Category Archives: dozens of upvotes
Splitsville! Paul Elam starts a rival Men’s Rights subreddit, where he can ban people
It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists -in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
Elam has long had a fairly strained relationship with Reddit MRAs. If you search through his comment history on Reddit, you can see evidence of numerous meltdowns on his part, which occur fairly regularly whenever anyone challenges him on pretty much anything, even when they are otherwise sympathetic to his views. On his own blog, he responds to such criticism by quickly banning the critics; on Reddit, he has tended to respond with schoolyard insults, digs at the masculinity of his critics, long recitations of his many fine accomplishments as a dedicated armchair activist, and the occasional rape joke.
Spearheader: Feminist men are “nerds, socially awkward, sissy-gay, annoying or just plain weird.”
So WF Price and the rest of the fellas over on The Spearhead are doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis of the dreaded “male feminist” in general, and me in particular. It is fairly amusing stuff.
Price sets forth his highly original thesis:
If you observe genuinely feminist men, there’s something a bit off about them, and it’s tempting to chalk their feminism up to a result of some flaw or aberration in their character. Normal men (aside from those whose paycheck depends on it such as politicians and men who work for feminist-dominated institutions) simply don’t go in for feminism unless it gets them sexual gratification, but those days are pretty much over, so the remnants tend to be an assortment of freaks and guys who have a chip on their shoulder.
“But those days are pretty much over?” Evidently, Price thinks there was a time during which women were obligated to reward feminist men with “sexual gratification,” but that this is no longer the case. So “normal men” have stopped being feminists, or at least stopped pretending to be feminists.
So what are these freakish feminist men of today really getting out of it?
Men’s Rights Redditor: “Men … need to start putting … government agents who violate their rights in the dirt.” [+54 upvotes]
Today, in the Men’s Rights subreddit, we find Demonspawn, a long-time fixture in Reddit’s MRA circles, getting dozens of upvotes for a comment in which he advocates murdering family court judges and other government officials:
Demonspawn is responding to a post from Robert Franklin on Fathers and Families about Dan Brewington, “[a]n Indiana man fac[ing] five years in prison because he criticized the judge and the custody evaluator in his divorce and custody case.”
Or at least that’s how Franklin wants to frame the issue. While conceding that Brewington “often used intemperate language” on his blog, Franklin downplays what seems to have been a relentless four-year harassment campaign from the troubled father. According to a report on the case on the Eagle Country Online website:
[P]rosecutors argued that Brewington took his postings beyond being critical of the court system. They became personal against anybody who became involved with his case.
“This was sick revenge dragging my wife and kids into the matter,” Humphrey said during his testimony. “I don’t know of many cases where a subject has more clearly expressed his intent to do harm.” …
Brewington … called [custody evaluator Edward] Connor a child molester and prostitute in his “Internet rampage,” contacted the Children’s Home of Northern Kentucky where Conner is involved as a board member, and sending mass e-mails to Connor’s colleagues and legal professional around the area. …
Connor’s wife, Dr. Sara Jones-Connor, reaffirmed what her husband shared with the judge.
“For over four years we have dealt with his attacks on a daily basis,” Jones-Conner said.
And Franklin leaves out the most serious of the accusations against Brewington: that he threatened to murder the judge.
Brewington’s cellmate at the Dearborn County Law Enforcement Center for two-and-a-half months, Joseph McCaleb, had sent a letter to jail officials on September 25 after being concerned with what he heard from Brewington.
“He talked about following (Judge Humphrey) home, shooting him, and dumping him in the river,” McCaleb said of Brewington’s alleged “detailed and thought out” plan.
I should note that after testifying that Brewington’s threats seemed serious, McCaleb later concluded that they weren’t; and Judge Brian Hill did not take his testimony into consideration when sentencing Brewington.
Was Brewington’s sentence fair? I don’t know. But Franklin’s posting was misleading, to say the least, if not dishonest. And while a few people raised questions about it, no one on the Men’s Rights subreddit bothered to spend the two minutes on Google that would have turned up the story I’ve been quoting from, instead relying entirely on Franklin’s, er, incomplete account.
Whether or not Brewington’s threats were sincere, Franklin’s post had Demonspawn and many others on the Men’s Rights subreddit thinking violent thoughts themselves. Here are some more selections from the discussion there. Note that every single violent comment I quote below got upvotes from the regulars.
Here, Boss_Money invokes the memory of Tom Ball, who killed himself in hopes that his dramatic suicide would encourage other MRAs to start firebombing courthouses and police stations:
Later in that same thread, coldacid suggests that suicide is a much less effective strategy than murder:
Anxdiety, meanwhile, shares his fantasies of violent “retribution.”
