Virtual Women, Real Annoying

Probably not the woman of your dreams.

Hey fellas! Are you tired of dealing with actual women? Would you rather spend a nice evening at home chatting amiably with a tiny virtual woman who lives inside your computer instead? If so, would it be OK if instead of resembling any woman you’ve ever met in real life this tiny virtual woman instead acted as though she’d been designed by some dude who’s never actually spoken with a real woman? 

Also, I should add, if you chat her up cleverly enough, she’ll take off her virtual clothes and show you her virtual lady bits. 

If this all sounds like heaven to you, you may want to check out a little “game” called Virtual Woman Millennium Edition. A friend of mine found it on Download.com theother day, and naturally thought of me. The game, such as it is, allows you to create the woman of your dreams. As the game publisher, an outfit calling itself CyberPunk Software, put it: 

Virtual Woman users can build, talk, and compete against Virtual Women with full artificial intelligence. You choose their ethnic type, personality, location, clothing, etc

By “compete against,” the game makers mean, basically, that you chat with her until she either tells you to fuck off (you lose!) or she takes off her clothes (you win!). Sex, evidently, is something that women own, and the point of dating, for guys at least, is to sweet talk – or wheedle, or con -- the ladies into giving it to them. Women “win,” by contrast, when they force guys to listen to their inane blather without giving the poor schmucks even a glimpse of their titties. (I’d like to think that when my dates take off their clothes we both win.) 

I played the game the other night – or at least as much of it as I could stand. The first time, the game crashed before the conversation started. The second time, I played as a raging misogynist and offended my date by calling her a “whore” and a “cunt,” and she left in a huff. The third time, I chatted long enough to convince my date to remove her top. At which point real life asserted its demands, and I set the game aside, never to resume it.

Let’s just say that the conversations I had with each of these imaginary women were something less than sparkling. The woman who eventually took off her top blathered happily away about her hair for a few minutes, then segued into a conversation about how she hated going to new supermarkets because she wouldn’t know where to look to find the milk. She was shallow, silly, and self-absorbed, a virtual incarnation of every sexist stereotype of modern womanhood.  In other words, she seemed to come straight from MGTOW central casting. My “conversation” with her only lasted a few minutes, but it seemed to take forever. If real women were like this, I think even I would consider Going My Own Way. 

As one review on Download.com put it:  

the girls are just plane stupid, they … keep repeating themselves over and over again, and allot of what they say makes no sense, I say something to them, and they asked me some silly question that makes no sense, once I said what to one about something stupid it said that made so sense, just to see what it would do, and it said ( why are you so worried about me being what?) and it did that with other things I said to it too, its stupid, don't waist your time with this. 

That pretty much hits the nale on the hed. 

So many questions:

Were the makers of this game deliberately trying to make the women as annoying as possible, or do they think women are actually like this? Was the inanity of the conversation a bug – the result of shitty artificial intelligence programming  – or a feature? Probably a bit of both. 

More to the point: who could possibly enjoy a game like this? You’d have to have a pretty low opinion of women to be able to put up with the game’s casual misogyny. But if you hate women that much, why would you want to spend your evening talking to an imaginary woman about shopping and hair? 

Perhaps that’s why the publisher seems to have abandoned the game; the latest update on its web site is from 2008. 

As I’ve pointed out before, a small but significant number of “mansosphere” men are eagerly looking forward to the day when sex robots and/or “virtual” women will give men what they see as a real alternative to real women, thus putting supposedly spoiled “western” women in their place and destroying feminism to boot. One of the many fatal flaws in this scenario is that the only people who seem to be interested in making sexbots and VR women are guys who have no fucking clue what actual human women are like. But, hey, if it gets these guys out of the dating pool, that’s pretty much good news for everyone.

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I'm going off the rails on an [ableist slur redacted] train. Also: Cat poll!

Well, discussions about my second Scott Adams piece over on Feministe (which was basically identical to my post here) have now been completely derailed by a number of commenters who’ve decided I’m “ableist” because I used the word … “idiot.”  That word, they have decided, is offensive to the “cognitively impaired.” If you want to wade into the mess, here’s the comment that, while polite in itself, started the long slide down this particular rabbit hole. You can see my responses in blue further down in the comments.

I consider this kind of language policing to the EXTREME! to be bad for feminism (and frankly insulting to people with disabilities), and I’m glad a number of others have stood up against it in the comments there.  I don’t think that the language police are in the majority at Feministe, much less in feminism at large. But these debates are so frustrating that many feminists who disagree with the language police end up biting their tongues and/or just walking away. At some point I may post more about this fraught topic here.

In the meantime, I’m am conducting a little poll about cats. Please click the appropriate button in the graphic above. Clicking it won’t actually do anything, but I’m pretty sure what the results are going to be anyway. Go kitties!

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Scott Adams: I meant to do that!

Easier to believe than Scott Adams.

There’s a classic scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in which our hero falls off his bike in a spectacular fashion in front of a bunch of kids. Instead of lying there in misery and shame, he quickly gets up, dusts himself off, and says, somewhat less than convincingly, “I meant to do that.” If you’ve never seen the movie, or simply want to relive the moment, here it is. 

It’s perhaps the oldest, crudest, and most utterly transparent strategy ever invented to recover from an embarrassing mishap: we either pretend that nothing happened, or that whatever did happen was all part of our super seekret master plan all along. We’re not the only animals that do this. Cats do it. Birds do it. Even drunk squirrels do it.


