Men’s Rights Redditors discover a new woman to hate (and it’s one of the ones I wrote about in my last post)
Reading comprehension: a bit of a problem for the angry dude crowd. So in my post earlier today I wrote about a Redditdude who got so angry reading a relatively innocuous Forbes column by a WOMAN ON TEH INTERNET that he called her a “cunt” and threatened to murder people and got more than a thousand net upvotes. All based on a complete misreading of her article, of which he obviously only skimmed the first paragraph.
Well, now the Men’s Rights subreddit has gotten hold of the Forbes column, and they too are pig-biting mad – not so much at the column itself, which it’s clear not many of them have actually read, but at a straw column they’ve written in their heads which is nothing but EEEVIL MISANDRY.
The Internet finds yet more women to hate
Pissed off cats: Much more entertaining than pissed-off dudes on the Internet
So yesterday, I appeared (albeit very briefly) on TheStream on Al Jazeera English along with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, social media researcher Alice Marwick, Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson, and others. The topic: online misogyny and harassment of women. No sooner had the show ended than I ran across two perfect examples of precisely the sort of misogynistic harassment we’d just been talking about, courtesy of Reddit and Roosh.
First, Reddit. On Monday, Forbes columnist Kashmir Hill – female, beep boop! – wrote a piece mocking the notion (apparently widespread in some circles) that in these hyper-connected days people without Facebook accounts are a bit suspect. But part way along towards making her point she committed the terrible error of making the following not-to-be-taken-literally remark:
The Al Jazeera English show I’m appearing on starts in a few minutes [UPDATED: It's over. Will post a YouTube link shortly]
The Al Jazeera English show I’m appearing on starts in about 10 minutes, at 3:30 PM
You can watch a live stream of the show (TheStream) on the Al Jazeera website here.
Men may not be from Mars, but A Voice for Men wants them to get all the credit for that Mars landing
It’s a proud day for the dudes over at A Voice for Men, which is celebrating the landing of the Curiousity rover on Mars by giving dudes everywhere serious dude credit for the event, which apparently involved no women at all. Well, maybe a few. But it certainly didn’t involve any of the women in the women’s studies department at Columbia University!
Actually it would be rather difficult for that to be the case. Impossible, really, as there is no women’s studies department at Columbia. Instead, Columbia has an Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an interdisciplinary center that works in cooperation with the Barnard College Women’s Studies department.
In any case, that once sentence is the entire text of the post, which linked to a live feed of the landing.
But to make sure everyone understands the MAN-significance of this MAN-vent, the AVFM dudes promoted it with this MAN-tastic blurb on the front page. (I mean the blurb on the right, of course, celebrating MEN and their UTTER MASTERYof technology. Just ignore that bit on the left about the technical glitches that AVFM has itself been having lately.)
The comments are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the AVFM crowd. I especially liked these two, from a manly fellow calling himself ActaNonVerba.
His followup is a bit Anthony Zarat-esque in its utopian grandeur:
I will be appearing on Al Jazeera English tomorrow afternoon. (And you can be a part of it too.)
I will be appearing on Al Jazeera English tomorrow talking about misogyny online. The show I’m going to appear on is called TheStream; it’s on at 3:30 PM ET.
You can watch a live stream of the show on the Al Jazeera website here.
If you want to be part of the discussion on the show, you can record a comment for the show’s producers here, or on the main page for TheStream. Some of the questions they’re asking:
Do women face more misogyny online than they do in person? Why? Does it reflect real sentiment or opportunistic, anonymous behavior? Have you experienced harassment as a woman online? What can be done about it?
I’m really looking forward to the show. It should be interesting.
If you have any suggestions about issues I should raise or points you think it’s important to make, let me know in the comments below.
Meet the Kittens 2: The Cutening
Perched on a favorite pillow.
Prof. Murder aka Pantz’ favorite toy.
Which has also become Sweetie Pie Jonus’ favorite toy.
Enjoying the view.
… and Sweetie Pie notices a bug.
They are ridiculous!
They remain adorable and tiring, though they’ve calmed down a little from the first few days. I think coming from a cage (filled with other kittens) to a big apartment overstimulated them a bit and gave them a desire to run and run (and play and play, and fight and fight).
F*ck funnels, raw dogs, and garbage receptacles: Roosh on Romance
So, yeah, I’ve been reading some more Roosh.
Just a little FYI. It’s probably not a good idea to take dating advice from a dude who writes shit like this:
Your fuck funnel is the series of steps you take from the approach all the way to sex. Most girls will drop out as they go through your funnel by losing interest, declaring they have a boyfriend, flaking out, throwing up, or a multitude of other reasons that prevent sex. This means that for ever one girl you fuck, you have to approach a lot of girls. This is the basic law of averages, where no man fucks every girl he interacts with (even serial rapists have a failure rate).
Or this:
The best sex I’ve had was from mediocre girls who let me treat their bodies like garbage receptacles.
Or this:
I could probably have raw dog sex with 95% of all white girls, regardless of socioeconomic background. I only have met one girl that was super serious about using condoms, but I eventually fucked her without a condom too, so actually I change that to 100%. I could bang every white girl who lives in the United States without a condom if I desired, within three dates. I’m not kidding. I could do most of them raw dog on the same night. Here’s how to do it. ….
At this point our intrepid dating guru explains his clever Assange-esque (allegedly) method for convincing women to have sex with him sans condom, which involves repeatedly sticking his condomless penis into his dates until they stop resisting.
Note: He followed this post with another one about how terrified he was that he might have contracted HIV.
Oh, Roosh, is it entirely by coincidence that your name rhymes with “douche?”
Men’s Rights Redditor: “I advocate the removal of judges, politicians, and other government agents who violate the Constitution by any means necessary.” [UPDATED]
Men’s Rights subreddit regular Demonspawn (remember him?) is back again with some deliberately vague but definitely threatening talk about judges and politicians:
Not a lot of “plausible deniability” here, though I am sure various MRAs will try to excuse this as not being what it obviously is: a threat of violence against judges, politicians and others who work for the government.
He’s done this before; I wrote about it here.
And while we’re on the topic of Demonspawn, here’s a little followup comment of his from the thread we discussed the other day. It’s a giant wall of text, I know, but it contains gems like: “When women mouth off to men and get their faces bashed in, they’ll know equality.” At least this comment of his got as many downvotes as upvotes.
I’m banned from the Men’s Rights subreddit, of course, but Demonspawn, despite repeatedly violating the subreddit’s rules about posting comments advocating violence, continues to post away. See his comment history for more lovely thoughts on, among other things, why women are parasites who don’t deserve the vote.
Men’s Rights Redditor on a Men’s Rights critic: “He is getting older and homosexual and … people like these tend to age like milk instead of wine.”
In yet another discussion of Arthur Goldwag’s latest post on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog (looking at MRAs bad-mouthing the men who lost their lives protecting their girlfriends in the Aurora shootings), longtime Men’s Rights Redditor Liverotto offers this intriguing take on what he sees as Goldwag’s motivations for criticizing the Men’s Rights movement:
Yeah, a dude actually wrote that, and a couple of people actually upvoted it.
I’m trying to understand the logic: Goldwag is growing older and more homosexual (do men usually become gay as they age?). But gay men age badly, which makes them mad at their “suitors.” So therefore Goldwag has come to hate the (mostly straight) men of the Men’s Rights movement?
Another highlight of the discussion: The r/mensrights regular who thinks I’m Paul Elam. No, really.
