Category Archives: drama
Banned in the MRA!
Well, I have been banned from the Men’s Rights subreddit, evidently for mentioning The Spearhead too often. And also, apparently, because of Lorena Bobbit? Honesty, I’m not sure I fully understand why I’m banned; I am pretty sure I haven’t breached any of the tenets of Reddiquette in any of my comments in r/mr. See if you can figure it out:
I’m also banned from A Voice for Men. And Toysoldier. Not sure about The Spearhead. I don’t think so, but there’s not really much point posting somewhere where all dissenting commenters (and most women) are downvoted so thoroughly that you have to click a special link to even see them. I might or might not be able to comment on other MRA blogs, I don’t know.
But honestly, the only Men’s Rights forum I really have (or had) any reason or desire to comment in is the Men’s Rights subreddit, because for all of its faults it’s really the only MRA forum of any size that’s not completely overrun with misogynists and fanatics. The only one where there is even a chance of holding any kind of substantive discussions with MRAs online. And Ig has shut that door, at least for me.
(There are of course many other places to discuss things with MRAs online, like, you know, here, and NSWATM, and so on, but these places aren’t run by MRAs.)
I asked Ig if he would also ban the guy who wished me liver cancer earlier today. I have not heard back from him yet.
EDITED TO ADD: Ig has gotten back to me. He recommends that I “go to hell.” Meanwhile, the liver-cancer wisher has reaffirmed his desire that I “catch” cancer.
Elsewhere in r/mr, another fellow describes me as “an accumulation of grunge far worse than any of the quotes you mine.” Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but at least has a spark of originality to it.
Guess who got trolled on April Fool’s Day? Hint: It rhymes with “Glen’s Brights Pubreddit”
So it turns out that the heartbreaking yet highly implausible story of attempted spermburgling that got the Men’s Rights subreddit so riled up on the first of the month … was in fact fake.
Mr. ineedhelpnow1234 himself wrote me a note today alerting me to a post on his blog explaining the whole thing, and why he did it. Some highlights:
I wanted to reveal just how twisted these men can be in the pursuit of their agenda so I came up with a story they could not resist. …
The spermjacker trope is irresistible to “men’s rights” activists because they believe they are perfect Darwinian examples of masculinity and as a result are irresistible to the hormonally irrational schemers that make up womankind. Narcissism and misogyny collide to make a toxic brew.
Oh, and I added the twist that this man punched his girlfriend so hard in the stomach that she bruised. Surely such fierce proponents of “gender equality” would not support violence against women. Right?
Well, we all know how that turned out. Ineedhelpnow1234/the blogger Eschatology continued:
The “men’s rights” movement is morally bankrupt. It is made up of people who support hitting women. It is made up of people who refuse to say it is wrong to hit women. It is made up of people who are so paranoid of women that they think people actually talk like this:
You fucking bastard, how dare you punch me for what I’m entitled to! Call me the minute you get this god damn message or I’ll call the fucking police and end your future. CALL MEEEE.
Attention MRA’s: You have all exposed yourselves as rotten human beings and you have discredited your movement (again). …
I wrote this story by stitching together nearly every cliche I have ever come across in the “men’s rights” movement. I tried to see if the MRAs had any line they would not cross. Apparently they do not. Looks like the SPLC made a good call.
Heck, even after they got called out for supporting the (imaginary) puncher, both here and on Jezebel, and were roundly mocked for believing such an utterly ridiculous tall tale, this is about as close as any Men’s Rights redditor got to criticizing the punch that never was:
He panicked and hit her. Sure he should have just have restrained her and took the condom out of her hands but we’re human and its not like he continually beat her into a pulp.
Yep, no big deal, “its not like he continually beat her into a pulp.”
The comment containing that line got 11 upvotes, and zero downvotes.
The Men’s Rights Movement, beyond the pale — but also beyond parody.
EDITED TO ADD: The Men’s Rights regulars respond to the big reveal here. They are apparently determined to learn absolutely nothing from the whole episode. At the moment this is the most highly upvoted comment:
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: Ineedhelpnow1234/Eschatology posted about this in the TwoXChromosomes subreddit, Naturally, a small horde of r/mensrightsers invaded the thread and pooped all over it.
