Dalrock, a manosphere traditionalist with a great love of charts and statistics and other accoutrements of SCIENCE, has managed to figure out a way to stretch “don’t be so picky, ladies, or you’ll get old and ugly and no man will ever want you” out to 1500 words.
Let’s say you wake up one morning and you decide, for some reason, that you’d like to make it your goal for the day to get yourself banned from the Men’s Rights subreddit.
If you’re a feminist, it’s not hard. I managed to get myself banned there some time ago and all I had to do was … well, I’m not exactly sure what it was I did. Actually, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, Reddit-wise, other than argue with the regulars there. It’s possible I may have engaged in some light sarcasm. So maybe try that.
If, on the other hand, you hate women, all you have to do is … well, again, I’m not sure. Because earlier today, as one friend of Man Boobz pointed out on the Against Men’s Rights subreddit, a dislikeable fellow who calls himself sciencegod posted an elaborate, graphic torture fantasy to the Men’s Rights subreddit. I’m posting it below as a thumbnail; click to see it full size, but TRIGGER WARNING because it’s very graphic.
It got some downvotes, and the mods deleted the comment. But it didn’t occur to any of the mods, evidently, to actually ban this user from the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Because obviously anything he might ever have to say on the subject of Men’s Rights is much more worthwhile than anything I might ever have to say on the subject.
I asked the mods why they felt it necessary to ban me when they wouldn’t ban someone like sciencegod, and here’s the response I got back:
This is pretty much the answer I get whenever I ask them anything. I could ask them if they thought the sky was blue and they’d send me the same response and probably put something in the sidebar saying the sky was red.
Ironically, elsewhere in the Men’s Rights subreddit today I learned this:
The narcissistic racist pickup artist guru who goes by the ridiculous nickname Heartiste is a bit of an excitable fellow.
What’s got his man-panties in a bunch at the moment is an article on Slate noting that a small number of family therapists have begun to suggest that an affair might not mean the end of a marriage — and that in some cases a mature discussion of the raw feelings exposed by the discovery of an affair might possibly lead instead to a — gasp! — stronger marriage.
A Voice for Men’s so-called “Honey Badgers” — its little super-team of female MRAs, led by blabby Canadian videoblogger Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan — have a new theory about Anita Sarkeesian. And it’s a doozy.
Sarkeesian, you may recall, is a feminist cultural critic who’s faced pretty much nonstop harassment from misogynistic internet assholes since she launched a project to dissect sexist tropes in video games. AVFM has contributed, in its own special way, to this wave of harassment, with articles describing Sarkeesian as, among other things, a “moneygrubbing liar” and a “queen bee … girl interloper” in the world of video games; AVFM’s Dean Esmay also held her partially responsible, along with an assortment of other internet feminists, for the suicide of one Canadian Men’s Rights Activist.
The principals at AVFM have blamed her for — either inadvertently or deliberately — bringing this harassment on herself by going to 4chan and posting about her project. (As I noted in a previous post, there’s no actual evidence she ever did this.)
The Honey Badgers, for their part, are certain that getting harassed by 4chaners was part of her devious plan all along.
Like all professional damsels in distress, Anita Sarkeesian had to choose a good dragon. Just the right looming shadow to fall over her delicate and fragile sensibilities; just the right cackling stage-villain to inspire her cries of helpless horror.
She chose 4-chan. An internet forum known for it’s underbelly of foul-tempered and hair-triggered trolls.
Then, after accusing Sarkeesian of inviting countless rape and death threats upon herself (and only a portion of it from 4channers, I should add), the Badgers take their weird conspiracy theory one step further:
But we at Honey Badger Radio have noticed something… odd. The wave of so-called hate that Anita received from her carefully chosen dragon, wasn’t really all that bad.
Yeah. A year and a half (so far) of pretty much unending harassment and baseless criticism, complete with violent threats directed not only at her but at other women who have defended her — that’s nothing.
Compared to 4-chan’s usual scorched earth strategy–raizing [sic] everything to the ground and pissing on the ashes, Anita got a little singed, like she sat too close to a campfire.
So we have to ask… Did 4-chan white knight Anita? I mean, come on. Was that the best 4 chan could do?
Yes, that’s right. The Honey Badgers are accusing those who sent rape and death threats to Anita Sarkeesian … of “white knighting” her.
