The Thinking Housewife tries to tarnish the legacy of Sally Ride with a surreally homophobic eulogy
Sally Ride and her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy
Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died last week, as most of you no doubt know. On The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood uses the occasion as an opportunity to bash lesbians, feminism, and Ride herself. Wood begins her most unusual eulogy by quoting Gloria Steinem, who once said of Ride:
“Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”
Wood scoffs at the very notion, suggesting that
Steinem’s real point, in keeping with her intense dislike of women, was that women should want to be astronauts and there was something wrong with them if they didn’t.
So we’re off to a great start here. Wood then offers this patronizing assessment of Ride’s life – which nonetheless turns out to be the nicest thing she says about the legendary astronaut.
The Men”s Rights subreddit weighs in on the “Why is Reddit So Anti-Woman?” debate.
Over on AskReddit, someone called 478nist has asked a question that has been puzzling a lot of us for some time: “Why is Reddit so anti-women? (outside of r/gonewild anyway).”
I used to think it was just because the large majority of users are men, but it’s not pro-men it’s becoming more and more anti-women.
Outside of the friendzoned crap, any comment that leans towards any kind of talk of womens issues, equal rights etc gets downvoted to hell so it’s not even capable of being discussed. It seems like it’s an US vs THEM mentality more and more. Was it always like this?
The thread that followed is nearly 2000 comments long, so far, and has gotten written up on TheAtlanticWire. The discussion is surprisingly … good? Not perfect — after all, this is Reddit we’re talking about here — but not terrible.
So naturally our friends in the Men’s Rights subreddit are complaining about it.
The legendary AnthonyZarat offers this thought:
MauraLoona, meanwhile, challenges the premise of 478nist’s question, and thereby challenges reality itself:
Legitimateusername also has a problem with Reddit’s alleged surplus of manginas.
Fuckrpolitics_again just goes with some plain old-fashioned misogyny:
The Men’s Rights subreddit, such a reliable generator of self-righteous poop.
Kitty Day! [UPDATED: KITTIES PROCURED]
I will be heading out to a cat shelter in about an hour. I hope to return with a kitty or two. Probably not as large as Mr. Martin’s kitty above.
UPDATE: Success! Two tiny adorable kittens are careening around my bedroom at high velocities. It is now 4:32 AM. They have been doing this off and on since I brought them home roughly ten hours ago. I have no idea where the fuck they get all their energy. From cat food? I think I might have to start eating it myself.
JohnTheOther: the Aurora heroes aren’t heroes. KEYWORDS: calculus of death, vagina, drug addled slut
Children: Not worth saving, apparently.
JohnTheOther, blabby videoblogger and Number Two at A Voice for Men, has now weighed in with his own, slightly tardy, manifesto on the Aurora shooting and the evils of supposed male “disposability.” I didn’t read the whole thing – seriously, dude, OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS – but a few things stood out when I skimmed it. For example, this lovely passage, which seems to be a longer and fouler version of that ill-advised tweet from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto that I mentioned in my last post.
Our mainstream, which is to say, our corporate media – that which bends and fawns for access to the corrupt elected officials and modern robber barons of corporate statehood – is telling you, young man, that in order to be worthwhile, a real man, you’d better be prepared to die without complaint for the child, or the little old lady, or the drug addled slut in the next seat.
But Mr. TheOther is having none of it:
The instinct – expressing itself variously as chivalry or as fatal self sacrifice — is just one more that no longer has any discernable benefit. It is an encumbrance to any real pursuit of a civilized society in which one class of humans is not legally and socially elevated over another.
Sorry, kids; sorry, old ladies; sorry “drug addled sluts” — you’re on your own. Apparently, in a truly civilized society, no one ever looks out for anyone else. Altruism is for barbarians and Bill Bennett!
Here’s JtO’s stirring conclusion:
Those three men are not heroes, they’re just dead. The calculus of death, where one life is traded in celebration for another by preference of a vagina, is pathological and regressive. It must be recognized as the sickness it is. Those who lionized these men, whose fatal and unexamined instinct led to self-destruction; those who held them up as a heroic example to follow, are cordially invited to go first — or to go fuck themselves.
Charming as always, Mr. TheOther.
In the discussion of Mr. TheOther’s post in the Men’s Rights Subreddit, AVFM’s Paul Elam expands on the whole they aren’t heroes” theme, arguing that we need to retroactively strip away the hero status of the three men who died protecting their girlfriends — because they died protecting women.
Why do Men’s Rights Activists hate the heroes of the Aurora theater shooting?
Our old nemesis The Pigman — the MRA blogger and one half of the cartooning team responsible for atrocities like this — has some thoughts on the Aurora shootings, specifically on the men who lost their lives to protect their girlfriends from gunfire. Their heroism makes him angry, much like the fellows on The Spearhead we looked at the other day. Here’s his complaint:
How’s that for inequity? How’s that for disposability? These guys appear to have sacrificed themselves for these people primarily because of their sex.
Well, no, I think they sacrificed themselves for their girlfriends because they loved their girlfriends.
After all, where are the guys who jumped in front of their best mate, or their dad or brother? And above all, where are the women who died saving their boyfriends?