Oh, Men’s Rights subreddit, will you ever learn? (Probably not.)
Sometimes I ask myself: what is it that I really hope to accomplish with this website, aside from entertaining myself and my readers, and exposing misogynist assholes for who they are. There’s a part of me that still hopes that someday, something I write will cause some misogynist and/or Men’s Rightser out there to develop a modicum of self-awareness, look at what they’ve been saying or doing, and say to themselves, “I’m really kind of a tool, aren’t I? Maybe I should stop.”
When the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the Men’s Rights movement came out, I hoped it might have a similar sort of effect. Or that, even if it didn’t persuade any MRAs out there that they were wrong, it might at least convince a few that they were going about things the wrong way. Nope. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, at least, it seems to have sent many of the regulars into an indignant tizzy, and they have doubled down on their peculiar brand of politics-by-whining-online.
Consider this post:
Yes, that’s right. Some Men’s Rights Redditors seem to think that the best way to convince the world that they’re not part of a hate group is to continue to celebrate a self-admitted child abuser who urged men to firebomb courthouses and police stations and kill people.
Then there’s this post, currently the top post on the subreddit:
Wow, if the Men’s Rights subreddit had anything to do with that, that would indeed be a victory. As one regular put it:
Thing is, I read r/mensrights pretty regularly, and I don’t remember any campaign there to protect the rights of fishermen in New Zealand.
Turns out that’s because the campaign, such as it was, consisted of one post some months back, which got all of 11 upvotes at the time. The current post in which r/mensrights congratulates itself for its “victory” has gotten, last I checked, 120 upvotes, more than ten times that. Simplecosine’s self-congratulatory comment in the new thread has gotten 36 upvotes. The comment in the original thread asking r/mensrightsers to send an email to the US Secretary of State’s office got … one upvote. In other words, only a handful of Men’s Rights Redditors even noticed the original post, much less sent along an email.
Reading one of the linked news articles makes clear the real reason the State Department opened an investigation: a six-month long, three-continent wide investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek revealing abuses in the industry.
The Men’s Rights subreddit: Taking Credit for Shit They Didn’t Do Since 2008.
And then there’s this post:
I’ve got nothing to say about this one — it’s basically self-refuting — except that I’m sort of bemused by the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “semi-women group.” Uh, what is that exactly? A group with some women in it? A group that doesn’t think women are all a bunch of evil bitches? The horror!
Oh, Men’s Rights movement. You’ll never change, will you?
EDITED TO ADD: And speaking of never changing, here’s how one Men’s Rights redditor responded to my comments there suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MRAs should actually denounce and distance themselves from someone calling for terrorism:
Let me just highlight that bit at the end again:
[T]he cost to the establishment to maintain the status quo in regards to divorce, custody, etc. must be made so high that it’s just no longer feasible. If that means instilling abject fear into the hearts of judges, cops and legislators by making them think their careers and/or lives could be forfeit unless they change their attitudes towards men, then so be it.
Trying to instill fear for one’s life in your opponents: that is the very definition of terrorism.
Muck Ryking: Petition to remove Alexander Ryking as a Tumblr politics editor
So Alexander Ryking is a Tumblr blogger and one of Tumblr’s community “editors” for politics. He thinks of himself as a liberal.
He is also a raging misogynist who regularly calls women “cunts” and tells feminists to “kill yourselves you feminazi twats.”
In recent days he’s turned his douchebag-o-meter up to 11. As a result, there’s now a petition up on Change.org to have him removed as a politics editor on Tumblr. It’s already gotten more than 3000 signatures, with several hundred new signatures added in the time it’s taken me to write this post.
Here’s unknowable woman, a frequent target of his cyber-wrath, with more details on his recent meltdown. (Read the post on her Tumblr blog for links to the evidence of his douchebaggery.)