Now we can add Scott Adams to the list. Recently, as regular readers of this blog will be aware, the Dilbert mastermind caused a bit of a contretemps on the internets by posting a blog entry so astoundingly idiotic, and so patronizingly misogynistic, that it managed to offend Men’s Rights Activists and feminists alike. Adams managed to make himself look like an even bigger idiot by pulling the blog post down in what seems to have been a futile attempt to make the controversy go away, only to find it reposted on an assortment of sites; some have begun to wonder if he actually understands how the internet works. (Things posted generally cannot be unposted.)

I wrote about the whole embarrassing spectacle here, and when I posted a version of that piece up on Feministe, Adams showed up to defend himself– badly – by insisting that his critics were too dumb and/or emotional to understand his oh-so-subtle argument. He then insisted, puzzlingly, that we actually weren’t his critics at all: “You’re angry,” he wrote, “but I’ll bet every one of you agrees with me.” Naturally, this did not advance his cause.“Mr. Adams,” wrote Feministe commenter Sheelzebub, speaking for many, “thank you so much for coming back here and entertaining us with your special brand of epic fail.”

But rather than letting this whole thing die, Adams has come back with even more detailed, and even more transparently ludicrous and contradictory, explanations as to why he wrote the post in the first place, why he subsequently deleted it, and why he decided to defend himself in such an obtuse manner on Feministe and (apparently) elsewhere. The whole embarrassing spectacle wasn’t an embarrassing spectacle at all: He totally MEANT TO DO IT.  As Feministe commenter Laurie sarcastically summed up his new claims, the whole thing was apparently “a form of sophisticated performance art,” and the controversy it generated was all “part of Adams’s master plan in the first place. He’s pulling all the strings. BWAHAHAHAHA!”

Yeah, right. 

So let’s go through his new explanations. Prepare for a bumpy ride.

Adams wrote the original post, he says, in a deliberate attempt to send the Men’s Rightsers into a frenzy:

I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men's Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a "bunch of pussies."

This part of Adams’ explanation actually rings true. Originally, you may recall, Adams decided to let his readers pick the topic of his next blog post for him. When he saw “men’s rights” jump to the top of the poll results, he knew, as he put it, that "the fix was in. Activists had mobilized their minions to trick me into giving their cause some free publicity."

This is in fact true; MRAs on Reddit, and perhaps elsewhere, did indeed flood his site to vote for their pet issue.

And so, even though he agrees with some of the Men’s Rights agenda, Adams says he’s been suffering from a “wicked case of ‘whiner fatigue.’” In a world full of  “financial meltdowns, tsunamis, nuclear radiation, and bloody revolutions,” complaining about men having to open doors doesn’t seem like such a big damn deal.

So far, so good. But it’s about here, as he gets into his decision to take the post down, that Adams’ explanations go completely off the rails. Indeed, he’s got two distinct, and almost completely contradictory, explanations for why he took the post down.

First, he says he deleted the post, even though he knew people would repost it, as a sort of “meta joke” apparently designed to rile up feminists and garner even more attention. As he explains, somewhat less-than-lucidly:

A few people appreciated the meta-joke of removing the post.  If you didn't get it, read the deleted post, consider the feminist backlash, then think about the fact that I took down my post and ran away.

And to those of you who triumphantly scrounged up a copy of the deleted piece from Google's cache, republished it, and crowed that I don't understand how the Internet worked, I would politely suggest that perhaps I do.

Adams goes on to suggest that the seemingly obtuse and arrogant comments he left on Feministe (and, apparently, elsewhere), were part of the same Puckish strategy of provocation:

I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day.

But, he says, this wasn’t the whole story. And so he sets forth his second explanation for why he took down the original post:

I didn't take down the piece just because I thought doing so would be funny, or because I wanted attention. Those were bonuses. The main reason is that when a lot of drive-by readers saw the piece, and they didn't know the context of this blog, it changed the message of the post to something unintended. As a writer, unintended messages are unbearable.

You might notice that this new explanation does not so much complement but completely contract his earlier explanation: in the first scenario, Adams portrays himself as a “meta joker,” a deliberate provocateur, trying to rile up readers outside of his normal audience with a puckish prank.

In the second scenario he portrays himself as a writer deeply concerned about being misunderstood, and troubled that his words were being misinterpreted by “drive-by readers” outside of his normal audience, a situation he describes as “unbearable.”

In other words, after telling us that he pulled down the post in an effort to rile people up and garner even more attention, he tells us he that he really didn’t like the extra attention his words were getting, and that he pulled down the post in an attempt to cut the discussion off. As he puts:

Men thought I was attacking men, and women thought I was attacking women. The message changed when the context changed. I saw that developing, so I took down the post.

There is, of course, a simple way for us to cut through this confusion: to recognize that Adams’ talk about “meta-jokes” is almost certainly utter bullshit.

My theory as to what actually happened is much more straightforward, and fairly similar to Adams’ second explanation: Adams wrote a post designed to rile up MRAs, and it did. But once the discussion spilled over beyond the relatively safe confines of his own blog, with its sympathetic – or is that sycophantic? – audience, he had second thoughts, and in a moment of peevishness he took the post down, hoping the whole thing would just go away. It didn’t.

Then the whole debate got a second wind after feminists, myself included, noticed his post, and noticed that it happened to be crammed full of patronizingly misogynistic bullshit. Unable to simply wish away the criticism, Adams waded into the fray. Unwilling to, or simply incapable of either justifying his original post or apologizing for it in front of an audience of non-adoring non-fans, Adams simply asserted that none of his detractors understood what he *really* meant. So far, he has not given us any explanation as to what this might be.

Instead, in his post as in the discussion on Feministe, he simply repeats his assertion that those who have criticized his post are too emotional or invested in the issues to truly "get it." The culmination of this line of, er, "reasoning" is this bit of passive-aggressive fuckery at the end of his post:

To the best of my knowledge, no one who understood the original post and its context was offended by it. But to the women who were offended by their own or someone else's interpretation of what I wrote, I apologize.

