized the needs and desires of women over those of men. For hundreds, even thousands, of years.
3)“If you believe men have silenced women for thousands of years … you believe something that just not true. … Furthermore, if you believe that, what you have to believe is that Asian men have been oppressing Asian women for thousands of years, black men have been oppressing black women for thousands of years, European men, Australasian men, and so on, have all been oppressing their women for thousands of years. And those weak women could do nothing about it. So what you believe here isn’t just wrong, it’s racist.”
4) “For most of history, being female was a privilege. It carried certain special rights that only applied to women, and special responsibilities that only applied to women, and through most of history, being male was a burden, a burden which carried certain rights that only applied to men, and those rights were there mostly so they could discharge their duties to women properly.”
5)“[Y]ou may occasionally see angry remarks or articles on this site. What I would hope you would do with that, when you do see it, is contemplate that there is a difference between righteous anger at real injustice, and what you seem to have misinterpreted as hate.”
The funniest thing about Esmay’s “open letter” is that this bizarre crackpottery, easily seen through by anyone with any knowledge of history or sociology or, hell, the real world, is his attempt to sound as reasonable as possible. He’s reined in the wild conspiratorial ranting he often indulges in when arguing with ideological foes; he’s avoided the misogynistic slurs (cunt, bitch, whore) favored by other AVFMers like Paul Elam and Diana Davison. And this is the best he can manage.
The Men’s “Human Rights” Movement isn’t ready for its close-up. And I suspect that it never will be.
EDITED TO ADD: A commenter has pointed out another quote I should have included as well. So here is BONUS EXTRA LEAST CONVINCING DEAN ESMAY ARGUMENT NUMBER SIX:
6) “The truth is, the most privileged class of people in the whole wide world are young women living in places like the US, UK, Canada, etc.–and if you want to be treated like an equal, you should not flinch or cry like a little girl if someone tells you that.“
How dare you accuse us of sexism, you spoiled little girl!