Blog Archives
Hey, It’s Some Men Against Assholes and Misogyny!
Jen Kirkman (Men Against Assholes and Misogyny Not Pictured)
With all the assholery that I’ve been writing about lately, I wanted to highlight something that wasn’t assholish. That is, in fact, anti-assholish. And that’s comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” - MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men - not afraid to call themselves feminists - to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”
Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.
Here’s how she explains it:
Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun - as we all should be. And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me. Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.
So far she’s gotten a lot of followers — she picked up a thousand in the first 48 hours — and a ton of submissions, some from fellow comedians (Greg Proops, Michael Ian Black), some from regular dudes, one from her dad.
The submissions are, I suppose I should say, a mixed bag. Some of the essays are great. Some are a bit mansplainy, or White Knighty, or otherwise a bit problematic.
But that’s kind of inherent to the project. Jen is challenging guys who don’t spend all day every day thinking about feminism, but whose hearts are basically in the right place, to stand up against the asshole misogynists of the world. And a lot of guys are responding to her challenge.
Oh, BTW, while we’re on the topic: Jen is also pretty fucking hilarious.
Here’s some of her standup:
And here she is narrating some Drunk History. (She really was drunk.)
Comics Break: All girls are good for is knittin’ an’ neckin’ and SATAN
I‘m feeling a bit poorly today, so in lieu of an actual post, here’s an old comic I found on a blog called Grottu. I’m pretty sure this is what our old friend NWOslave sees when he looks at the world.
Slightly more on topic, here’s a frame from an old romance comic; you can find a discussion of the somewhat, er, problematic story it’s from on Sequential Crush.
Why aren’t more women world leaders? Some Reddit dude has a theory. (SPOILER ALERT: It’s really dopey.)
NOTE: It’s the final day of the Man Boobz Pledge Week! It’s gone quite well. Once again, serious thanks to everyone who has donated! I appreciate it a great deal.
If you haven’t yet donated, and want to, here’s the button you’re looking for:
Men’s Rights activists spend more time discussing women than most women’s studies majors. Heck, they might even qualify for honorary degrees in women’s studies, if we expand the term “study” to mean “make shit up.”
Here a couple of dudes on the Men’s Rights subreddit offer their new but not-exactly-improved version of “difference feminism.”
Seems legit.
The debate is on! And off! And on again! Then really, really on!
Have you heard about the big debate in Vancouver? In the wake of the recent hubbub over Men’s Rights posters in that fair city, one woman thought it might be a good idea for there to be a public debate over some of the issues raised by the posters.
I’ll let A Voice for Men’s JohnTheOther explain it, in his adorably poncy way:
Has feminism gone too far? …
That is the question asked in September of 2012, by a woman of integrity and courage. She posited this question as the premise of a public debate. It was to be discussed by three individuals from the contention that yes, feminism has gone too far, and three individuals arguing that no, feminism has not gone too far.
But, alas, this debate was not to be.
Three Whoops and a Holler for Jean Shepard and this awesome old song
I usually listen to my music collection on shuffle, and this old song was one of the first that popped up this morning as I caught up on comments here. Recorded by Jean Shepard in 1954, it’s a charmingly blunt criticism of sexist double standards. The notions she challenges are still, sadly, issues to this day, especially amongst the you-know-who’s-rights-activists and the rest of their pals in the you-know-who-o-sphere. Some of the lyrics:
How come a man can fight and cuss and smoke and drink and chew
Step out on their wives and do the things they shouldn’t do?
But it’s all right in the publics’ eye, they say he’s just a man
But if a woman does one little thing, she’s not worth a …
Two whoops and a holler,
she’s lower than a hound
If she drinks or smokes or tells a joke,
she’s a lowest thing in town
Of course, like a lot of old songs by women in country music that challenge male sexism, Two Whoops and Holler is a product of its time, and doesn’t transcend traditionalist thinking entirely. The song ends up endorsing some double standards of its own: Shepard sings that “the women ought to rule the world ’cause the men ain’t worth a … Two whoops and a holler, they’re lower than a hound.”
In other words, she ends up offering a mirror image of the original sexism — which is exactly the sort of dualistic thinking that double standards lead to in the first place. Don’t tell the MRAs! They’ll start going on about female supremacism or some other nonsense.
Gold-digging c**ts and over-inflated pussy: An A Voice for Menner “refutes” Roosh
Paul Elam has so far refrained from responding to the halfway-on-the-mark, halfway-completely-ridiculous criticism of the Men’s Rights movement leveled by rapey PUA douchenozzle Roosh that we discussed yesterday. Not even that bit comparing the very serious dudes reading A Voice for Men to silly ladies reading Cosmo was enough to provoke the oh-so-easily provoked Elam. Either he’s gotten very Zen about criticism from PUAs, or he’s spent the last several days punching pillows and muttering under his breath about evil “pussy beggars.”
But some of Elam’s acolytes took it upon themselves to respond for him. My favorite comment is this bait-and-switcher from MrStodern, which starts off with a vaguely reasonable observation before descending into misogynist nonsense.
Apparently feminists love pickup artists, and the only legitimate reason for dudes to have sex with women is to teach them a lesson. Who knew?
Ann Coulter channels Men’s Rightsers in her latest attack on single women
All you single ladies get off my lawn!
While single herself, the always belligerent Ann Coulter seems to have a bit of a grudge against other single women — single mothers in particular. In a recent appearance on Fox and Friends, Coulter complained that the Democrats — and the media — were paying too much attention to what women think, and suggested that Romney could win the election without appealing to women — or at least to single women.
Ronald Reagan managed to win two landslides without winning the women’s vote, but it is as you say, it’s striking, it’s not the women’s vote generically, it is the single women’s vote. And that’s because single women look to the government to be their husbands and give them, you know, prenatal care, and preschool care, and kindergarten care, and school lunches.
Heartiste: Women athletes are mannish uggos because “women’s natural bodies are not evolutionarily designed to run, throw, fight or lift optimally.”
An innately unsexy lady athlete somehow cons a dude into kissing her.
So over on Chateau Heartiste, the Dude Who Used to Call Himself Roissy seems personally affronted that the female athletes in the Olympics, by and large, didn’t live up to his wet dreams of Perfect Womanhood. In one post, he hails a Turkish newspaper columnist (yes, the same one we talked about here) who complained about the allegedly unwomanly bosoms of female Olympians, and offers his own less-than-complimentary assessment of their looks:
Who with the eyes to see hasn’t noticed the narrow hips, the grotesque six-pack abs (never a good look on women), the chest “stubs”, the linebacker shoulders, and the manjaws of an inordinate number of the female Olympians?
So why does it matter that Roissy/Heartiste couldn’t get a boner watching the Olympics? Apparently because these women are violating the PRIME DIRECTIVE, which forbids representatives of the United Federation of Planets from “intervene[ing] in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system.”