This sounds like it might be his last word on the subject. No such luck. Like a terrier worrying a bone, Adams still hasn’t quite let this one go. Today, Salon ran a couple of articles on the controversy, including an interesting interview with Men’s Studies doyen Michael Kimmel; Adams urged his minions readers to rush over and defend him in the comments against the “the poorly informed [who] are in full unibation mode over their shared hallucinations of my Men's Rights post.”

“Unibation?” Apparently they speak a different kind of English up Scott Adams’ ass.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Another post up on Feministe. Also: Scott Adams responds to my post on him

"We hunted the mammoth": Always hilarious!

My second guest post has gone up on Feministe. In it, I introduce the Feministe audience to a Man Boobz classic: the "we hunted the mammoth to feed you" quote, in all of its original glory. (By the way, t-shirts are still available, and they're pretty snazzy!)

Also, Scott Adams himself  has responded in the Feministe comments section to my post about him. Some highlights of his, er, argument:

Is this an entire website dedicated to poor reading comprehension? I don’t think one of you understood the writing. You’re all hopping mad about your own misinterpretations. ... 

In this case, the content of the piece inspires so much emotion in some readers that they literally can’t understand it. The same would be true if the topic were about gun ownership or a dozen other topics. As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion. ...

You’re angry, but I’ll bet every one of you agrees with me.

Wow. Just, wow. How narcissistic and delusional do you have to be to even type out that last bit, much less post it on the internet for all to see? 

I wonder if Scott Adams would agree with the "we hunted the mammoth to feed you" guy? I'm sort of thinking that he just might.

Scott Adams to Men's Rights Activists: You'll never win an argument with a woman

Scott Adams: Sometimes dumber than Dilbert's boss.

So Scott Adams -- the Dilbert guy -- has a blog. About a week and a half ago he made the mistake of asking his readers to give him a topic to write about. Well, some MRAs heard about this, and, being MRAs, decided that they would flood his site with comments urging him to write about Men's Rights. And so he did.

What they got from him wasn't quite what they hoped. Really, though, it wasn't what anyone would have hoped. So much so that Adams decided to take his post down, saying that it had gotten "a bit too much attention from outside my normal reading circle."

Luckily, through the voodoo of Google, we can still see the original post. Adams started out, depressingly enough, by more-or-less agreeing with MRAs on a wide assortment of their pet issues big and small  -- from men paying more for car insurance to the alleged anti-male bias of the legal system.  Much of what he wrote made as little sense as many real MRA rants; even his little jokey asides fell completely flat.

We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?

Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.

Add to our list of inequities the fact that women have overtaken men in college attendance. If the situation were reversed it would be considered a national emergency.

After more or less agreeing that men are getting a raw deal, Adams dismissed the complaints of women upset that women earn less than men; to Adams, this is because they are naturally timid souls who don't know how to ask for raises.

So far, so not-so-good. But then Adams pulled the old switcheroo on his MRA readers, who up until this point were presumably giddy with excitement.

Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men's rights:

Get over it, you bunch of pussies.

Uh oh! Shaming tactic! MRAs love directing vagina-based insults at others -- mangina anyone? -- but they hate hate hate it when anyone directs a vagina-based insult at them. To be fair, calling someone a pussy is not much of an argument.

But here's where Adams pulled a sort of double switcheroo. After insulting Men's Rights activists, he did them one better with a bizarre, brazen misogynistic argument that seemed to have been cribbed from some of the more idiotic comments on the various MGTOW message boards.  It turned out that the reason Adams thinks men should "get over it" is that ... well, read it for yourself.

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

What what what?? This is the sort of shit you expect from some low-grade misogynist loser on The Spearhead.  But no, this is Scott Adams, internationally famous cartoonist and bestselling author. Instead of trying to explain just what the fuck he means by all this, Adams continued on with a very strange, and strangely sexual, chess metaphor:

How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression just to get something better in the long run? It's called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen. If you're still crying about your pawn when you're having your way with the queen, there's something wrong with you and it isn't men's rights.

Apparently In Scott Adams' world, chess players don't get all their kicks above the waistline, Sunshine. 

After a few more paragraphs that, frankly, don't make any more sense than what I've quoted so far, Adams seemed to realize that maybe he shouldn't have really suggested that women were a bunch of retarded children. But instead of going back and removing that from his post, he dug himself further in with a weird and completely unconvincing denial:

I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I'm not saying women are similar to either group. I'm saying that a man's best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he's smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.

As far as I can figure out his weird and convoluted argument, it is this: The world really is unfair to men. But you'll never win this argument with a women -- you know how they are. So keep quiet and maybe ... you'll get to fuck the queen? 

No wonder he deleted the post. 

Completely off-topic observation: Every time I hear the name Dilbert, the song Dilbar Dil Se Pyare, from the 1971 Bollywood hit Caravan, gets stuck in my head. So let's see if I can get it stuck in your head:



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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Armageddon me some quality wives, widows and virgins!

If you don't have one of these, you're screwed.

The good fellows at the Happy Bachelors forum have gone all survivalist on us. Well, a bunch of them have. Some are posting tips on gracious postapocalyptic living: did you know that you can only safely drink your own urine once or twice in an emergency, because it gets more concentrated with nasty bad stuff as you get more dehydrated? The More You Know.

Others are speculating on what it all means for men like them, and the ladies they think are filthy whores.

