Woman: Always wanting men to buy them toasters — or steal them!
Sometimes posts by Men’s Rights Activists seem like transmissions from some alternate universe, a Bizarro world that bears a superficial resemblance to our own but where everything is backwards and upside down.
Take a recent post on A Voice for Men by FeMRA Diana Davison with the seemingly innocuous title “Women don’t own sex.” Ostensibly a response to a piece about rape in the Irish Times, the piece contains a series of bizarre assertions about relations between men and women that Davison apparently thinks she can use as proof that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s really women, not men, who run the world. And that men only commit crimes in order to make women happy.
But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.
I’ve read and watched and listened to a lot of creepy pickup artist crap over the past few years while writing this blog, but in some ways this little video, from PUA “coach” Julian of Real Social Dynamics, one of the bigger and better known of the commercial “game” marketers, may well be the creepiest. Essentially, Julian provides tips to young men on how to “get” the girl of their dreams by temporarily driving her out of her mind.
No, really: he recommends that men overwhelm their female targets with confusing and contradictory stimuli to throw them so off-balance they’ll reflexively turn to their mental tormenters for support (and, maybe later, reward them with sex). This isn’t pick-up artistry so much as freak-out artistry.
The one thing about this video that is vaguely reassuring is that Julian’s examples of his technique in action are so crude and hamhanded I seriously doubt they’d actually work on anyone “in field,” as the PUAs like to say. What’s not so reassuring is that anyone would actually come up with something this predatory and perverse in the first place. Also, you know that at least a few of the video’s 32,000 viewers have actually tried out this technique on annoyed and bewildered women around the world. The world doesn’t really need any new ways for dudes to be assholes in clubs.
Derek Zoolander: Also a little delusional sometimes
So over on A Voice for Men, the regulars are all congratulating one another for their grand victory in Toronto. In AVFM’s official post on Saturday’s tiny “rally,” incongruously titled “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto huge success,” Elam — who in photographs of the events looked rather befuddled by it all — declared that the day had been magical for him:
“This was one of the greatest things I have ever done in my life,” said Elam. “Meeting all of these people and talking to a crowd that was five times bigger than the opposition was a remarkable event.”
Given that most of the opposition made a clear decision to ignore the AVFM/CAFE rally and lecture — much to the obvious disappointment of many MRAs who were there in Toronto or watching on the sidelines on the Internet — this was not much of an accomplishment.
So a helpful Twitterer told me that I was a frequent topic of conversation on A Voice for Men’s Honey Badger “radio” show last night — that’s the one hosted by Karen Straughan (Girl Writes What) and Alison Tieman (Typhon Blue) and a newer addition to AVFM’s FeMRA stable named Della Burton. Bored, I went over to take a listen to the archived show. Well, bits and pieces of it, anyway. Life is short, and every minute of this show felt about an hour long.
Anyway, I missed most of whatever it was they said about me, but I did manage to force myself to sit through a good chunk of the segment featuring none other than Nick Reading, the guy who’s running a joke campaign for city council of Edmonton Alberta as the “Patriarchy Party” candidate. You know, the dude we talked about just yesterday.
The gals did their best to play along with his over-the-top patriarchal schtick, proclaiming themselves submissive inferior females unworthy of his manly phallus, and so on. It was as gratingly unfunny as you might imagine, and it went on and on. Even the Honey Badgers, perhaps wondering if this whole segment wasn’t a rather apt metaphor for their own role within A Voice for Men and the Men’s Rights movement at large, couldn’t quite bring themselves to laugh at any of Nick’s, er, humor.
At least not until, about 49 minutes into the show, he brought out the rape jokes.
Take a listen:
Paul “The Thought of Fucking Your Shit Up Gives Me an Erection” Elam, meet Nick “If They Didn’t Scream No, How Else Would I Get an Erection” Reading.
