Category Archives: internal debate
Men’s Rights Classix: The Age of Consent is Misandry
If it weren't for this guy, there would be no pedophiles.
Today, a trip down memory lane to revisit an until-recently lost classic of modern misogyny: Jay Hammers’ “The Age of Consent is Misandry.” The piece, originally published on Jay Hammers’Men’s Rights blog, inspired some heated discussions amongst MRAs online, with some harshly criticizing the piece as an apologia for pedophilia and others hailing it as a “politically incorrect” masterpiece. Stung by the criticism, Hammers ultimately took his blog down. But the piece has since been resurrected on the Human-Stupidity blog – another blog that seems rather unhealthily obsessed with the supposed injustice of men not being allowed to fuck underage girls.
Here are some of its highlights (that is, lowlights); the headlines are mine.
ALL ABOUT THE MENZ
The arbitrary age of consent is not about protecting women/girls. It is about valuing females and their virtue over males and their freedom. The intent of the laws is to stop older men from having sex with younger women and that is how it is enforced. It was never intended to stop younger men from having sex with older women.
MORE BETA BLUES
Age of consent laws are designed to punish beta males. A beta male in his 20s, unsuccessful with women his own age who are infused with a sense of feminist entitlement and deride all but the top alpha males who take interest in them, who seeks companionship with a younger, sexually mature female who desires him, should not go to prison for acting on that which is normal male sexuality.
FEMINISTS WHO SUPPORT AGE OF CONSENT LAWS ARE TREATING WOMEN LIKE CHILDREN
If we are to treat women as children then we should be consistent. Young women who have sex with older men are as much victims as women who have sex with a pick-up artist after meeting at a club. In both cases, feminists are angry because the woman has been “fooled” into having sex with a less than ideal mate in terms of value. …
This is what makes feminists angry and this is why age of consent exists still today, because it is assumed women are not mentally mature enough to give consent AND because older women want to limit men’s options to increase their own value in the sexual marketplace.
BUT WOMEN ARE CHILDREN, BASICALLY
Older women … are generally not of a much higher intelligence level than teenage girls. The big difference between the two is that older women are less attractive and that is what makes them so damn angry. …
Females generally do not significantly mature mentally past puberty so it should always be illegal for any woman to have sex or it should never be illegal for any woman to have sex. There is no arbitrary age where females suddenly become self-aware, realizing the consequences of their actions, and stop seeking out alpha males. Thus there must not be an arbitrary age of consent for sex.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
If anything, it should be illegal for women to have sex with men until men have been educated on the truths of women, Marriage 2.0, Game, feminism, and men’s rights.
Discuss?
The Cock Blockade
Benedict Arnold: Don't let your dick be like this guy!
There are a lot of manosphere misogynists and MRAs who think that “Game” (pick-up artistry) offers a sort of liberation for guys who heretofore have been at a horrible disadvantage to stuck-up bitches in the dating arena. But there are others – and the blogger at Omega Virgin Revolt is one of them – who think that spending so much time trying to figure out how to impress women is not only a waste of time but a sort of capitulation to the evil that is women. To put it in the parlance of the manosphere: If women are just a bunch of cunts, why waste your life chasing pussy?
I recently ran across a comment on the blog Omega Virgin Revolt that explains this particular theory quite cogently. Well, as cogently as these guys ever get. (I’ve taken the liberty of editing out some of the less-comprehensible bits.) According to this anonymous non-Gamer:
Men have so much power that they literally give it away… [by] chasing tail. Biological impulses my ass. Humans have this thing called the ability to think and the power to choose. It’s why we are at the top of the food chain yet there are much larger and stronger creatures that exist. Apply that to women and sex as well. If [men would] go on a sex strike like the MRM should have [done] as one of it’s primary objectives … .
It’s like Lysistrata, only with penises.
Which makes men who chase after women sexual strikebreakers. Scabs. Traitors. Collaborators. BeneDICK Arnolds who are quite literally sleeping with the enemy.
Who in their right mind thinks that fraternizing is going to get them anywhere? First off it makes men in general look like … out of control [scum] who only want sex and gives women even more reason to view us all like that. Well I myself am not manipulated by sex and once men get to that point, women simply can’t overcome that. And you know why? Because they have to bring something else besides it which many unfortunately don’t comprehend.
Yep. We’re back to the MRA misogynist theory – discussed here previously – that the only thing women bring to the table, as possible romantic partners and humans, is the vagina. And that when men “call them on it,” as it were, they will collapse in a heap, realizing they can’t lord it over men with the power of their vaginas any more.