Like a lot of those who've convinced themselves that the end is of civilization is near, our Happy Bachelors seemed kind of stoked at the notion of everything going to shit. Because, you see, clear-sighted, no-nonsense dudes like them will obviously thrive in the tough new environment, while wimpy females and those who love them will be forced to beg for scraps from their new MGTOW overlords.

The perhaps appropriately named recluse sees some hope in the economic collapse of towns like Flint Michigan:

[E]xtreme social poverty ... will end frivolous bullshit like catering to the feminists or princess mentality ball busting bitches.

Apparently when mens jobs get harder they begin to get more efficient and genuinely self protective.

This is how manginas can be transformed on a wholesale basis.

Wholesale transformation? Uh oh. I don't know exactly what recluse is getting at here, but it doesn't sound good for the manginas of the world.

Still,  there is hope for you, ladies.! Well, for some of you. Not many, I'd guess. To be perfectly honest, ladies, if you're reading this blog here, you're probably not on the list.

As boogyman explains, after the shit hits the fan,

Quality wives, widows, and virgins will be looked after by good men just like in the Biblical days. Thug lovers, welfare mothers, and feminists will have to fend for themselves (Daddy government will be MIA). The laws of the jungle will sort everything out in short order.

So get that last bit of thug-loving in, gals, while you still have a chance.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Humorless dudes: Women aren't funny!

What a hideous beast!

It's weird the lengths that the dudes of the manosphere will go to try to prove things that simply aren't true. Like the idea that women aren't funny. (Seriously, if you can't immediately reel off the names of ten women who are fucking hilarious, you just might be -- to paraphrase one famously hackneyed male comedian -- a misogynist. If you get stuck, maybe this will help.)

The standard misogynist line on the alleged unfunniness of women is rooted, as are so many misogynist ideas, in sexual insecurity and resentment: Men are funny, the argument goes, because, unless they're George Clooney or Ghengis Khan, it's the only way to get women to have sex with them. Meanwhile, all that most women have to do to get men to have sex with them is to exist.

In an old post on Gucci Little Piggy which I just ran across today, our friend Chuck (who sometimes posts comments here), offers his version of this argument.

Humor and oppression are strongly correlated. Oppression leads to a sense of irony and keen insight about human nature and life in general. ...  And nobody is less at the bottom of the social heap than women.

Actually, maybe men are inherently more funny than women, because so far Chuck's explanation is hilarious. His proof for this: there aren't a ton of gorgeous white women comedians. Listing a a small batch of female comedians -- among them Ellen Degeneres, Joan Rivers, Wanda Sykes, and Chelsea Handler -- he remarks:

Take a look at the list of famous female comedians and notice that none fit the “prototypical” (average) woman. In other words, they aren’t white, beautiful, and straight. ... They weren’t handed a golden ticket, like many of their straight-and-narrow sisters. In the same way that Jerry Seinfeld, Milton Berle, and the Marx Brothers inherited a legacy of humor from their Jewish ancestors, lesbians, fat broads, and ethnic women have used the same tool: humor. ... female comedians are almost universally unattractive or lesbian or ethnic.

You may have noticed a few problems with this argument. Aside from the fact that there have been plenty of completely hilarious women who were also utterly gorgeous -- uh, Marilyn Fucking Monroe? -- that several of the women on his list are actually quite conventionally hot, and that most of them are white, all Chuck has done is to show that many female comedians, like many male comedians, tend to be outcasts and misfits with less than model-quality looks. Not that "women aren't funny" or even that women are inherently less funny than men.

The fact that Paris Hilton is not what you'd call a brilliant wit -- she's his example of a beautiful unfunny lady -- doesn't mean that "women" collectively are unfunny, any more than the fact of Tom Cruise's humorlessness means all men, or even all Scientologists, are unfunny. (Well, maybe the bit about the Scientologists.)

But the funniest part of the whole thing comes in the comments section, where one bravely anonymous commenter offers his own -- utterly sincere, unintentionally hilarious -- explanation of the "women aren't funny" meme:

Well, you're speaking of a culture/society that's been decimated by Cultural Marxism. The comedians you mention are using the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory to criticize and breakdown (criticize/critique) what remains of White Western Civilization. There were plenty of excellent white comedians, both male and female, before the open immigration act of 1965 turned the USA into a third world shit hole. There's a reason they're not white.

Yeah, that's gotta be it. Joan Rivers is staying up nights reading her dog-eared copies of the treatises of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, perfecting her dialectical critique of ugly Oscar dresses.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Memo to angry dudes: Not all the women who hate you are feminists

Disdainful women: Not always feminists.

Given how much of their time they spend attacking feminism and feminists, manosphere dudes can be surprisingly incompetent at telling just who is and who isn't an actual, bona-fide feminist; they've got terrible fem-dar.

Case in point: Last Saturday, annoying social conservative polemicist Kay Hymowitz published a piece in the Wall Street Journal taken from her new book "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys," in which she argues that young men today have degenerated into puerile pre-adults, led astray by an assortment of villains including, but not limited to, Maxim magazine, Comedy Central, Seth Rogan and, if the subtitle of her book is any indication, rising women. You may vaguely remember her first rehearsing this general argument in a similarly annoying City Journal piece a couple of years ago called "Child-Man in the Promised Land."

To point out a simple fact that should be evident to all but the most hardened manosphere misogynists: not everyone who says critical things about men is therefore a feminist. Indeed, many of those who say the worst things about men aren't feminist at all.

And in fact, as should be very clear to anyone who actually sits down to read her work, Hymowitz is no feminist. If the reference to "the rise of women" as a villain in her book's subtitle isn't enough of a clue, let me point you to several of the many articles she's written attacking feminism -- for example, accusing feminists of ignoring the precious wisdom of Evolutionary Psychology, going "AWOL on Islam," and just generally being "obsolete."

