Ducks Going Their Own Way (DGTOW)

Donald Duck was evidently a Duck Going His Own Way. This Disney cartoon from 1954 pretty much sums up, in 7 short minutes, every single discussion on every MGTOW message board ever, right down to the little jokes about Daisy riding what we might call the “bad boy duck cock carousel.”

This is quite literally how MGTOWer’s see the world, except for the part about everyone being a duck. (Oh, and that Donald doesn’t blame modern feminism for Daisy’s behavior, as it didn’t actually exist in 1954.)

Thanks, I guess, to the fellows on MGTOWforums.com for finding this.


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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.

Comment of the Day: Child support is worse than rape

Er, not so much.

Sometimes this job is just too easy. Sometimes I don’t have to even bother to check in on my favorite manosphere sites to find hair-raisingly awful quotes to feature here. Sometimes the Boobz are thoughtful enough to leave them in the comments here. 

Take this quote from resident MGTOWer Cold, who currently seems to be spending more time on this blog than I am, comparing rape and child support. (You don’t think these two items are actually in any way comparable? Clearly you do not understand Boob Logic.) 

In response to commenter Amused, who pointed out that “being ordered to support a child you've fathered isn't the same as being pinned down and penetrated against your will,” Cold responded:

Exactly, it's much, much worse. The latter lasts for some number of minutes, the former for at least 18 years. Given the choice it would be a no-brainer for me, and I think a very large number of men agree with me on this.

Setting aside the appalling trivialization of rape as something that’s over in “some number of minutes,” what does this say about Cold’s attitudes towards children? Paying a couple of hundred buck a month to pay for some of the expenses for a child you fathered – your own flesh and blood – is worse than being raped?

If Cold ever becomes a father, through circumstances which are frankly too horrible to imagine, I feel safe in saying that he will not be winning any “father of the year” awards. 

I can just imagine the following scenario, some 11 or so years into the future: 

EXTERIOR, MOVIE THEATER

Cold’s 10-year-old son: Happy Father’s day, daddy! I’m so glad we’re going to see Toy Story 5! I love Woody!

Cold: Yeah, so does your whore mom, if you know what I mean.

Son: Huh? 

Cold: When you get older, you’ll understand. Did I mention that you mom’s a whore?  One, please!

Son: Um, daddy, why did you buy only one ticket? 

Cold: It’s for me. Get your own. You get enough of my money as it is. I stick my dick in your mom for two fucking minutes, and I’m screwed for life. It’s worse than rape! 

Son:  Um, daddy, I don’t have any money. I’m ten. 

Cold: Well, you should have thought of that when you were a sperm! 

Son:  When I was a what? 

Cold: I’m going in. See you in two hours. 

Son: Dad? What am I supposed to do now?

Cold: Not my problem!  I’m Going Galt! I’m Going My Own Way! You were a MISTAKE!

Son quietly sobs 

Cold: Hey, when we get back to your mom’s place later, remind me to tell her she’s a filthy whore. 

And … scene!

(By the way, Cold actually does claim to be going Galt, if self-admitted tax evasion counts.)

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Off-topic: Hand Cat

I may or may not get around to a real post today, but in the meantime, here's what Winston Churchill would look like if he were a cat being held aloft by someone in a red sweater.

Video Games: No girlz allowed!

Cats: Not hardcore gamers.

When the oft-discussed topic of women and video games pops up on most internet forums, the discussion tends to be fairly predictable: Someone will wonder why women prefer Farmville to Halo. Someone else will point out that they are, in fact, a woman, and that they fucking hate Farmville and love to while away their evenings pwning newbs on Halo Reach. And a third someone will point out that the culture of “hardcore” gaming is still overwhelmingly dude-dominated. And so it goes.   

On MGTOWforums.com, the central questions about women and gaming aren’t “what do women want, game-wise” or “is there something about certain types of games that repels women, or do they stay away because it gets really tiresome really quickly to have to listen to 14-year-old boys calling them “cunts” on XboxLive?” No, to the MGTOWers the big question is simpler: Why are women allowed to play video games at all?

Or, as MGTOWforums.com regular AC101202 put in a recent discussion:

Why can't men have their own space? ...

Women, back the fuck off. You stole our TV. You stole our movies. You stole our malls. You stole our clothe shops. You stole our supermarkets Meanwhile the gays are stealing our gyms, our theater, our dance, our music. Video-games is all we have left.

Reacting with horror to the very notion of his favorite shoot-em-up games being somehow made more appealing to women, AC1010202 demands equal attention from the makers of “casual games”:  

I don't hear this bitch [note: a commenter on CNET] complaining about the lack of inclusiveness of games like bejeweled to men (I've played bejeweled maybe 10 minutes in my life, fun for about that length of time or when you are sitting on the bus). …

Companies like Zynga want to make casual games to target the hundreds of millions of girls on facebook. Fine! … Why not push to make casual games more "male-friendly", you bitch? Farm-ville and City-ville could use some thought. Those games suck. They are clearly designed for the modern day brainless airhead bimbo with too much time on her hands.

