Category Archives: awesome
Kate Harding Tells Men’s Rights Activists to Go Fuck Themselves
You all need to go read Kate Harding’s bracing (and given all the recent doxxing bullshit, spectacularly well-timed) Jezebel piece titled “Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists.” Here’s a sample:
Fuck you, first of all, for making it nearly impossible for decent men struggling with abusive partners or unfair custody arrangements to get the help they need and deserve. You have forever tainted those issues with your rage-filled, obsessively anti-woman horseshit, to the point where it’s become difficult for any rational, compassionate person to trust a man who claims he’s been screwed over in family court or abused by a female partner, even if he has. …
Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.
And it keeps going from there.
Thank you Kate, for putting it so well.
The Men’s Rights Movement: Much Less Popular Than Horse Porn
When you spend as much time as we do here at Man Boobz scrutinizing the Men’s Rights movement, it’s easy to forget what a fringe phenomenon it is. So here are some charts from Google Trends – charting the frequency of certain search terms from 2004 until today — that help to put it all in perspective. (Thanks to Katz, Cloudiah and Cthulhu’s Intern in the comments for inspiring this post.)
That “rapidly growing” Men’s Rights movement that MRAs like to talk about? It may actually be stagnant or even shrinking, if searches for “men’s rights” are any indication. Despite a recent comeback, they’re still less than half of what they were at their height in 2004.
Now let’s put that in perspective.
No, there’s nothing wrong with that graph; it’s just that My Little Pony is so much more popular than Men’s Rights that the latter simply vanishes into the X axis.
But this graph is my favorite:
Well, nothing will top that, but here’s a graph showing that people are a lot more concerned about misogyny than misandry — and, I would add, for good reason.
Let’s see what other trends we can find!
(Oh, and sorry about the low quality pics; WordPress won’t let me embed the charts.)
Hey, It’s Some Men Against Assholes and Misogyny!
Jen Kirkman (Men Against Assholes and Misogyny Not Pictured)
With all the assholery that I’ve been writing about lately, I wanted to highlight something that wasn’t assholish. That is, in fact, anti-assholish. And that’s comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” - MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men - not afraid to call themselves feminists - to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”
Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.
Here’s how she explains it:
Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun - as we all should be. And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me. Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.
So far she’s gotten a lot of followers — she picked up a thousand in the first 48 hours — and a ton of submissions, some from fellow comedians (Greg Proops, Michael Ian Black), some from regular dudes, one from her dad.
The submissions are, I suppose I should say, a mixed bag. Some of the essays are great. Some are a bit mansplainy, or White Knighty, or otherwise a bit problematic.
But that’s kind of inherent to the project. Jen is challenging guys who don’t spend all day every day thinking about feminism, but whose hearts are basically in the right place, to stand up against the asshole misogynists of the world. And a lot of guys are responding to her challenge.
Oh, BTW, while we’re on the topic: Jen is also pretty fucking hilarious.
Here’s some of her standup:
And here she is narrating some Drunk History. (She really was drunk.)
Three Whoops and a Holler for Jean Shepard and this awesome old song
I usually listen to my music collection on shuffle, and this old song was one of the first that popped up this morning as I caught up on comments here. Recorded by Jean Shepard in 1954, it’s a charmingly blunt criticism of sexist double standards. The notions she challenges are still, sadly, issues to this day, especially amongst the you-know-who’s-rights-activists and the rest of their pals in the you-know-who-o-sphere. Some of the lyrics:
How come a man can fight and cuss and smoke and drink and chew
Step out on their wives and do the things they shouldn’t do?
But it’s all right in the publics’ eye, they say he’s just a man
But if a woman does one little thing, she’s not worth a …
Two whoops and a holler,
she’s lower than a hound
If she drinks or smokes or tells a joke,
she’s a lowest thing in town
Of course, like a lot of old songs by women in country music that challenge male sexism, Two Whoops and Holler is a product of its time, and doesn’t transcend traditionalist thinking entirely. The song ends up endorsing some double standards of its own: Shepard sings that “the women ought to rule the world ’cause the men ain’t worth a … Two whoops and a holler, they’re lower than a hound.”
In other words, she ends up offering a mirror image of the original sexism — which is exactly the sort of dualistic thinking that double standards lead to in the first place. Don’t tell the MRAs! They’ll start going on about female supremacism or some other nonsense.
Man Boobzers Join the Poster Revolution Against Misandry and Mean Ladies!
One of Cliff Pervocracy’s outstanding contributions.
As I noted in my last post, the gang over at A Voice for Men have launched a veritable POSTER REVOLUTION against the evil gynocracy, by which I mean a couple of dudes have designed some posters and a couple other dudes have put some of them up.
Much like the web site they represent, these posters are dumb and ugly and incoherently angry. Feeling generous, some Man Boobzers have designed some more posters for them to use, trying their best to capture the unique qualities that make A Voice for Men posters so, well, special. Cloudiah has collected them together on her hilarious blog Artistry For Feminism. And Kittens. Check them out!
The Five Million Mark
Change “years to earth” to “page views,” and forget about all that “cities in flames” stuff to make this picture actually relevant to the matter at hand.
Just wanted to let you all know that Man Boobz has just passed a milestone of sorts: FIVE MILLION page views. Thank you, loyal visitors and annoying trolls alike! No, seriously, thank you!
We’re also just a handful of NWOslave screeds away from 180,000 comments. Which is actually even more amazing. Thanks again, loyal readers, for making the comments here so entertaining and educational. And thanks again, trolls, for giving us so much more material to work with.
The Man Boobz Street Team Posters the World!
Man Boobz is not only a blog. We’re all about ACTIVISM! I want to thank the Man Boobz “Street Team” for spreading the word via posters in major cities across the globe – New York, London, Paris, Munich, and many more. Here, some photos documenting our global postering offensive.
Here’s one of our posters in Detroit:
And one in La Paz, Bolivia:
And one in Ulan Bator, Mongolia:
Remember the words of Sylvia Plath Genghis Khan Ghandi Gahdhi Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you put up some posters, then you win!”
I’m paraphrasing loosely here.
Keep up the good work, Man Boobz Street Team!!!
(NOTE: The Man Boobz Street Team is imaginary.)
Greatest thing ever: Men’s Rights sites, with the graphics replaced by kitties!
Esteemed Man Boobz commenter Cloudiah has pointed me to a wondrous site called Meowbify, which takes ordinary web sites and replaces all their graphics with kitty gifs.
So as a service to you all I would like to bring you The Men’s Rights Movement, Meowbified.
Let’s start with A Voice for Men and its sister site Register-Her.com.
Alas, most of the bigger MRA sites are pretty light on graphics, but here are a few that look pretty good Meowbified.
MGTOW: Men Going Their Own Way
And, in the interests of fair play, here’s Man Boobz, Meowbified.
For added entertainment, the links on all these Meowbified sites are also Meowbified.
New blog catalogs Men’s Rights awfulness!
Yep, that’s right, the “clopping” sound of high heels are a form of “street harassment.” I found the screenshot above on a promising new blog you can find at MensRightsActivism.com. Yep, that’s right. Evidently it never occurred to anyone in the Men’s Rights movement to lock down that domain name.
Oh, this little Reddit screenshot is good too:
How exactly does saying “consent is sexy” mean that male consent is taken for granted? How is it that 59 people thought that comment deserved an upvote?
I can’t answer either question, but there’s lots more hilarious and appalling stuff where that came from, mostly from the Men’s Rights subreddit. It’s going in the “antidotes to boobery” blog roll.