But the basic fact of Hymowitz' antifeminism seems not to have penetrated the consciousness of many of her critics in the manosphere, where her latest WSJ has produced a flurry of angry denunciations from dudes who take her stale tranditionalist bromides as the latest in evil feminazi-ism.

On Happy Bachelors she's derided as a "typical second-wave hag feminazi." On The Spearhead, one commenter dismisses her as "yet another smug, AA-promoted female token who can’t grasp what she and her feminist sisters have done to men." On MGTOWforums.com, yet another misguided commenter snidely asserts that  "Jewish feminists do not age well."

Blogger Rex Patriarch, meanwhile, proclaims her op-ed to be a "a typical feminist rant about how wonderful women are and what disappointment men have become," and accuses her of sour grapes:

That’s right ladies do us men a favor, go away and keep telling yourselves you don’t need any sour grapes.

You ladies are the ones that need to grow up and face reality. Wanting both the full benefits of feminism and marriage without any responsibilities is understandable. I would take that deal if I could get it too but since I can't I exercise my natural right to not participate in the stacked deck you have to offer. That deal means jumping through the endless and ever increasing hoops of expectations it's going to take to just get to the break even point in a sham marriage with an entitlement princess that western women have become.

Thanks but find some other sucker to be your jumping poodle, I will take video games instead.

As a fellow video gamer and something of an overgrown child-man myself,  I've got nothing against anyone offering a good sensible critique of Hymowitz' basic thesis; unfortunately, so far all I've seen on the topic from MRAs and MGTOWers have been little more than crude misogynist (and sometimes anti-Semitic) insults, most far cruder than the remarks I've quoted here. 

But here's a hint: you can't really offer much of a critique if you start off assuming that she's driven by an ideology she actually hates.

EDITED TO ADD: Speaking of good sensible critiques of Hymowitz, here are a couple from actual feminists. ECHIDNE of the snakes takes on Hymowitz' "extreme definition of masculinity," which seems to suggest that "Men can only be men if women remain girls." Meanwhile, Jill at Feministe notes that life is not really much like Judd Apatow movies and makes the point that what Hymowitz derides as "extended adolescence" is in fact "an intelligent and fair reaction to a new economy and new gender models."

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Beware the jackbooted feminazi marriage thugs!

The denizens of the Happy Bachelors forum, always alert for possible threats to their Happy Bachelorhood, seem to have discovered a new one: Evil feminists "enslav[ing] men through forced marriage."

That might sound a bit like the plot of an old episode of Futurama, but apparently the threat is all too real. Artbunker sounded the alarm in a recent posting:

What if women and manginias in power pass a law to make men marry with women?

Hear him out, guys:

[M]ore and more guys are truly waking up to the no marriage to Western Women concept. It's a small but growing fact. We already know feminist have made it harder fro Eastern European women to come over here and probably in other countries as well.

If they can get laws passed for that how much longer till they start going after single men? How much longer till they want to make sure single women with kids are paired with single men for "the betterment of the children?" because the single man makes a good wage to support her and her family.

Why would this be necessary, you may ask. Aren't there a lot of simps and manginias doing this already, of their own volition?

Sure there still a lot of simps and manginias that dont mind doing this already without a law sure. But we know these women really want guys who have the economic power to provide them the lifestyle they want. A lot of simps and manginias today cannot provide that for them .They want the guys with the big checks whom they know wont chose them.

Yes, all the fantastically wealthy movers and shakers who spend all their time trading stories about how evil women are on the MGTOW message boards of America.

Longshot39 suggested one (somewhat familiar) way to resist the jackbooted feminazi marriage thugs:

A man with any sense could still refuse to marry, at least in the traditional sense. Just get another MGTOW friend and marry them, like was said in another thread. Even if a person were required by law to live in the same house, having your friend as a roommate would still be a HUGE improvement over being forced to marry some womb turd with little thuglits.

To be sure, not everyone on the Happy Bachelors forum is convinced such a danger is imminent. The always logical spocksdisciple responded:

There won't be forced marriage, as women want the earning power of the beta but 'gina tingle factor of the thug/bad boy. Instead what the gov't will do is simply start to garnish the wages of single men with selective taxation and "fees."

And if any men resist the New Girl Order by not earning enough, well, naturally they'll just be forced into labor camps:

These labor camps would come into existence under some economic pretext set up by gov't. One such pretext is that unemployed or underemployed people(ie men) of a certain age range say 18-40, would be very useful to the government as labor for various federal projects. ...

Of course women would be exempt because they'll have some beta or stooge on standby for marriage and they would claim "gender oppression" should women be inducted into such camps. ...

These camps would be run under the auspices of FEMA and would be painted to be "emergency support facilities", note that some form of this type of forced and indentured labor already as come back in the form in prison chain gangs which were all but abolished by the 1950s-60s but made a comeback in the late 90s.

But hey, still beats being married -- amirite, fellas?

All joking aside, I feel that one thing we can all agree upon here at Man Boobz is that the fine gentlemen at Happy Bachelors should not be marrying anyone any time soon, either voluntarily or as a result of evil feminist legislation. So I ask the women reading this post now to pledge publicly, in a comment below, that they personally will not marry anyone on the Happy Bachelors forum, even if they are required by law to do so.



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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Oh, Yahoo Answers, must you be so ...

... Yahoo Answers-ish? (Link.)

(This is what you get when you idly type "all women are whores" into Google to see what turns up.)

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Wasn't that an Adam Sandler movie?

