Reddit Ugly: MRAs and others argue that a man allegedly wronged in divorce court should turn to murder
So there was a bit of ugliness over on the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day. No, scratch that; there was a giant explosion of ugliness.
A couple of days ago, you see, a Redditor with a nine-day-old account posted a story to r/menrights detailing the alleged ill-treatment he’d gotten at the hands of a vengeful ex-wife and an unsympathetic family court system. The story was filled with literally unbelievable details – among other things, he claimed to have been rendered homeless by the demands of the court, forced to pay $1000 a month in spousal support to his ex though she had a $60,000 a year job. Some commenters challenged the veracity of the tale – while the OP gave a case number in his post, no one has been able to find evidence that a case with that number actually exists. (The OP has not responded to the skeptics.)
But most of the respondents assumed the story was true. And why not? It seemed to reinforce every paranoid MRA fantasy of evil women and courts out of control. Despite its fishiness, the post got more than 700 net upvotes.
And that’s where the ugliness began. Not content to merely offer the man sympathy and advice, many commenters started talking murder, and some of the most violent comments got dozens of upvotes.
How to Get Downvoted on the Men’s Rights Subreddit, Sandra Fluke edition
If you ever have the desire to get yourself downvoted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, here’s one sure-fire strategy: Write a sensible comment suggesting that birth control benefits people with penises as much as people with vaginas.
Here are the two top replies to this comment:
I was going to point out some of the ironies inherent in Men’s Rightsers getting mad about women getting “free” birth control, but I suspect you can figure those out on your own.
This is why the so-called Men’s Rights movement is not so much a rights movement as a take-away-other-people’s-rights movement.
Complementarian Loner: “Due to their lame, banal talking, [women] show they are only good for sex.” So online sexual harassment of women is just peachy!
Women: Always up to no good!
Complementarian Loners, a relationship blog of sorts run by two kinky but reactionary Catholics (and which I’ve written about before), describes itself as “primarily a blog of ideas.” The main idea seems to be that women are awful, worthless creatures. Surprisingly, it is CL, the female half of the blogging team, who is often the most vociferous on this point.
In a post unironically titled “Tits or GTFO (a.k.a. How Women Ruin Everything),” CL defends the regular harassment women face when entering – sorry, “invading” – “male spaces” online. As she writes:
Too many women will waltz in and expect to engage everyone, with no sense that perhaps they should just hang back once they’ve had their say if they even have it. They talk and talk and talk, derailing conversations, going off-topic usually to talk about themselves, until all that’s left is a room full of clucking hens and all the smart guys eventually get fed up and leave.
They want to be considered equals yet prove they do not deserve it both by showing that what they really want is to be up on that pedestal and that they are incapable of rational thought.
The Man Boobz Street Team Flying Squad goes on a postering blitz!
Sorry to post so late today, but I’ve been super busy helping to coordinate the Man Boobz Street Team Flying Squad in its latest postering blitz. Here are some shots of the team at work in Cleveland, Ohio and Humpy Creek, Alaska.
And here’s the Man Boobz Misandrymobile we use to transport Street Team members to and from their targets. Don’t worry! As you can see, it’s driven by a man. (You know what they say about women drivers.)
Keep up the good work, gals!
NOTE: The Man Boobz Street Team Flying Squad is imaginary.
Ann Barnhardt, contemporary anti-suffragette: “As soon as the 19th amendment was passed, men were effectively castrated, and in many, many cases disenfranchised by their wives.”
Birth of a suffragette
As election day draws ever nearer – at least for those of us here in the States – I thought I’d devote a couple of posts to some of those who think that half of us should be prevented from casting our votes this November. I think you can probably guess which half.
The strangest thing to me about those who still think that Women’s Suffrage was a bad idea – aside from the fact that they exist at all – is that some of them are women.
Consider the strange case of Ann Barnhardt.
A right-wing blogger and the founder of a now-shuttered commodities brokerage, Barnhardt has very strong opinions about a lot of things, including Presidential politics, and is not shy about sharing them. Indeed, when she went all Galt and shut down Barnhardt Capital Management last year, she declared:
I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform.
(For the rest of her explanation, see here.)
Despite her strong political convictions, Barnhardt also believes, apparently with equal conviction, that she should not be able to express her opinions through the ballot box.
MGTOWer: Raise girls to be farmers to keep them from becoming whores
The ideal woman?
Let’s say you’re a dude who thinks that All Women Are Like That, except possibly for two or three of them. Let’s say you think women today are the equivalent of rattlesnakes, or unexploded grenades, or hungry, hungry alligators. Let’s say that you think marrying a woman “is like playing Russian Roulette with a fucking Gatling gun and hoping that the one that might actually hit you is a blank.” Let’s say you think that women are
Hypergamous
Materialistic
unfaithful
almost Bi Polar like mood swings
entitled
completely self serving
histrionic
parasitic
hard wired for alpha cock
The Man Boobz Street Team sprays the world!
Posters are so last century, Daddy-o! What’s happening today is GRAFFITI. And so the Man Boobz Street Team — with boots on the ground on all nine continents except Iceland, which isn’t even really a continent anyway — has decided to retool its approach, abandoning its previous massively successful postering scheme in favor of spray paint and spontaneity.
Unfortunately, to be honest, the new strategy has not been altogether successful as of yet. While the energy is there, some of the Street Team have had trouble staying on message.
Father Benedict Groeschel: In “a lot of the cases [of sexual abuse by priests] the youngster is the seducer.” Friars: He didn’t mean to blame the victims.
Father Benedict Groeschel
It’s victim-blaming at its worst. Last week, Father Benedict Groeschel, a fairly prominent religious figure who is, among other things, the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, said some utterly appalling things about the victims of sexual abuse by priests.
In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Groeschel declared that some of the victims were likely “seducers,” and expressed sympathy for ”poor” Jerry Sandusky, and suggested that abusers “on their first offense … should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime.”
After the comments spurred outrage, the NC Register took down the interview. Here are the relevant sections, which I found reposted by an appalled columnist on the right-wing RenewAmerica site. The whole thing is awful; I’ve highlighted some of the worst parts.
How MRAs view the world (in cartoon form).
I found this cartoon over at Comically Vintage. I’m pretty sure this is how MRAs view the world.
Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c): It’s “a disaster to say ‘never hit women’…..it destroys the womans ability to bond closely with the man via a good spanking.” [UPDATED WITH NOLAN RESPONSE]
Some misogynists seem to have a really difficult time telling the difference between consensual kinkiness and domestic violence. Over on the Happier Abroad forums, our old friend Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) – who doesn’t really seem to be all that happy, honestly – tells the fellows about a woman he recently met. (Note: the faux ellipses in the quotes to follow are all from the original.)
I am now able to look a woman in the eyes, even from some distance, and know if she is a decent woman or not. I only developed this two years or so ago and have only had it happen 4 times. I am not saying that it is ONLY these women who are decent women….I am saying that the 4 this has happened to turned out to be pretty good women…
By a “pretty good woman” he seems to mean a woman who hates women nearly as much as he does:
