MRA founding father Warren Farrell responds to questions about his incest research with evasive non-answers. And a smiley.
Watch out: He has a Ph.D!
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Warren Farrell, whose 1993 book The Myth of Male Power essentially set the agenda for the Men’s Rights movement we know (and don’t love) today, did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit yesterday.
Most of the questions he chose to answer were pretty much softballs, and his answers largely reiterated things he’s said before many times. But he was also asked some pointed questions about his views on incest which he chose to answer. Well, sort of. Instead of clearing up the issue, he dug his hole a little deeper.
[TRIGGER WARNING for incest/child abuse apologia.]
Question Time: MRAs and PUAs in the real world
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And now back to our regularly scheduled post:
Reading through some of the stranger comments from MRAs and PUAs and other manospherean types I often find myself wondering to what degree this “new misogyny” reaches beyond the internet. I don’t mean old-fashioned misogyny and sexism, which are obviously fairly common offline. I mean the elaborate misogynistic ideologies we discuss here – the “feminism runs the world,” “all women are hypergamous bitches who will dump you in a second for an alpha,” “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” kind of stuff.
I run across much less of this offline than on, though the people I hang out with aren’t exactly a representative sampling of the general public.
So I’m asking you, dear readers, to tell me a bit about your own experiences. Do you run across MRAs/PUAs in the real world on a regular or even an irregular basis? Where (online or off) did you first encounter MRAs and/or PUAs? What aspects of what we might call the manosphere ideology are the most common offline? If it seems less common offline, is this because the beliefs are not that widespread, or is it that people are less willing to say the kind of horrific misogynistic shit they say online to other people face to face?
Thoughts?
Man Boobz Party Time President’s Day Pledge Drive!
Party on, dude!
If you aren’t too worn out by all the Presidents’ Day revelry — and the ritual Donning of the Fake Lincoln Beards — I would like to welcome you to the first edition of the 2013 Man Boobz Pledge Drive! (There will be 3 in all.)
I’ll try to keep this brief and repeat what I said last time: If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below and sending a few bucks my way. Or, if you’d prefer, a massive quantity of bucks. You don’t need a PayPal account to donate; you can use a credit card, and I think there are other options as well.
There’s a bit more urgency to my request this time: I’m really and truly broke at the moment. Things should get better later in the year, but right now I could use all the help I can get.
I appreciate any and all contributions. And I’d also like to do a quick shout-out to the those who send me much needed $ between pledge drives, whether these are one-shot deals or regular infusions.
That said, if you’re also broke and can’t swing a contribution now, I completely understand. There are lots of ways to contribute to this blog besides cold hard cash, and lots of you contribute enormously every day with smart and funny comments and cartoons and silly parody MRA posters and so on and so on. Which is awesome. It’s the community here that keeps me going.
So thanks!
Oh, and if you need more persuading, here’s Tom Baker (no, really) begging for bucks during a PBS pledge drive.
Crystal Bawling: Spearheaders look forward to an apocalyptic future in which the ladies finally get their comeuppance
Over at The Spearhead, the boys are thinking about tomorrow – to be more specific, about the year 2020, the date at which an MRA calling himself The Fifth Horseman predicted in an eccentric online manifesto that a convergence of forces would lead to the popping of what he calls “the misandry bubble,” and that the ensuing gender apocalypse would put the uppity ladies of the world firmly in their place.
Men’s Rights Redditors outraged again by imaginary injustice, alleged-stripping-at-school-assembly edition
Trapped in an imaginary matriarchy!
MRAs spend an awful lot of time getting worked up by hypothetical injustices. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, angry Men’s Rightsers regularly post links to stories of women behaving badly – or who may have been charged with or convicted of a crime – with indignant headlines suggesting that the women in question would be treated far worse if “she had been a man.”
The latest example of this outrage over imagined injustices? This post, found in r/mensrights today, with 87 net upvotes:
If you follow the link, it goes to a brief story about the alleged incident in The Huffington Post. I say “alleged” because the woman in question has not yet been convicted of anything. As the story reports, the police arrested her because
school staff told them the assembly was halted and the cafeteria cleared after Meaders began dancing onstage and took off some of her clothes.
She’s charged with seven counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of public lewdness.
An Albany City Court clerk says Meaders was arraigned Friday afternoon and ordered held on $3,000 bail. She doesn’t have a lawyer yet.
There is no mention of putting her on a sex offenders registry because, and let me be blunt here, YOU HAVE TO BE CONVICTED OF A CRIME TO GET PUT ON ONE. She’s merely been CHARGED.
There is no “pussy pass” for women that enables them to bypass the sex offenders registry ONCE THEY ARE CONVICTED of public lewdness. The relevant NY State law can be found here; as you can see, the gender of the convicted offender is not an issue. (It took all of 30 seconds on Google to dig that up.) Meaders isn’t getting special treatment because she’s a woman; she’s not on the offenders registry because an arrest is not the same as a conviction.
Enjoy your imagined oppression, fellas.
Read this: Guys on OkCupid try to pick up surreal-text-spouting Twitterbot Horse_ebooks
hey, sexy, do u hav skype?
I have Cloudiah to thank (again!) for putting me onto this amazing article about a devious prankster who trolls pickup artists and other lonely horny hearts with a fake OkCupid account … that replies to all come-ons with selections from the ouvre of the legendary horse_ebooks, “the surreal Twitter bot that streams nonsensical snippets of text. The result: dozens of conversations from horny men desperately vying to have sex with a robot.”
And yes, it’s as funny as it sounds, especially when the guys try to use their PUA magic to “game” this imaginary HB10 (Hot Babe 10) – or should that be HRH10 (Hot Robot Horse 10)? – only to receive responses like “VERY SOME VERY NO VERY SOME VERY CHANCE LITTLE CHANCE GOOD CHANCE LITTLE CHANCE GOOD CHANCE CHANCE CHANCE CHANCE , NAVAL” and “CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION Corp. CHAMPION Corp. CHAMPION Corp. CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION CHAMPION.”
And of course the guys keep trying.
(All this made me wonder if anyone had set up a Gertrude Stein_ebooks account, and … yes, someone has! FOLLOWED!)
Anyway, you all need to go read the post. Check out the Okc_ebooks Tumblr blog for more.
For MRAs, Valentine’s Day is “a socially coerced day of hyper-entitlement for a generation of princess leeches.”
Happy Valentine’s Day Boycott Day! Every year on Valentine’s Day, MRAs around the world unite in a sacred ritual: the annual Valentine’s Day Blaming of the Ladies parade.
For, you see, Valentine’s Day is little more than a plot by the ladies to extract fancy chocolate and diamonds and other pricey romantic goods from the world’s men. That’s why, for the past I’m-not-going-to-look-up-the-number of years, the lady hating radio personality Marc Rudov has been trying to get other men to boycott the holiday to show the ladies of the world what’s what.
#TellAFeministThankYou fends off a manosphere manvasion!
Kittens composing feminist tweets.
The twitter hashtag wars continue! Apparently still pissed off that feminists pooped on their #INeedMasculismBecause tag the other day, the dudes of the manosphere launched a little counterattack aimed at #TellAFeministThankYou, a hashtag originally started by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to give an opportunity to feminists to thank other feminists for, you know, being awesome and stuff.
With courthouse violence on the rise, Men’s Rights activists continue to lionize the author of a terrorist manifesto urging men to burn down courthouses
Poster at a memorial event for Tom Ball, an MRA who advocated burning down courthouses and police stations.
EDITED TO ADD: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it seems even more important to reinterate that influential Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men continues to host, in its “activism” section no less, a terrorist manifesto literally calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations. Until and unless that manifesto is removed, and A Voice for Men apologizes for hosting it, I will be linking to this post every time I mention A Voice for Men.
There has been another courthouse shooting. On Monday morning, the father of a man due in court for a child support hearing pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and shot his son’s ex wife and a friend of hers as they entered the lobby of the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington Delaware. After an exchange of gunfire with police that left two officers wounded, 68-year old Thomas Matusiewicz took his own life. The two women Matusiewcz shot were pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital.