Ladies, watch out! Over on the Happy Bachelors Forum, a fellow calling himself ac101202 has figured out a sneaky way that guys can escape you gals doing that whole marrying-a-dude-and-divorcing-him-and-taking-all-his-money thing you ladies like to do. All it requires is a little bit of fake-gay marriage on his part.

Imagine if two straight men got legally hitched (emphasis on straight). No expensive ceremony, no grueling engagement process, just signing the contract. Then, they go on and live their separate lives as bachelors. Because of their legally married status they ... Cannot get remarried legally. This means if they get married with a women, come divorce time she will be unable to legally claim any of his property as they are not legally married. Bigamy and polygamy is illegal so all marriage contracts signed after the first are not recognized as valid by a court of law.

Oh, you sly dog you. Such a clever idea. And so original!

Quiz: Jezebel ... or Andrea Dworkin?

Here's one easy way to tell if someone is from another planet. Specifically, Planet I'm-So-Crazed-by-My-Hatred-of-Feminism-That-My-Brain-Has-Imploded. They post comments on Reddit containing this sentence:

Hmm. I'm not what you'd call a big fan of Andrea Dworkin, but I have read her work, and unless my memory is faulty, I don't recall her writing much about Ryan Gosling, lip stain, or baby giraffes.

So here's a little quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jezebel and Andrea Dworkin. Some of the quotes below come from recent Jezebel articles; some come from Dworkin. I also threw in a quote from Ryan Gosling as well, just for the hell of it. So who said what? (Answers below.)

a) Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality.

b) I freely admit that I watch some shitty, shitty television, and if it weren't for my sense of shame, I'd probably watch a lot more of it. I can't get enough of The Bachelor, which combines the most terrible aspects of dating, the weirdest aspects of arranged marriages, and sociopaths.

c) The sexual colonialization of women's bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women's bodies. In this system of male power, rape is the paradigmatic sexual act.

d) Women's bodies are possessed by men. Women are forced into involuntary childbearing because men, not women, control women's reproductive functions. Women are an enslaved population--the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses.

e) Pie is just fine as a partner for the weak coffee of church basements, for Thanksgiving, for dessert at a roadside cafe in Harmony, Minneosta, but for high falutin' snacking, you cannot beat the elegant convenience of the cupcake.

f) If I eat a huge meal and I can get the girl to rub my belly, I think that's about as romantic as I can think of.

ANSWER KEY: What, are you a fucking idiot? Oh, ok, the last one is the Ryan Gosling quote. I really, really, really hope you can figure out the rest on your own.

All out of context

As the herpes and hypergamy discussion (which also erupted here) reminded (almost) everyone, statistics can be wildly misleading unless you know at least a little bit about the context. I got another reminder of that recently while poking around on a site called NationMaster, a site that aggregates stats about the world found in the (very useful) CIA Factbook and other sources and makes them a little more user-friendly.

Which isn't always a good thing. As we learn from this contextless factoid I  found festooned at the top of one page:

Yeah. I think if you really do like kids, you might want to think a little about why half the population in Uganda is under 15 before planning your move there.

Feminist cat ponders how idiotic the herpes and hypergamy discussion has gotten

(Note: In cats, tail-lashing is not a good sign.)

Rapists are apparently being oppressed by the term "rapist."

Well, here's a new one. Apparently rapists are being oppressed by the evil misandrist term ... rapist. Or so says a poster calling himself ReluctantNihilist in the upstart MENSRIGHTSMOVEMENT subreddit on Reddit, a tiny little discussion forum (with 12 subscribers) for those who think the regular Men's Rights subreddit has become a hotbed of radical feminism. Here's his argument:

The prefix "-ist" means "one who believes in". ...  It is a belief system. A misandrist demonstrates a pattern of behaviors that exemplify misandry.

Does a person who commits a rape necessarily believe and engage in a pattern of behavior of rape?

No.

There are a couple of problems with this analysis, starting with the fact that "ist" is, uh, not actually a prefix but a suffix. And that it can simply mean "one that performs a specified action." Believing may not have anything to do with it: a "typist," for example, types; he or she doesn't believe in an ideology of typing. Nor does an "ist" have to do something repeatedly: an "arsonist" is someone who burns shit up, whether that's once or a hundred times. Our ReluctantlNihilist is evidently not much of a linguist. But let's set aside these little qualms and continue with his post:

The proper term for someone who commits a rape, or even several, is a raper. "-er" means "one who takes part in". Determination of whether that person would qualify as a rapist is another matter.

The use of the word "rapist" rather than "raper" is misandrist doublespeak, because even though women rape, too, we know that the term "rapist" is only applied to males. 

Uh, I think the term is used for female rapists also. There just aren't that many of them.

This misandrist doublespeak is subtle but effective. Calling someone a rapist insinuates they have committed multiple rapes and, if set free, they'll do it again and again. This only fuels rape hysteria.

The more accurate and less emotionally-charged term is:

Raper.

Actually, it's a fair bet that someone who rapes once will rape again; one study of "undetected rapists" -- that is, rapists who hadn't been caught, which is to say the overwhelming majority of rapists -- found that they admitted to having assaulted, on average, roughly 6 victims each.

But let's set this aside and ask the big question: why exactly should we give a fuck about hurting the feelings of people who rape other people? If "ist" is good enough for Stalinists, philanthropists, proctologists, and, yes, even nihilists, it's certainly good enough for rapists.

ReluctantNihilist, I am demoting you to a ReluctantNihiler.

Breaking News: Man Oppressed at Safeway!

Woman oppressing men.

Women reading this site may not appreciate just how many ways men are oppressed in our society. So here's a first-hand report from the battlefront, found on the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) forum.