Our anonymous philosopher then makes what he evidently sees as a highly cutting remark about feminism:
Isn’t that actually being a true feminist and the basis to which we should all hold women up to?
Um … yes? Feminism does indeed suggest that the worth of women does not inhere entirely in their vaginas, at least not any more so than the worth of men inheres in their dicks.
What do we want? Genital equality!
When do we want it! Now!
But back to our anonymous friend and his manifesto:
You go to war, the first thing you do is try to embargo or blockade your enemy’s means of getting supplies to keep their own war effort going long before the firs[t] shot is fired. But these days, men are giving women all that and much more just to turn around use on them.
That’s right, fellows. He’s talking about a cock blockade. Cut off their dick supply at the source!
Urk. Let me reword that last bit:
Keep your dicks locked down, far from the grasping hands of desperate women. Starve them out.
Soon enough they’ll surrender, and come out waving white flags. And, presumably, their panties.
Profit??
EDIT: I changed the title to one that darksidecat recommended. It’s really a much better title.
W.F. Price: A Daisy Picking Mangina?
I'm onto you, all women!
MRAs and MGTOWers are, as you might have guessed, some pretty acronym-happy people. And one of their favorite acronyms — besides those two – is NAWALT, which stands for “Not All Women Are Like That.” This is a phrase often uttered by people who are not misogynist assholes in response to things said about women by people who are misogynist assholes. Apparently many MRAs and MGTOWers hear this so often that they’ve turned it into a running gag, the “joke” being that in their minds all women really ARE like that.
Now W.F. Price of The Spearhead has caused a tempest in the teapot that is the manosphere by admitting that, in fact, not all women are like that:
We all know that there are good women out there, including some who comment here, in our families, at work and in neighborhoods all over the land, so why shouldn’t we listen to women who tell us this is the case?
Now, Price has not suddenly become a feminist or anything. Indeed he went on to argue that even if not all women are horrible monsters,
a lot of them are, and we have no assurance that the nice girl who is smiling and saying she loves you won’t at some point destroy your life. …
If somebody handed you a revolver with three loaded chambers and three empty ones and said, “go ahead and aim this at your head and pull the trigger — not all the chambers are loaded,” would you go along with the suggestion? Of course not. It would be sheer folly.
And, oh, it goes on. Blah blah blah, men, don’t get married. Blah blah blah, and you good ladies out there better give up some of your rights – sorry, advantages — because the bad ladies abuse them and pretty soon no man will want to marry any of you:
[T]hose women who really “aren’t like that”… are less likely to find a man willing to marry them, and more likely to be used and abandoned at the first hint of commitment. Society at large is increasingly skeptical about the virtues of women, and the word is bubbling up from the grass roots that women are a risky proposition. …
Until the laws are reformed and some balance is restored to relationships, men who care at all about their lives will have no choice but to regard any woman he becomes involved with as a loaded gun pointed straight at him.
So, yeah, this is the same old W.F. Price we know and don’t love.
On The Spearhead itself, the dissenters were at least generally polite. “Nah, sorry Mr Price,” wrote oddsock. “Your well written post cuts no ice with me. All women are like that.” Herbal Essence also challenged Price’s math:
The argument needs to be rejected because nearly all women are enabling the behavior of the worst of them. And nearly all women stand, arms akimbo, as a bloc to preserve female superiority. ..
[I]t’s time that men take off their rose-colored glasses and realize that nearly all women are waging a war against us. For god sakes, our own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters support the female hive mind over their own flesh and blood. (us.)
Over on MGTOWforums.com, the judgment was a little harsher. The commenter calling himself fairi5fair reacted as though Price had lopped off his own dick and announced his engagement to the ghost of Andrea Dworkin.
W. F. Price is just a daisy-picking mangina with a chip on his shoulder imo. Even the woman MRA I knew was probably just using it as a slick way to trap a nesting male.
Bottom line: if words are coming out of a woman’s mouth, she’s a lying cunt. Mr. Price probably wants to believe in some romantic fairytale because he just got divorced and wants pussy again, and doesn’t want to face the reality of his options.
Yes, Mr. Price, you’re going to get your sorry ass handed to you again if you keep thinking with your dick and your heart. Use the brain, moron. Next!
Whenever I run across something this idiotic, I have to remind myself that Not All MGTOWers Are That Astoundingly Stupid. NAMGTOWATAS, for short.