In case you weren’t able to make all that out, due to the clear-as-mud sound engineering job of AVFM’s James Huff — you may remember him as the guy responsible for this amazing rant — I have transcribed the exchange below as best I could, cutting out a few repeated phrases and ignoring some remarks that got buried under other remarks.
Nick Reading: No never means no. It only means yes. That’s an understanding that we have within the patriarchy.
Karen Straughan: It is.
Alison Tieman: That’s true. Actually “no” should be stricken from the English language because it simply makes no sense. How could any woman ever say no to the holy phallus unless she was criminally insane?
Nick: Criminally insane, yes.
Della Burton [?]: Criminally, yes.
Karen: But, but we shouldn’t strike “no” from all the dictionaries and the lexicons of language simply because there are numerous times in the course of a day when a man loves to say “no” to a woman.
Nick: I would almost insist on striking it from the non-male vernacular but if they didn’t scream it, how else would I get an erection?
[Awkward pause]
[Laughter]
Della [?]: Oh my goodness.
Karen: Right, you’re right.
Della: I hadn’t even thought of that.
Karen: So no is still in.
A Voice for Men: Promoting Human Rights, One Rape Joke at a Time
EDITED TO ADD: Below, a video on YouTube about this episode of Honey Badger radio, which not only looks at the show itself but at what was going on in the official chatroom for the show at the time, which turns out to be even creepier than the stuff said by Nick Reading on the show itself.
Along with the standard MRA misogyny from some of AVFM’s regulars, there were bizarre sexualized comments directed at the so-called Honey Badgers themselves: one commenter went on at length about how he wanted to use Karen Straughan’s breast milk in his coffee (and spike her coffee with his semen). Palani provides screenshots and everything. Some of her commentary is a bit problematic — she refers to them as “retards” at one point — but if you’ve got 15 minutes it’s worth a watch.
Here — above and below — are a couple of amazing works of Men’s Rightsy propaganda I missed in my survey of deviantART yesterday, both from a fellow calling himself alexlartwork22. And, yes, they both seem to be meant completely seriously.
Pity the poor Men’s Rights activists. The real civil rights movements that MRAs like to compare their, er, “struggle” to may have faced many obstacles that MRAs haven’t — from legal prohibitions on voting to fire bombings and assassinations — but at least they haven’t had a hard time explaining just what it was, and is, that they’re seeking redress for.
When Martin Luther King so famously dreamt of a world in which “my four little children will … not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” he was not only speaking eloquently; he was expressing an idea that was, well, pretty easy to understand.
Sometimes I like to take a look through the search terms that people use to get to Man Boobz. Doing that recently it occurred to me just how disappointed many of these searchers must be when they arrive here and find no answers to their questions, nothing to slake their curiosity.
I thought I’d collect together some reccent search terms from the people you might call Man Boobz’ Least Satisfied Customers.
Warning: This list is extremely NSFW, as people are filthy perverts. And some of them are also terrible.
Apparently feminism has turned the lovely and obedient ladies of yore into a bunch of wild wolves and dingoes — by preventing men from “putting the foot down” when ladies misbehave. At least that’s what the always awful Men’s Rights Redditor who calls himself Alisdair_ and the 41 terrible people who’ve upvoted his comment so far think:
Thanks to chewinchawingum in the AgainstMensRights subreddit for pointing out this lovely quote. Huh. There’s something that seems oddly familiar about chewinchawingum.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Probably Not Christopher in Oregon’s favorite painter
It’s time for another visit into the fertile mind of Christopher in Oregon, perhaps the most viscerally misogynistic boob I’ve ever written about on this site. Most of the misogynists I write about here like to pretend that they’re not misogynists, or to dress up their misogyny in pseudoscientific terms, talking about the evils of female “hypergamy” or citing dubious evo psych to back up their reprehensible views.
Not old Chris. He’s an old-school, women are bad because their vaginas are stinky, woman-hater. And his 2007 manifesto “Deconstruct the Female,” which I recently found reposted on MarkyMark’s blog, may well be his masterpiece.