There were many heroes in the Aurora shooting. Jonathan Blunk, Matt McQuinn, and Alex Teves died protecting their girlfriends. Stephanie Davies risked her life to keep a friend shot in the neck from bleeding to death. Other acts of heroism had less storybook endings: Marcus Weaver tried to shield a female friend. He was wounded but lived; she died. Jennifer Seeger tried to drag a wounded victim to safety, but fled when the shooter returned.
Men’s Rights Redditor: “The cougar phenomenon is perverse. Yet we criminalize sex with fertile women who haven’t passed some arbitrary age limit.”
Fresh from the Men’s Rights subreddit, some thoughts from some dude called atiwywr on cougars, age of consent laws, and Justin Beiber.
So “cougars” are perverse, but pedophilia – sorry, ephebophilia — is natural and good?
The age of consent in most American states is 16.
Complaining that men can’t legally have sex with girls – sorry, “fertile women” – aged 15 and younger: Men’s Rights activism at its finest!
Manosphere blogger blames Obama, Jesse Jackson, and feminists for the Aurora theater shootings. Yes, really.
Scientific geniuses: Always white dudes
We’ve already seen some unusual perspectives on the Aurora theater tragedy courtesy of The Spearhead and the Men’s Rights subreddit. Over on whiskeysplace, the manosphere blogger (and sometime Spearhead contributor) who calls himself Whiskey throws some racism into the mix.
In Whiskey’s view, the whole thing just shows … just how badly treated white men are in America today. And, he suggests, unless we change our evil white-man-hating ways we should expect even worse massacres to come. His basic thesis:
[T]hat an (admittedly crazy) 24 year old White guy with an extremely high IQ would paint his hair red, carefully position his beat up old pickup truck against one emergency exit door, enter through the pre-arranged opened other door, and kill (again as of this writing) 12 people while wounding 58, many seriously, shows how out of hand Obama’s America has become. …
Who is at fault? In no particular order, Obama, the entire Affirmative Action establishment, Jessie Jackson, feminists, the media, and the American people for taking the easy way out and not removing the former from public life through a hard, brutal political struggle that costs time and effort and more.
Spearheader: Women are “feral creatures who want to be thugf#$cked and used.”
Women: Feral, civilization-destroying monsters
Over on The Spearhead, the discussion of, er, “altruism” (and why the men who sacrificed their lives to save their girlfriends in the Aurora theater shootings were “suckers”) continues. All of the comments I mentioned in my previous post now have dozens of upvotes; one has more than a hundred. (All except for the comment praising the dead men as “heroic” which remains underwater, votewise.)
The discussion has inspired one commenter called ck to offer this rather harsh assessment of modern women:
Words cannot convey my sense of dispair, isolation, and acceptance that women are at best amoral beings and at worst imoral. I no longer look at a women and hope they may be the one who vaules a decent, kind, moral man. Instead I see a feral creature who wants to be thugf#$cked and used. They are addicted to a drug called emotion. They want the highs of being thugf#cked and the coming lows of being used and dumped. Then rinse and repeat.
[citation needed]
The stable decent man is too “boring” or “nice”. The lush sociatal enviroment we have created for them is taken for granted. It exists as does the air they breath, simply out of nothing in thier minds. They simply cannot grasp the truth of it takes good men to build, invent and maintain their “posh” world. … My eyes are sadly opened to what women are now.
ck also makes comments that suggest to me that he is suffering from depression, possibly quite severe. He gets upvotes for his misogyny, but no one there offers any comfort or help, except for one commenter who urges him, unhelpfully, to “[t]ry to get as far from feminist women as possible,” possibly by moving to another country.
Evidently the last thing MRAs ever want to do is to provide actual tangible help to fellow men who are suffering.
Meanwhile, Darryl X offers some thoughts on you, my dear readers and commenters:
I hope the posts on Futrelle’s site and others illustrates for you the cold-blooded and parasitic nature of those kinds of people and that they do not represent civilization and that as more and more honest hard-working and innocent men are killed off by them, they will be living in a cave because they have neither the intelligence nor the initiative to do anything but defraud others and they are running out of victims. Eventually they will start cannibalizing themselves. Actually they already have started.
Evidently, according to Spearhead logic, “civilization” is much more effectively maintained by demonizing half of it.
Hawaiian Libertarian: “Misogyny is the key to male liberation from blue pill delusions.”
This pedestal is a trick illusion.
It’s amazing how daintily some manosphere dudes dance around the word “misogyny.”After spewing forth venomous woman-hating filth in post after post, they turn around and equally vociferously deny that they are in any way misogynistic – after all, they can think of three or four women in their life they don’t actively hate.
It’s strange. Men whose entire political and social philosophy is based on the hatred of women aren’t willing to say this out loud.
Over on Hawaiian Libertarian, a blog with some influence within the marginal universe of the manosphere, Keoni Galt is a bit more honest: he is proudly and openly misogynist. Not only that, but he’s convinced that others in the manosphere need to fully accept misogyny into their shrunken little hearts. And he’s written a little manifesto about it:
MRAs: The men who lost their lives protecting their girlfriends in the Aurora theater shooting were “suckers.”
Over on The Spearhead, the regulars are discussing the three young men who sacrificed their own lives to save their girlfriends in the chaos of the Aurora theater shootings.
Needless to say, many of them aren’t too keen on any act of heroism that might benefit a woman.