Of course it turns out that even the hunk of manly manhood that is AC101202 has played some of those girly little smart-phone games himself. But, he hastens to add, he was totally l33t about it:

The only casual game I've ever sucked dry was Plants Vs. Zombies. And if you aim to finish everything it becomes really hardcore in the survival levels.

AC101202 then sets forth his theories as to why women and hardcore games don’t mix. Some of them are fairly predictable: men like guns, women don’t; women “lack imagination and creativity, and the drive to complete real challenges.”

 

Others are a bit more peculiar:

1) Women identify with their gender too much. It seems that taking control of a male avatar is a problem for most of them. They cannot identify. I can identify with almost all avatars today. Male, female, adult, child, alien etc...

2) Females have less interesting personalities in real life, and therefore in fiction. There is a reason fiction involves men going through challenges and being transformed by them. In video games the two female archetypes are: the princess and the "you go grrl". Women in real life have less dimension. They aren't interesting. They bitch or they submit. That's it. And I don't care to hear some loud mouthed bitch barking orders at me through an ear piece. It's unpleasant. If I'm in a war simulator I like hearing men talk. They usually have unique personalities, accents, character traits etc... When female characters do this they come off as pretending to be men and it doesn't work.

He ends with an odd, angry paean to the free market:

Bitches like the one above form groups funded by donations to artificially fuck with the market. Men's money today goes overwhelmingly towards good video-games. Let the market decide what women get. Bitch!

And with that final outburst AC101202 confirms that he conforms to every single last negative stereotype of the angry, sexist male gamer – and then some.

You go, boy!

(Also, he's totally wrong about Bejeweled. I have played the fuck out of that shit for hours.)

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Twats Know It: Or, Why The World Hates a Bachelor

... and one more thing!

I’m not quite sure what this comment from S.T.A.L.K.E.R over on  MGTOWforums.com is supposed to be. Some sort of experimental free-verse poetry?  It’s definitely not a limerick. (Doesn’t rhyme or involve anyone from Nantucket). Or a haiku. (Way too many syllables.)

Basically, it’s the sort of thing you might expect to hear from the angry drunk guy sitting on the barstool next to you in a dive bar at 2 AM. Or from the angry drunk guy sitting across from you on the subway at 4 AM. (The exact time or location isn’t quite as important as the whole “angry drunk” thing.)

Now, with the help of the technological marvel known as the internet, you get to enjoy all of the insights you expect to hear, whether you like it or not, from angry drunk dudes without actually having to deal with them in person. The internet is wonderful.

So without further ado, here’s the prose poem/rant/whatever the fuck it is that I'd like to call “Twats Know It.”

A bachelor guy is a happy guy, and the world hates him. specially women.
also its a common understanding in every society that women need men for their survival. women are kids in adult bodies.
No matter how loudly these brainless feminists shout, but the truth is well known... You know it, I know it... twats know it.
if they are left alone, women automatically lead to the path of self destruction and will die... so according to society's rule ... you should man up and save a twat ( kid in adult body) and if you do that it means, they can depend on you for their survival so you are a responsible guy ( A good sucker).
Unlike women we men generate our strength from inside. we dont need the constant approval of 12 cunt friends to " FEEEEEEEEEEEEL GOOD" . they simply hate us because we are men with unlimited potential, that's the heart of misandry. Y chromosome makes all the difference.

Shine on, you crazy bachelor!

 

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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.

I'm guest blogging on Feministe

Pre-internet bloggers in action.

Just a note: For the rest of the week -- through Sunday -- I'll be guest blogging on Feministe. My first post there is a slightly reworked version of my recent Scott Adams post here. (I also posted something introducing myself to the Feministe crowd.) I'll post pointers here every time I post something there. Just so you know, comments there are a lot more heavily moderated than comments here.

I'm also going to be posting here too, of course, though my posts may be a little on the short side.

Living Bitter and Alone is the Best Revenge

Soon you too will be able to snub women LIKE A BOSS

You may remember our friend Christopher in Oregon, a proud woman-hating virgin (from Oregon, presumably) with some interesting theories on what women think about while having sex. He's back with some thoughts on how to live the good life, MGTOW-style. Truly an inspirational post, offering words of encouragement for all those young MGTOWers out there who still can't help getting boners whenever they stop thinking about how much they hate women long enough to start picturing these same women naked. (Ah, the MGTOW Paradox in action again!) CinO, as I'll call him for short, tells these poor young men to hang in there – because eventually these dastardly boners will cease.

 

Women, even the truly attractive ones, somehow just aren't that attractive once your sex drive starts to disappear. The fog lifts, and you start noticing the annoying and down-right rotten things about women that you never noticed when you were blinded by your sex drive.