Boss_Monkey returns with a miniature manifesto for armed revolution:
And whats_up_doc suggests that violence may be the only solution:
The Men’s Rights subreddit is by and large the most “moderate” of all the major Men’s Rights forums online. But this is the language, and the thinking, of a hate movement. Anyone who really cares about improving life for men needs to call this kind of thing out, and make clear that it is completely unacceptable in any rights movement worthy of the name.
Redditor: Do Your Bit for Gender Equality by Telling Women They’re Terrible
Hey fellas, do you ever find yourself wondering: why are women so terrible? Well, over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, a fella named osaap has a partial answer: because dudes don’t criticize them enough!
So, fellas, the next time you see a woman, tell her she’s a mean, thoughtless, selfish, lazy little bitch, and that you won’t be giving her a “pussy pass” any longer. You’ll be doing your part for real gender equality. Pay it forward, by putting her down.
Judging from the dozens of upvotes osaap’s post got, and the almost-100% positive response it received from commenters there, it sounds like a lot of Reddit’s Men’s Rightsers are on board with this ingenious new form of activism.
-
This post is mostly
Scented Candles Oppress Men: The Spearhead at its self-proclaimed best.
Men’s Rights Activists and manosphere misogynists love to complain that I “cherry pick” quotes in an attempt to make them look bad. Which makes it especially ironic that all too often when I call them out on some particular bit of bullshit, they more or less double down on that bullshit, reiterating and in many cases amplifying the terrible things they originally said.
Several days ago, I wrote about a Spearhead post from W.F. Price with the priceless title “After 25, Women Are Just Wasting Time.” It was appalling even by Spearhead standards. Price used the untimely death of a talented young writer named Marina Keegan as an opportunity to rehash the belief, widely held in the manosphere, that women over the age of 25 who haven’t managed to snag themselves a “good husband” are “just wasting time,” growing older and uglier and less appealing to men. (Evidently, women’s appeal to men is the only thing that really matters about them.)
Price’s article inspired numerous comments from Spearheaders that were even more grotesquely misogynistic and cruel than his own post; Price at least pretended to care about the dead girl, even though his post was a crass and opportunistic insult to her memory.
And it inspired one regular Man Boobz commenter, a 26-year-old woman, to wade into the muck that is the Spearhead’s comments section to point out that Price’s grand narrative of female decline after age 25 has no relation whatsoever to her own life story:
I’m 26 years old. 27 terrifyingly soon. I am nothing like the person I was when I graduated college.
After originally getting a film degree, I’ve just started nursing school.
I’m living on the other side of the country and loving the different culture here.
I’m dating a wonderful guy who mysteriously didn’t dump me on my 25th birthday.
I’m doing difficult, not always fun, but ultimately socially useful work, work I couldn’t imagine myself doing when I graduated college.Since I graduated college, I’ve read more books, worked on more movies, learned more skills, lifted more weight, traveled more places, marched in more protests, gotten published more times, saved more lives than I thought I ever would.
And I’m still only 26.
You think I’m going to stop protesting and writing and working the wild Saturday midnight shift in the ER before I’m 30? Before I’m 60?
Or do you think it doesn’t matter because I might not be as fuckable then?
Well then fuck you. I’m 26 and I got miles to go.
–
(Oh, and I’m way better at sex now. Guys who thought I hit my “expiration date” just around the time I was first learning what a Kegel was, you are missing out.)
The Spearheaders responded, predictably enough, with downvotes and insults and a lot of mainsplainy comments suggesting that she’s regret it forever if she doesn’t get married ASAP and start popping out children.
The strangest comment of the bunch came from a Spearhead “Shieldmaiden” (that’s what they call female commenters on The Spearhead, for reals) by the name of Andie, who launched into a barely coherent tirade that somehow revolved around, er, SCENTED CANDLES!
Price, after seeing Andie’s rant mocked by the commenters here, decided to feature it today as the Spearhead “Comment of the Week.” So without further ado, here is what Price considers to be the Spearhead community at its best:
@26 year old woman
Let’s see how you feel when you’re 29 and the end of everything possible is right at your doorstep. Hell, lots of women are infertile at 26. Done. You won’t do everything. You won’t be a mother.
And if that doesn’t bother you, darlin’, you ain’t a woman.
And if your plans are to actually BE a mother (as in do the damn work), you are already in very deep water.
Your resume will never put his chubby little arms around you and tell you he loves you, like a child will. Your resume will never give you grandchildren, like your children might. Your resume will never share in all your joys, all your sorrows, all your triumphs, all your tragedies, like your husband will.
But you WILL be able to rape that resume of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS over your lifetime. Yay!
The fastest growing consumer product category: scented candles. SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES.
Yes, 26 year old woman, all your education and opportunity and rights have resulted in millions of children raised without fathers, the total destruction of the family, the rise of GIANT ASS government to give all those wymyns a place to work (doing utterly useless shit) and what was it for? What did we gain?
SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES!!
Nicely done, ladies. Really good job.
Fuck you, bitch. My daughters are coming for you. And millions of daughters just like mine. We see you, you superficial piece of trash. You have cost us our lives. For patchouli candles.
You will pay.
Go back and read @26 year old woman’s comment, then read Andie’s again. Quite a contrast, wouldn’t you say?
I should note that when Price first posted the quote, he evidently left out the last few paragraphs; perhaps even he realized they were a tad over the line as a response to a woman whose only real “crime” was telling the Spearheaders that her life was interesting and fulfilling to her, and that she wasn’t planning on having any babies in the foreseeable future. (And if they didn’t approve of her life, too fucking bad for them.)
In the comments to Price’s “Comment of the Week” post, HL offers this thought:
Every time something like this comes up, it becomes ever more apparent that the ignorance, hate mongering, bigotry and fallacies rests so much more heavily on the side of the feminists.
To paraphrase Rick James, lack of self-awareness is a hell of a drug.
Reddit Rape Joker: “Let’s all use this as a learning experience.”
Every few days, it seems, Reddit has some thread asking the regulars there what horrible thing they would do if they could get away with it. And invariably someone says rape.
The good folks in ShitRedditSays recently highlighted one such comment, from a fellow calling himself nickfromredcliff. As you can see from the edits to his comment below, poor Nick felt somewhat embarrassed and even affronted by the attention.
When I checked his comment again this morning while writing this post, I found he’d edited it again. Gone was his plaintive plea for tolerance; in its place, a bunch of new rape jokes. (You can find a screenshot of his original comment here; at the time it had 39 upvotes.)
Let’s all use this as a learning experience.
And while we’re at it, let’s have a toast for the douchebag.
Reddit: Rewarding the reprehensible (again)
Oh, Reddit. Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.
So a couple of days ago Reddit had another one of its regular “confess something awful” mega-threads. This time, the OP asked “what is the one illegal, immoral, criminal, or disgusting thing you’ve always wanted to do or try?”
So, aside from the obvious choices (murder, taking a police officer’s gun) what is one terrible desire that a Redditor could confess that would garner more than a hundred upvotes?
Did your answer involve pedophilia – sorry, ebebophilia? Well, congratulations. You are of course correct:
I would have also accepted “smash everything in a Pottery Barn“ and “fuck a female horse.”
Naturally, Reddit being Reddit, someone helpfully offered the would-be child rapist advice on places it would be legal for him to fulfill his desires. And got a dozen upvotes for it.
Did you also guess that some brave Redditor would try to talk the would-be child abuser out of it – and hundreds of upvotes for it? No? Amazingly (for Reddit), someone did – though in true Reddit fashion they did so not because it’s wrong to prey on the young, but because 14-year-olds are annoying.
For many even more horrible confessions that didn’t get quite many upvotes, go here and sort by “controversial.”
Oh, but you say it’s not fair to pick on Redditors in a “confess awful things” thread?
Redditors don’t need a special occasion to celebrate pedophilia.
Thanks again to ShitRedditSays for pointing me to all this awfulness.
New Reddit theory: Girls develop early in order to entrap guys and send them to prison
So someone on Reddit posted a video showing time-lapse video of a girl from infanthood to 12 years old. Naturally, Redditors responded with creepy pedophilia jokes, and one Redditor (speaking for many, judging by the numerous upvotes) took the opportunity to complain about just how hard it is for dudes to not have sex with underage girls. Apparently these girls deliberately develop earlier than boys as part of an elaborate plot to entrap guys and send them to jail.
Thanks to ShitRedditSays for pointing me to this latest bit of egregious Redditry.
All Women Are Whores, Part XIV: Cat on a Roomba Edition
Men of America! You face a grave threat today: Evil feminist slutwalkers are working tirelessly to enslave men by conning them into marrying secret porn-star whores! Over on The Spearhead, an unnamed “Featured Guest” explains the whole dastardly scheme in a post with the intriguing title “Whore is just a label.”
With slutwalkers working hard to remove the stigma of sex for women, you see,
young women in porn face far less stigma than they ever have. So much so that for that young women the leap from wanton behavior at a drunken college party to getting double teamed followed by a full facial in a porn shoot may not be a far leap at all.
Exactly. Because if you’re going to be having sex anyway, why not do it on camera with strangers?
The dollars and cents is that you have a huge growth porn industry demanding a huge number of sex workers who blend invisibly into the population because there is no longer any stigma attached to the world’s oldest profession.
Wait, I thought that prostitution was the world’s oldest profession. I guess porn and prostitution are the same thing now?