One of the issues that many Men’s Rights activists profess to be Very Concerned About is prison rape. This alleged concern translates into essentially zero actual activism beyond the occasional indignant reaction to someone making a terrible rape joke about men in prison. But then they’ll turn around and make similar rape jokes themselves.
That’s right: MRAs don’t only joke about rapes in which women are the victims. Like many Americans, sadly, quite a few MRAs seem to think that rape is an appropriate — and even sort of hilarious — punishment for men they don’t like.
This quote from the Men’s Rights subreddit was featured on the Against Men’s Rights subreddit a week ago, but I can’t resist reposting it here, since it’s such a marvellous distillation of Men’s Rights LOGICS at work.
That’s right: while we of course agree that women are all crazy bitches, we generally don’t like to say that sort of thing out loud, at least here in this subreddit, because our actual opinions are so foul they discredit us every time we say them out loud in public and the evil feminists cherry-pick our statements and reveal to the world WHAT WE ACTUALLY BELIEVE.
And jabberwockeysuperfly won himself 60 upvotes for that wondrous bit of SUPER STEM MANLOGICS.
Later in the discussion, our dear old friend Pecanpig clarified that even if there are some women who aren’t crazy bitches, they’re definitely a bunch of bad … oranges?
The charming Man Going His Own Way who calls himself Rex Patriarch has written up a short treatise entitled “Women Are Incapable of Love.” (He’s also posted a video by another MGTOWer making the same point, but we’ll just ignore that for now, because I didn’t bother to watch it.)
Anyway, here’s Rex’s argument, such as it is:
Look guys, women are like pets.
Do pets love you?
No, of course not but they do feel the warmth which is the love you may have for them. At a minimum you are their meal ticket. That in of itself is why they stick around.
Same same with women. As long as you are their meal ticket they “love” you but the very moment you can’t provide for them. The very moment they find a better deal, find some higher status.
Watch how fast that “love” goes out the window.
The reason being is it never was there to begin with. It was just something they were telling you to keep the goodies coming. Up until they could find something better. If they can.
The thing is men can love women all they want or none at all but don’t expect them to love you back in the same measure. They simply do not have the ability.
What’s interesting about this argument, insofar as anything about it is interesting, is that he’s not just, you know, wrong about women. He’s also wrong about pets.
Now, anyone who’s bonded with a pet certainly feels that their pet loves them back. (Or at least some pets do; I’m pretty sure the turtle my brother had as a kid didn’t really love anything other than worms.) Still, some skeptics insist that we’re just anthropomorphizing when we look at our pets and see love in their eyes.
But researchers are increasingly seeing harder-to-dismiss signs that animals may have emotions remarkably like our own — and that they can indeed feel love. By scanning the brains of dogs, Emory University neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns has found that dogs and humans are alike in some key ways:
All in all, dogs and humans show striking similarities in the activity of an important brain region called the caudate nucleus. So, do dogs love us and miss us when we’re gone? The data strongly suggest they do. And, those data can further move humanity away from simplistic, reductionist, behaviorist explanations of animal behavior and animal emotions and also be used to protect dogs and other animals from being abused.
You can read more about his research, and what he sees as its implications, here.
You can also learn a lot about how animals — including the animals called humans — think and feel by just fucking paying attention to them and having a tiny bit of empathy. This is apparently a bit too much for some people to manage.
So some Swedish movie theaters have decided to institute a new rating system to let viewers know whether or not the films they show pass the Bechdel Test — that is, if at any point in the film two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man.
Over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, a fella with the classy handle classypedobear takes strong exception to this terrible affront to human decency. His argument?
So A Voice for Men, classy joint that it is, “reported” yesterday that Elizabeth Vargas of ABC’s 20/20, who interviewed Paul Elam for a 20/20 piece that has yet to air, has checked into rehab in order to deal with her alcoholism. The general reaction of commenters there ranged from “ha ha” to “well, maybe once she’s cured she’ll see how oppressed we men really are.” Those aren’t exact quotes. The exact quotes are below.
How gullible is Paul Elam, grand pooh-bah of A Voice for Men? Well, he just wrote an frothingly angry denunciation of a Canadian business school dean based on an obviously phony story on a satirical website called The Syrup Trap. A website that declares at the top of the page that it is “Canada’s favourite humour magazine.” A website whose logo is a cartoon beaver with a plastic cup on its head.