Category Archives: misogyny
Lords of their Dingalings: Men’s Rightsers outraged at Time writer for noting the lack of female characters in The Hobbit
Can you find the woman in this picture?
Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
2012: Year of Triumphs for the Men’s Rights Movement
Come early to get a good seat!
What a year!
The Men’s Rights movement, the most important human rights movement of the 21st century, got 2012 off to a flying start in February with an event in Bozeman, Montana that was quite literally attended by no one. After that, the year was a whirlwind of activity. Let’s go to the timeline:
Battle of the Banned (Man Boobz trolls)
Miniskirted cyclists prepare to oppress men with their legs.
Feeling nostalgic for some of the Man Boobz trolls of yore? Well, head over to the Men’s Rights subreddit, where two of the greats most terrible are having a battle of wits. It all started when Man Boobz Troll of the Year 2011 NWOslave offered his opinions in a thread discussing Swaziland’s recent banning of “rape-provoking” miniskirts.
Men’s Rights Redditor warns men: “Be careful with your sperm. Your very freedom is at stake.”
Men: Protect your Purity of Essence
It’s official: Men’s Rights Activists are more obsessed with their “precious bodily fluids” than Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper. Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, many of the regulars are celebrating Boxing Day by sitting around on their computers worrying about evil predatory succubi burgling their sperm. Check out this little post, which has gotten 90 upvotes so far:
Not-Misogyny, Explained at Last
But THIS man clearly LOVES women.
There’s one kind of person you meet again and again in the manosphere: the man who hates women, but insists that he’s not a misogynist. Some of them will even tell you that you calling them a misogynist is equivalent to a white person calling a black person the n-word. And they seem to even believe this.
National Review writer: Men and “husky” boys could have prevented the Newtown school shootings
Apparently Charlotte Allen thinks all janitors look like this.
It’s always a little distressing to see manosphere-style dumbassery outside the manosphere. Today’s offender: Charlotte Allen at National Review Online, explaining how the deaths in Newtown are the result of the school’s “feminized setting.” Had the school been filled with manly men (and manly boys), Adam Lanza could have been stopped in his tracks!
No, really, that’s what she says. Except that what she wrote is somehow even more egregious than my sarcastic summary. Read for yourself:
Homophobic Asshole Throws Other Homophobic Asshole Out of Men’s Rights Movement for Homophobic Assholery
Another big fight in the manosphere!
I don’t want to make this blog the A Voice for Men Show, but that little hangout of angry dudes has really been outdoing itself in recent days. Take site founder and chief egomaniac Paul Elam’s post the other day reading the riot act to another Men’s Rights activist for being a homophobic asshole.
Specifically, an Australian bloke named Chris Key, whom Elam describes as “a true misogynist, homophobe and all around asshole who claims to be an MRA.”
Register-Her is a Fake “Offenders Registry” Run By Misogynists, Designed to Vilify and Intimidate Women
Register-Her accused Katherine Heigl of being a man-hating bigot who “endorse[s] male targeted sexual mutilation” because she appeared in a Funny or Die video.
Some of the women profiled on the site as “bigots” include:
Actress Katherine Heigl, who was put on the site after making a humorous public service announcement for the site Funny or Die promoting the spaying and neutering of pets. Register-Her charges her with “endors[ing] male targeted sexual mutilation.”
Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, the author, most recently, of “Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness,” who was put on the site for several newspaper columns that the site misrepresents in an attempt to show that she is guilty of “an ongoing pattern of anti-male bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex.” A Voice for Men has also labeled Valenti a “child abuser” for supporting feminist causes, and on one occasion posted candid photos it claimed were of her in an attempt to cause her embarrassment.
A number of young women who attended a protest against Men’s Rights icon Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto. Register-Her used Twitter Tweets from some of the women, clearly intended as jokes, as evidence of genocidal intentions towards men. In an article on A Voice for Men, an anonymous writer even attacked one of these women for Tweeting a picture of a poster which declared “it is important to have someone’s consent before sexual activity.”
Site founder Paul Elam and other writers on A Voice for Men make no bones about their desire to ruin the lives of their foes. Indeed, the site’s much-referenced slogan is “Fuck Their Shit Up.”