Let's set the scene: our hero is out picking up a couple of things at a Safeway, when the first oppressor of men comes into view:

I walk in and there is a woman with a basket with maybe 10lbs worth of items in her left hand and a small item in her right, she not only walks very slowly but blocks the entire fucking space and almost nails an old man in the back of the leg with the basket. I literally wanted to push her the fuck out of the way.

Our hero manages to circumvent this obstacle without resorting to violence. Then -- oh no! -- some gay guys come into view! Just so you know, these were REAL gay guys. No, they weren't actually having anal sex in the store while listening to Cher, but they didn't need to be for our hero to figure out their secret. You see, our hero has highly tuned gay-detecting abilities.

Then its the two gay guys, how do i know they are gay? Please don't say to me the PC bullshit you cant tell a dude is gay by how they act, feminized lispy speech has never EVER let me down 100% of the time, they were gay.

That settled, we move on to their dastardly behavior:

They happen to separate and take all of the spots at self check out making me wait even though they were clearly "together" then walking out these same two are lallygagging like the woman blocking me from exiting the store, I stood there for 5 seconds and just looked at them, like the self-importance meter is just running off the charts here!

Yes, yes it is.

Oh but now we come to the kicker. Brace yourself. It's: A TEENAGE GIRL CROSSING THE STREET!!!

If you're not already sitting down, please do so at once, as reading about this encounter may well chill you to your very bones: 

Driving back in the rain, visibility and braking power obviously reduced, I am making a left hand turn on A GREEN FUCKING ARROW, and little girl who is probably 15-16 years old is walking across the street on a DON"T FUCKING WALK sign ... I slam on my brakes and FUCKING WAIL ON MY HORN at her. She gave me the "Doe in the headlights" look and just blinked at me, that's it.

The worst part of it? Our hero is literally prohibited -- by evil feminist laws and by the feminazi press -- from simply running her down.

Sad part I can tell you what happens if I hit the girl, the headline would read "Man mows down helpless 15 year old girl, and is not in the least remorseful". Also my insurance policy would have to pay a massive settlement out to her regardless because she was injured or killed even if i am found 99% not at fault a 1% at fault claim would still probably net her or her family a massive amount of money that no one deserves for this Darwinian fucking reject.

Oh, the humanity!

Brave, brave man, please continue Going Your Own Way.

Further Reading: The Worst of the Men's Rights Movement

From Paul Elam's site.

Here are links to, and brief excerpts of, some of the worst posts by Men's Rights activists and/or antifeminists I've run across in doing this blog. These are not random comments by random MRAs; they are all by people who have a history in the MRM. In most cases, they are fairly prominent names, at least within the online MRA community. A few of these posts will be familiar to readers of this blog.

Lest anyone accuse me of taking quotes out of context, I urge you to read the originals. As you'll see, none of these quotes are any more justifiable "in context" than they are here on their own.

If anyone out there has seen worse, please post a URL below. Conversely, if any of these posts have been publicly challenged by others in the MRM, I will happily post links alongside the original.

I am also taking nominations for a follow-up post, The Best of the MRM. Post URLs below.


Let's start with Paul Elam's charming "Bash A Violent Bitch Month" Post

The money quote:

In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women - to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess.

Immediately after this quote, he claims he's not "serious" about this, though apparently only because "it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers." My post on the subject is here. Here's another piece by Elam full of fantasies of violence against women.

Another by Elam: Jury Duty at a Rape Trial? Acquit!

Key quote:

Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.

This post from Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and Men's Rights activist best known for suing clubs that have "ladies nights," suggests that men may have to take up arms to win their, er, struggle:

The future prospect of the Men’s Movement raising enough money to exercise some influence in America is unlikely.  But there is one remaining source of power in which men still have a near monopoly—firearms. 

I wrote about Hollander's call to arms in If at first you don't succeed, shoot people.

And speaking of angry men and their guns, here's a post from Citizen Renegade, a Pick-Up Artist (PUA) site popular with MRAs: Game Can Save Lives It's about George Sodini, the misogynist killer who gunned down women at a health club a year ago. "Chateau" suggests that all would have been well if Sodini had learned how to be a Pick-Up Artist:

If Sodini had learned game he would have been able to find another woman and gotten laid after his ex dumped him. He wouldn’t have spent the next 20 years steeped in bile and weighed down by his Sisyphian blue balls, dreaming of vengeance. Game could have saved the lives of the women Sodini killed.

Actually, Sodini had taken at least one class from Don Steele, author of "How to Date Young Women for Men Over 35." The comments to Chateau's article are scarier than the article itself. For selected examples and commentary, see here.

Another from Citizen Renegade: Owning a Dog is Training for Owning a Woman

[P]roperly owning a dog is excellent training for properly owning a woman. The behavior of dogs and women is eerily similar, and their relation to man testifies to that.

Like dogs, women need to be led. They *want* to be led. In fact, though they will never admit it, women want to be owned by their men.

Other MRAs don't seem to be much interested in adult women at all. MRA Jay Hammers, a regular contributor to The Spearhead, has taken down his blog, but its worst moments live on in Google's cache. Perhaps the worst of the worst: Age of Consent is Misandry. Key quotes:

Age of consent laws are designed to punish beta males. A beta male in his 20s, unsuccessful with women his own age who are infused with a sense of feminist entitlement and deride all but the top alpha males who take interest in them, who seeks companionship with a younger, sexually mature female who desires him, should not go to prison for acting on that which is normal male sexuality.

Females generally do not significantly mature mentally past puberty so it should always be illegal for any woman to have sex or it should never be illegal for any woman to have sex. There is no arbitrary age where females suddenly become self-aware, realizing the consequences of their actions, and stop seeking out alpha males. Thus there must not be an arbitrary age of consent for sex.