Alexander Ryking, who has a history of attempting to silence women bloggers (he told Jess of STFUConservatives and the other “feminazis” to “go kill themselves” several months ago, and has also been rude to women of color but I haven’t been on Tumblr long enough to have personally witnessed that), defended The Amazing’s Atheist’s violent rape threats on Reddit by tagging his posts with “I support TAA.”
I and many, many other Tumblr users were disgusted by this, so we decided to tag our criticisms of Ryking that night with “Ryking’s banana republic”—a reference to his co-opting of [social justice] concepts, NOT a homophobic dig, and the person who coined it was a queer man anyway. Someone also wrote a few jokingly romantic lines about Ryking’s blind defense of TAA and new atheism, and Ryking interpreted this as homophobic and misandric…it wasn’t, but because I reblogged it, Ryking insists that I am now a homophobe, which is hilarious given my own sexual identity but whatever.
We also responded to some of his posts with pictures of extreme close-ups of our eyes.
Seriously. That is what this guy is calling “abuse.”
We did NOT threaten him, make personal attacks against his sexuality, tell him to go kill himself, send him rude messages, or commit any other acts that could reasonably be interpreted as the “cyberbullying” Ryking claims it is. I did temporarily change my URL to rykingsbananarepublic and I make no apologies for that. Why should I? Why shouldn’t a group of feminists and their allies be allowed to respond creatively to misogyny? The only actual cyberbullying that has taken place was TAA’s initial rape threats on Reddit; I wouldn’t even go so far as to claim Ryking’s tweets to me and other Twitter users are cyberbullying, though I leave it up to the other people who were insulted by him to label their experiences as bullying or not.
Anyway, a few nights later, I tweeted something in defense of Whitney Houston’s legacy, and suddenly there was Ryking going ballistic. He found me on Twitter, called me a cunt right off the bat, and insisted that I claimed Whitney Houston’s death was “more important than the death of 5,000 Syrians” (I didn’t! Here is what I actually said!). I had never exchanged tweets with this man before, and was confused about his sudden interest in my thoughts about Whitney Houston and Syria. Naturally, I responded, told him how wrong he was, and the next day I screencapped some of the things he said and posted them … I never expected that post to get the amount of notes it did, but I think that just goes to show how widespread the dislike for him is.
Ryking, for his part, has responded to the widespread criticism by striking the pose of a victim, and pretending that it is somehow all related to race. Apparently, the evil feminazis are impugning his white manhood, though he’s not white.
So-called feminists have subjected me to white-bashing comments (even though I’m Hispanic) and sexist attacks impugning my manhood (slash-fiction scenes featuring me and heterosexual men; being called faggot; being told to man-up; insults about my body;) by people who don’t realize I’m gay. After nearly two decades online, I learned early on that when you’re attacked, you defend yourself by attacking right back and just as viciously, if not more so. And that’s what exactly what I’ve done. …
What’s really at issue here is not my rude behavior but that you and others like you want to punish any man who refuses to conform to your rancid, misandrist orthodoxy by discounting everything he says and using his gender and race as the excuse for doing so. …
You don’t want me stripped of my editorial privilege based on my behavior but because I reject your sick, bigoted, misandrist (per)version of feminism.
Yep, apparently the dude who loves to call women “cunts” is the final arbiter of what is and what isn’t “true feminism.” Who knew?
I signed the petition. How about you?
Breaking News: Men’s Rights mod on Reddit is kind of a dick
So, funny story.
Earlier today, some guy on the Men’s Rights subreddit made a not-so-vaguely threatening remark about me. I sent the mod a message about it, and, well, this was his response:
Yeah. Pretty sure that’s not exactly the way Reddit wants its mods to behave.
Scott Adams: Self-proclaimed Misunderstood Genius, Part XVIII
Oy. Scott Adams won’t shut up about that execrable “Pegs and Hoies” piece of his that I (and quite a few other people on the internets) wrote about the other day. Naturally, he’s being willfully obtuse about the reaction his piece caused, and blames it all on the “low reading comprehension” of everyone in the world who is not him and/or one of his sycophantic fans. So he’s decided to interview a number of those who wrote about it. (Not including me. Aww, Scott, but we had such good times together!)