Not that it matters, because if you’re a man the evil ladies will keep their sordid whoring from you:
Unlike men women know how to keep a secret. Women don’t brag to their girlfriends, in fact they’ll lie even to themselves. You really have NO IDEA where even that conservative and very virginal girl you’ve proposed to has been until the night she thought she forgot shows up on Youtube.com. Where does that leave an increasing number of American men?
So YouTube is a porn distribution hub now? Or is he suggesting that any woman who has sex is by definition a whore?
Evidently he is, as Mr. Featured Guest then goes on to warn of the dangers of those who are:
Trying to turn a whore into a housewife.
Yes, there are terrific women out there. But single women are angling for a man to pay for their lives, and given that incentive there’s a huge temptation for a woman to present herself falsely, to tell a lot of lies and to make a lot of “stay at home, cook and raise kids” promises she has no intention of keeping. Under US and ESPECIALLY Canadian divorce laws, women are almost never accountable for bad behavior or broken promises. For all the men who thought their betrothed was only slutty the night she met you and who are steaming mad that you’ve been sold a bill of goods, does the marriage contract needs a “false advertisement” clause?
Or do women who have sex with men other than their betrothed – possibly on video, possibly on YouTube — simply need to have the word “whore” tattooed on their foreheads?
The regulars at The Spearhead respond to this sophisticated analysis of contemporary marriage with their usual good sense.
Quentin, in a comment that got 50 upvotes, notes with some alarm that
A lot of women don’t feel bad abut their sexual escapades. In fact, they take pride in them. “Ladies” are an endangered species, and are on the verge of going extinct. All this slutty behavior has really made me lose interest in women. I don’t want to be with a woman who has had sex with a lot of men. If she is easy to get into the sack, then she is a liability in a relationship. I have lost a lot of respect for women over the past several years. Sex, along with marriage, is something most women view as a get-rich-quick scheme. It is disheartening to think I live in a world where being a whore is considered empowering, while being a supportive wife is frowned upon. This world is upside down. … If you act like a whore, then you are going to get treated like a whore. If women were pleasant to be around and were loyal, more men would probably stick around. You reap what you sow, women.
Napoleon (24 upvotes) urges his fellow men to be cautious when dealing with the wily female:
Women these days are increasingly trying to have the best of both worlds and present themselves as wholesome nice girls to the public while hiding a lot of whoring that goes on behind the scenes. There is really no way to know whether a woman is a part-time prostitute or not but a good rule of thumb is to assume that she is until proven otherwise due to the prevalence of such antics.
Silent warns men to be especially suspicious of any woman who seems to know what she’s doing in bed:
Just be careful about the super-sweet girlfriend who knows a little too much about how to do that thing you like, without you having taught her. She may have had a mouthful. But hey, maybe it’s all “in the past”.
YoungMan shares his tale of woe:
Back in my plugged in days I dated a girl for over a year before I found out she used to play with herself on camera for money. I was incensed I had been taken advantage of like that.
Keyster, a bastion of morality who once boasted about dating a 14-year-old (when he was 25), warns men to stay away with women who don’t keep silent about their sexual pasts:
Any woman who feels compelled to reveal her debaucherous past has no intention of having a serious relationship with you.
It’s not a shit test.
It’s meant to show a certian amount of disdain and disrespect for you as a man who doesn’t quite measure up to her standards. Don’t ever forget that.
Yes, because if a woman has had sex with anyone other than you, it’s all about disrespecting you.
And then he adds:
If she says she can’t even remember how many guys she’s f*cked in a rather “matter-of-fact” tone, you’ve entered the Futrelle Zone. Go home and video tape your cat on a Roomba and post it on YouTube. It would be time better spent.
I guess I should be flattered? But alas it was not my cat on the Roomba. I wish I had a Roomba. (Also, I wish I had my cat back, but that’s a whole other and much sadder story.)
Alan Vaughn writes an impassioned defense of pedophiles – sorry, “pedophiles,” in scare quotes – that I’m frankly too tired to bother to cut and paste in here. Check it out yourself if you dare.
Eric has a sad about the poor quality of American women:
Women are presumed to ‘have all the power in relationships’. Really, it’s her choices alone that matter. Women choose to be with thugs and idiots when there are numerous better and more responsible options open to them. The fact that women overwhelmingly terminate relationships with good men and pursue worthless ones is proof in itself that the responsibility lies with them and not with us.
Men, on the other hand, are very limited in their field of choices (unless they expat out). The abysmal quality of American women; women’s complete lack of interest in responsible men; and the ever-impending consequences of acting contrary to misandryist legal and social norms considerably constrict men’s options. Most men, if they were honest about it, would admit that their choices are pretty much limited to the least objectionable—not the most desirable—of available women.
Life is apparently very tough for American men who hate the very idea of women ever having sex with anyone but them. And doubly tough for those who don’t see the inherent hilariousness of cats on Roombas.