This post did get some criticism in the MRM. Here's one discussion.

And here's Hammers again, accusing other MRAs of being "pansies." 

One of Hammers' biggest defenders has been an antifeminist blogger by the nom-de-net of Schopenbecq, who is equally obsessed with the age of consent and what he sees as the superior attractiveness of teen girls. Here's one of his posts on the subject, which argues:

The age of consent has always been central to feminism. In fact, it has been its primary driving force right from the beginning. The purpose of this website is not to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from the present feminist age of 16. For one thing, there is little or no chance of that happening in this author’s lifetime. However, I have no shame whatsoever in stating my clear belief that the age of consent ought to be what it still technically is in the majority of major civilised nations – namely, 14.

In this post, he mocks any man who doesn't think Heather Locklear's 13-year-old daughter is hotter than Locklear herself:

Results of a poll on Schopenbecq's site.

Here, he argues that feminism is a "Sexual Trade Union," and seems to suggest that increasing the age of consent from 12 was bad thing :

Feminism exists as a defender of the selfish sexual and reproductive interests of aging and/or unattractive women. This is its entire raison d’etre, the reason it first came into existence with the social purity movement reformers of the 19th century, led by their harridan battle cry – ‘armed with the ballot the mothers of America will legislate morality’.

And legislate morality these pioneering feminists quickly did, even before they had won the vote. That is, they successfully lobbied for restrictions on prostitution, a rise in the age of consent from 12 to 16, or even 18, and the closing down of saloons where their husbands might mix freely with unattached young women.

More misogyny:

Anglobitch: Women, Self Awareness and the Guillotine of Bitterness

Post-feminist women have been so indoctrinated by specious polemics extolling their (largely imaginary) talents, that they truly believe their ‘achievements’ are somehow self-determined. This is why the loss of their physical charms wreaks such havok on them. Having been nurtured on feminist pipe dreams, the cutting realization that their youthful ‘success’ was entirely due to sexual allure must be galling indeed. ... Indeed, the staunch bitterness of middle-aged Anglo-American women can be entirely attributed to this realization:

It wasn’t your 'talent' and 'intelligence' that men admired: it was your sweet young pussy. That pussy-pass departed with your first wrinkle: live with it, bitch.

Heretical Sex: Never Date Western Women

Big cities like London, New York and Sydney are jam-packed with beautiful foreign girls from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. They are sexy, fun, good company and they treat men like human beings. They have not had their minds poisoned by feminist hate-speech. ... I urge all Western men to boycott Western Women if they can. Don't date them, don't marry them, don't have children with them. Find yourself a nice foreign girl, and find out what women should be like. If anyone asks you why, tell them it is a protest against feminist ideology. Once enough men start boycotting them, women will turn away from feminism.

Henry Makow has gotten too loopy for most Men's Rights activists to consider him as one of their own. But he remains one of the internet's most influential antifeminists. Here are some quotes from his classic in craziness How the Rockefellers Re-Engineered Women.

Feminism is an excellent example of how the Rockefeller mega cartel uses the awesome power of the mass media  (i.e. propaganda.) to control society. ... Nicholas Rockefeller told [producer Aaron Russo] that his family foundation created women's liberation using mass media control as part of a long-term plan to enslave humanity. ....

The hidden goal of feminism is to destroy the family, which interferes with state brainwashing of the young. Side benefits include depopulation and widening the tax base. Displacing men in the role of  providers also destabilizes the family. 

Only satanists would trash motherhood. 

The fellows at the Manhood Academy have also gotten a lot of criticism from MRAs. It's not altogether clear why, since their ridiculously retrograde views of women are no more ridiculously retrograde than many of those I've quoted above. The key Manhood Academy text is a 135-page pdf called The Principles of Social Competence, which is full of stuff like this:

While women and children often lack the capacity to grasp the inner workings of authority, they still have an instinctual, positive response to it. Authority brings chaotic, aimless things, people, events and circumstances into a state of good order. ...  Masculinity is properly expressed in the form of authority.

You know what I said above about reading the originals? Don't bother in this case.

Speaking of women as children, who could forget this classic, from "ramzpaul" on The Spearhead: How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization, which posited:

Single mothers, rampant divorce, abortion and falling birth rates are part of the cancer that is destroying what is left of Western Civilization. But very few people (even conservatives) fail to realize that the inception of this cancer can be found in the passage of the 19th amendment.

I wrote about the piece, and reactions to it, here.

More Worst Of links to come! The Men's Rights movement produces fresh awfulness each and every day.

EDIT: Deansdale's Blog has weighed in on this Worst-of list and is surprisingly positive about the whole thing. Oh, not my post -- he hates my post, and me -- but the original MRA-n-pals posts. Elam's "Bash a Violent Bitch" post? "What’s the problem with this article? Nothing, really. ... Elam has some insightful observations about the nature of women in our contemporary cultures." Roissy's post about misogynist killer George Sodini? "What’s wrong with this article? Nothing."And RamZpaul's How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization? "There are valid arguments supporting his claim. It’s not PC, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically wrong." 

He even sort-of defends good old Henry Makow and his bizarre conspiracy theoryies:

Actually this is not so crazy. You don’t believe it, that’s fine, but show me why this is soooo unacceptable. He states lots of things: some of them obvious, some of them researchable. But it’s not so radical.

 The only people he doesn't defend? The Manhood Academy guys. Apparently saying horrible, horrible shit about women is perfectly acceptable in Deansdale's vision of the MRM, but saying horrible, horrible shit about women while also calling other MRAs "manginas," as the Manhood Academy guys do, is totally BEYOND THE PALE!!!