So far he’s interviewed Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon (a great writer and lovely person, by the way) and Irin Carmon of Jezebel. Naturally, the interviewees offer cogent explanations of just what was wrong with his idiotic post, and he responds by completely and utterly missing the point. (Or pretending to; it’s always hard to tell with Scott.)
Scott Adams is so relentlessly irritating – he’s a bit like Eoghan in his stubborn refusal to get the point – that I can’t bring myself to write any more about this idiotic manufactured controversy. So you’ll have to go check out the posts yourself.
EDITED TO ADD: Adams has put up yet another post on the subject, entitled “Maybe it’s me?” in which he decides ” to take a step back and seriously consider the hypothesis that the reason people disagree with me is that I’m an idiot and I don’t realize it.” Scott, your hypothesis is correct.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: And … Mr. Adams has now made a personal appearance in the comments below. Be gentle!
Given Adams’ intense narcissism, I can’t help but get the song “Biggest Fan” by the Martini Brothers stuck in my head every time I read any of this posts. Listen a bit, and you’ll see why.
>The Spearhead: You don’t have to be crazy to post here, but it helps. Scratch that: You DO have to be crazy.
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Don’t ever say this to the guys at The Spearhead |
These days I mostly ignore the people who attack me and this blog online, because I’m sick of internet drama and have no interest in stirring that particular sort of shit. But there’s one discussion going on at the moment that I think is worth mentioning, because it provides as interesting snapshot of the manosphere at the current moment.
Over on The Spearhead, a certain MRA who used to comment here at great length is suggesting that Spearheaders tone down their rhetoric so that “a site called mamboobz.com” won’t quote them and, by exposing their crazy talk to the light of day, possibly make the men’s rights movement look bad.
Never mind that the regulars at The Spearhead aren’t all MRAs and I don’t identify them as such. That’s not the point. The point is this:
The person making the suggestion is Eoghan. And his mild and in fact quite sensible suggestion has not gone over well with the locals. Indeed, one of the regulars, SingleDad,compared him to “a Jewish person in Germany telling all the others who are complaining about their fears as they are loaded on the trains headed for the concentration camp to quiet down or the Nazi’s might get angry.” Another added, “I won’t make you wet your panties by calling you a mangina, especially since you seem to be either a doofus or a cunt.”
After a bit more back and forth, SingleDad came back with what can only be called a direct threat:
You sir are a traiter to your gender. .. You would hold our hands as they lead us into the gas chamber.Your a collaborator. You know what men do to collaborators, right?Expect the same from me. Count on it.
Again, SingleDad isn’t talking about me. He’s talking about Eoghan. Eoghan! As anyone who has been reading the comments on this blog for any length of time is well aware, Eoghan is about as far from a feminist as you can get; indeed, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool MRA ideologue, and I actually banned him here some time ago because of his consistently disruptive behavior. But because he challenges not what they say but the way they say it, the guys at The Spearhead evidently see him as some sort of fem-symp if not the equivalant of a Nazi collaborator.
Naturally, all of Eoghan’s posts have been heavily downvoted by the regulars, and the attacks on him, including SingleDad’s threat, have gotten multiple upvotes.
I’m not going to post a bunch more comments from this surreal “debate.” Obviously you all can head over and read the whole thing if you like. But I thought this one, from Poester00 and actually directed at me, was kind of telling:
Mr Manboobz is a low down slime, using comments posted here by third parties and NOT articles to attack this site.
Since I don’t think he is stupid and he’s extremely persistent at what he’s doing, it’s highly probable that he is either:
- being paid to continue by some interested third party with deep pockets, or
- is a victim of systematic child abuse by his mother or other female relative(s), so has been “Joe Bidened”
OR BOTH.It may be just a “job” to him but his words are supporting the hurting of real people. People will remember his words and what goes around comes around.
What goes around comes around?
Poester99, I’m not quite sure you understand the concept of karma.
Here’s what I did: I quoted some repugnant shit some dudes said on a web site, and made some sarcastic remarks about these comments.
Here’s what you did: you falsely accused my mother of child abuse.