Internet Inactivism and the MRA Paradox
MRA in action
As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of Men’s Rights Activists aren’t really activists at all, if by “activists” you mean people who occasionally get off their asses and try to engage in political activity in the real world. As I put in in my piece for the Good Men Project on misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement,
Men’s rights activists aren’t much like any other activists I’ve ever run across. For one thing, for supposed activists they are almost completely inactive. Sure, they complain endlessly about things they see as terrible injustices against men. They just don’t do anything about them. While some of those who consider themselves fathers’ rights activists—a slightly different breed from your garden-variety MRAs—try to influence laws and legislatures, MRAs do little more than cultivate their resentments.
MRAs seem to be good at one thing, and one thing only: posting angry comments on websites, whether their own or on those of their many enemies – whether that’s on blogs like this one or in the comments section on various mainstream media sites they consider “misandrist.” (Actually: that’s not entirely fair – on a few occasions, MRAs have been moved to make threatening phone calls as well.) They don’t raise money for anything but their own web sites and their pet projects. They don’t organize demonstrations that involve more than a tiny handful of people. Like, for example, this one, involving one dude dressed like Batman who climbed up onto a highway sign:
Or this one, which involved a dude dressed up as Batman and a dude dressed up as Robin, climbing up on a bridge.
If your protests typically involve fewer people than, say, the line of people waiting to use the Redbox video rental kiosk outside your local supermarket on a Friday night, I think it’s safe to say that yours is not a mass movement, at least not yet.
Am I being unfair in demanding MRAs actually, literally,get off their asses before I consider them to be activists? Perhaps.
But, as it turns out, MRAs aren’t much good at sitting-on-your-ass activism either. Case in point: For quite some time – weeks? months? — MRA elder Paul Elam has been urging readers of his blog A Voice For Men to sign a petition to disbar a District Attorney he and other MRAs have decided is corrupt. But despite his repeated pleas to his readers to sign the thing, it has not yet garnered the required 1000 signatures, even though at least a few of his readers have talked about signing it more than once. [Edited to add: it has now gotten more than 1000 signaturesd.]
Today, this particular example of internet inactivism prompted Elam to lash out at his non-signing readers. Declaring himself “tired and frustrated” and “sick of this shit,” he once again begged his readers to sign. Then he went a step further, suggesting that he might limit commenting on his site to “activists that are contributing to this site in one way or another” as a way of encouraging activism and discouraging those who are “sucking up air and doing little else.”
I don’t think further exhortation on his part – or limiting the comments there to “real” activists only – is likely to make much difference. [Edited to add: Nagging a few more people to spend two minutes signing an online petition is one thing. Actually transforming them into real activists is another.] Elam is running up against the inherent paradox of Men’s Rights “activism” – the fact that most of those complaining the most about alleged injustices against men are not in fact interested in changing anything. Their “activism,” as it were, is little more than an excuse to wallow in their own bitterness, and to blame others for their own problems.
If MRAs really cared about domestic violence against men – as opposed to using the issue as a rhetorical weapon against feminists – they would be raising money and devoting their time to actually building shelters, like the (mostly) women who built the first shelters decades ago, and the (mostly) women who keep these shelters going today. If MRAs were really interested in stopping prison rape, instead of simply complaining about it, they’d be donating money to or working with the advocacy group Just Detention or other groups concerned about the treatment of prisoners. If they were really interested in helping those falsely accused of rape or other crimes, they’d be working with The Innocence Project or some other group fighting for the falsely accused or convicted. Or they would be starting real organizations of their own.
But that’s not, at heart, what the MRM is about. For all but a tiny handful of real activists, it’s not about changing the world. It’s about creating a space where men can kvetch and blame and cultivate their own sense of martyrdom. Actually trying to change the real world would involve , well, going out into the real world, a place where their assertions about the alleged oppression of men are seen as the nonsense they are, a place where their bitterness and hatred of women is seen as bitterness and hatred rather than the righteous anger they like to imagine that it is.
When MRAs do venture out of their self-created bubble they tend to either make fools of themselves – like Batman on the highway sign in the video above – or to reveal themselves to be the angry fanatics they are. Elam, for his part, sometimes even has trouble making his case in the relatively sympathetic environment of the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit, and is quickly reduced to sputtering rage when anyone disagrees with him. In the end, sputtering rage seems to be what the MRM is really all about.
>The Men’s Rights Movement Vs. The People’s Front of Judea
>
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.