In one post, Elam warned one critic of Register-Her that:
I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. …
[Y]ou fucking moron. Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut and pretend AVfM and register-her.com does not exist for as long as you can. Because, as you can see right now, anything you say or do will be thrown back in your face like holy water on a vampire.
We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity. …
You are SO fucked.
Register-Her is clearly a major part of Elam’s program to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” The “registry” is heavily promoted on A Voice for Men, which links to a number of “featured offenders” in its sidebar – all of them so-called “bigots,” none of them the criminals that Register-Her claims to really be about. A banner ad for Register-Her depicts a bloody knife. The tagline: “TRUTH is the real bitch.”
Elam’s idea of exposing the “truth” seems to involve publishing photographs and the personal information of his targets, whether these are alleged “false accusers” or simply feminists who have offended him. On the A Voice for Men internet radio show, Elam promised that:
If Mary Jane Rottencrotch decides to falsely accuse her husband of domestic violence in order to get the upper hand in a divorce … we can publish all her personal information on the website, including her name, address, phone number … even her routes to and from work.
While Elam has yet to make good on the threat of posting information on women’s routes to and from work, posts on A Voice for Men promoting the profiles of so-called “bigots” are filled with threatening language and vague intimations that further information will be revealed. In a post announcing the site’s campaign against the University of Toronto protestors, Elam wrote this about one of his targets:
We have her image and know her general location. We will identify her and profile her activity and name for public view.
We will not stop there, or just with her. And while we will not publish our complete intent, we are dogged in our efforts. …
We have no more sympathy for your agenda of hatred and exclusion than for a plantation owner’s rationale in the Antebellum South for justified ownership of another human being.
A Voice for Men’s posts about the targeted women are also filled with bizarre and hyperbolic accusations. In a post about a college student who had jokingly Tweeted that her “political position” was “kill all men hail satan,” and who in another tweet suggested she might get a tattoo reading “misandry,” one of A Voice for Men’s many pseudonynmous “agents” wrote:
She doesn’t just hate men; doesn’t just want them dead or silenced or marginalized or ignored. She at least entertains the idea of permanently marking her skin with that hatred, like a convict signaling gang affiliation.
“Agent Mauve” makes clear that he hopes to ruin the life of the young woman by putting her on Register-Her:
[T]his will be the beginning of [name removed]’s real legacy; where she can revel in the full and permanent notice of her deeds, and the lesson she is providing to the world about the nature of feminism, and the etiology of hatred. And so that anyone who ever does an internet search on her name again will be aware of it.
So far, A Voice for Men’s campaign against the Toronto protesters seems to be having what one can only assume is the desired effect. On A Voice for Men’s Facebook page, a commenter refers to one of the protesters as an “evil twisted little piece of dogshit,” adding: “I hope she suffers a fatal injury before she can go out and ruin peoples’ lives like she seems determined to do.” This comment earned several “likes” from A Voice for Men’s readers.
In the Spring of 2012, Register-Her was profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, as part of a larger feature on the so-called “Men’s Rights” movement. Writing in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, Arthur Goldwag described Register-Her’s modus operandus and its effect on one targeted woman:
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
That’s hate, and that’s precisely the sort of reaction Register-Her seems designed to provoke.
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I encourage readers to link to this piece on their websites, so as to make sure that people understand what Register-Her is really all about.
Men’s Rights Redditor Advocates Violence Against Cops — Again
Advocating violence is allegedly against the rules in the Men’s Rights subreddit. Just don’t tell it to these guys! (Or the people upvoting them.)
As I’ve noted before, Demonspawn is fairly regular violator of this particular rule — as evidenced here, here, and, oh yeah, here. (And check the archives for even more Demonspawn terribleness that stops short of advocacy of murder.)
When I asked the r/mensrights mods some months back why they didn’t just ban him for his repeated violations, you may recall, this happened:
Hey, Mens Rightsers, if you don’t want to be associated with violence, perhaps you should, you know, disassociate yourself from those who advocate violence — seriously, repeatedly, and definitely not as a joke.
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.