I’m having a really hard time seeing how I’m the bigger asshole in this scenario.
Also: the paid shill thing? Not true. But if some “interested third party with deep pockets” wants to empty these pockets into my bank account, and won’t interfere with what I write in any way, I’d like to suggest that they contact me, like, right now.
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>The Men’s Rights Movement Vs. The People’s Front of Judea
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One of the strangest things about the Men’s Rights Movement is how little actual debate there is within it. Oh there’s plenty of discussion, to be sure, and plenty of arguments about what sort of strategy is most effective in dealing with MRA opponents and the rest of the world in general (see, for example, “Pansygate” and the ongoing sniping between Manhood101 ubermilitants and pretty much everyone else in the MRM). But actual substantive disagreements over major issues? Very few. With most key issues the MRM deals with, there’s a party line, and few within the MRM fold deviate very far from it.
This sort of ideological conformity is far less common outside the insular world of the MRM. Among leftist political groups, of course, internecine battles are so common that Monty Python satirized them in Life of Brian — you no doubt remember the bits about the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. And such battles are hardly confined to the left: just consider the battles between the teabaggers and the Republican party, not to mention the much more substantive battles you see between the various factions that make up the contemporary right, like those between Ayn Randian libertarians and bible-thumping social conservatives.
Among feminists, of course, there have been giant, bloody battles between anti-porn and sex-positive feminists, battles over “difference” feminism, over race and class, and on and on. (For a quick look at a dizzying array of different ideological tendencies within feminism, see here.) I’ve participated in these battles myself: see this piece of mine critiquing anti-porn feminism in general and Andrea Dworkin in particular.
These kinds of battles are inevitably frustrating, sometimes massively silly, and often distract activists from “real” political work. But they’re also necessary, a way to work out and work through issues that are inevitably more complicated than the political slogans with which most movements make their case to the world at large. Within feminism, for example, the “sex wars” have pushed anti-porn feminism from the center of the movement to the margins — a good thing for feminists, and for everyone else. Debates challenge dogmas; they’re symptoms of political health, not signs of weakness.
Indeed, if the Men’s Rights Movement is to have even a small chance of transforming itself from an insular, largely reactionary movement that’s actually harmful to men, into one that actually does men, and the world at large, some good, it’s going to have to have these kinds of debates. Right now the Men’s Rights Movement turns legitimate concern and legitimate anger at real problems faced by men into bitterness aimed at feminist bogey-women and women at large; it’s as destructive for the real cause of men’s rights, and for the world at large, as the Dworkinite branch of feminism was for feminists and for everyone else.
So it’s always interesting to me to see an actual substantive debate break out in the angry-manosophere. The latest: an honest-to-goodness debate over the notion of a “marriage strike” that has recently become an MRA shibboleth. In a series of posts, the blogger who calls himself Dalrock asks
whether or not there really is, or will be, a marriage strike. My first answer is that it depends on how we define the term. If those using it are thinking of a classical strike where men would eschew marriage out of a sense of male solidarity in an effort to extract a better social bargain, this isn’t happening and won’t happen any time in the near future.
Looking over the stats used by MRAs to provide evidence that men in general, not just Men-Going-Their-Own-Way MRA types are, in effect, boycotting marriage, he argues
that the metric published by The National Marriage Project is being widely misinterpreted, and show[s] that the vast majority of current white men and women in the us in their mid 30s have married at some time. … We may yet see a marriage strike by white men in the US, but the data simply isn’t in yet.
As a result of his posts, Dalrock has gotten a lot of what he calls “push-back” from the MRM community, some of it quite personal, so much so that he felt he had to clarify that
For those of you who are refusing to marry, I’m not denying your existence or equating you with UFO conspiracy theorists. As I’ve said before, we won’t see men banding together against their immediate interests to form a better social bargain longer term. But this doesn’t mean individual men won’t decide that marriage isn’t a risk they want to take.
This kind of “push-back” from your ideological allies is actually a sign that you’re moving forward.
I’ll weigh in on the whole marriage debate in a future post or few, but in the meantime I’m just going to watch how this plays out.