 

You start seeing the physical imperfections that even the prettiest women have. The blemishes. The overuse of cosmetics. Things caught in their teeth. Plaque build-up. Hair on the lip. Less than perfect hair dye. Bad hair cut. Bushy eye brows. Bad breath. The stupid laugh that grates on your nerves. Her lack of knowledge in current affairs. Shit. The list grows ever longer as you grow older, and your patience grows shorter.

 

Women simply start to annoy by their mere presence after a point in life.

 

For MGTOWers, CinO explains, life really does begin at forty:

 

When you hit forty, the situation becomes laughable. If you listen to nothing else I say, boys, trust me on this one:

 

The satisfaction you get from snubbing or cancelling out on a date at the last minute with a 35+ attractive woman makes the misery you suffered at the hands of women all worth while.

 

Granted; I never really suffered, as I avoided them, but what the heck, I might as well enjoy it as long as it's being throw in my face.

 

Yeah, there's nothing quite so satisfying as getting back at women for causing suffering that didn't happen by being really rude to an individual woman who had nothing to do with the original suffering (which never happened)! (Also, I'm guessing this aborted date is fictional as well.) That'll show 'em!

 

Today, CinO, is free, white (I think), and fortysomething, and living an enviable life riding motorcycles, watching ancient Nazi-based sitcoms, and posting endlessly online about how vile and horrible women are:

 

I took the last few days off work, and rode my Harley Beasties around. Just because I bloody-well wanted to. Today, I rode all around the snow covered mountains surrounding Mt. St. Helens. An absolute blast. … It sure beat the hell out of spending the day perusing the aisles of K-Mart with a fat bitch of a wife.

 

I came home, watched movies, a few episodes of Hogan's Heroes, and it's off to bed.

 

Oh, wait, there is still one tiny little trouble in paradise:

 

Tomorrow, I stop by the doctor because I've been riding my bikes so much, it's re-activated a long dormant 'roid. Hope he can cure it. lol. Ah, the penalties of being a care-free bachelor. Oops. I meant joys.

 

Truly an inspiration to us all.

 

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

I'm walkin' here!

Pierce Harlan of the False Rape Society has broken past the limits of mere logic, arguing that the fact that a small number of guys at a couple of events have put on women's clothing to raise money for women's causes means that rape culture doesn't exist. That seems to be the main message of a post of his today with the baffling title "Boys in bras, boys in heels, boys in pink -- all to raise money for women's causes: Is this the 'rape culture' we hear so much about?"

Harlan, posting as "Archivist," complains about several recent campus events, in which college guys have literally put on heels (to raise money and awareness about sexual assault) and bras (to raise money for breast cancer research). Harlan isn't thrilled about the causes themselves: he has sneeringly derided sexual assault awareness as "a supposedly good cause" and, while acknowledging that breast cancer research is theoretically a good thing, he's evidently tired of hearing about it.

But he seems even more hot and bothered about the cross-dressing by guys he calls "chivalrous clowns," describing the bra-wearing as "creepy" and deriding the guys "prancing around in high heels." Apparently, as Harlan sees it, these fellows are just doing it to impress the chicks:

young men will do pretty much anything to help, to curry favor with, and to be admired by young women.

It is heinous to suggest that attitudes of sexual aggression and dominance over women are normalized, rationalized, and excused by the alleged beneficiaries of "patriarchy" in our culture. In point of fact, the foolish young buffoons in heels and bras are far more representative of young masculinity in our culture than is the young rapist. 

There's not a lot of logic in this, er, argument, but in an earlier posting Harlan elaborates on the distaste he feels towards the "Walk A Mile In Her Shoes" event, which was held at the University of Montana (clearly a hotbed of radical feminism). 

It would be downright shocking if this or similar events ever prevented a single sexual assault from occurring because: (1) prancing around in high heels and similar useless stunts has nothing to do with preventing sexual assault; and (2) the vast majority of young men who strutted their stuff and who participate in such events are highly unlikely to ever rape a woman.  ...

If we want to curb sexual assault, we need to teach our young people the truth, but the truth doesn't jibe with the current rape meta-narrative that holds only one gender responsible for stopping it. ...

Young people generally do not understand that women experience much greater after-the-fact regret than men do. Sometimes feelings of regret are translated into feelings of "being used," and sometimes feelings of "being used" are misinterpreted or purposefully misconstrued as "rape."

Asking the police, a judge, or a jury to sort out what happened in an alcohol-fueled tryst based on a "he said/she said" account puts an impossible burden on our law enforcement and judicial apparatuses. ...

There is no "rape culture"; there is no "rape continuum."  Rape is committed by social deviants, not the nice boy next door. It is almost a certainty that none of the charming young buffoons who strutted around in women's heels yesterday will ever rape a woman. ...

The sad, politically incorrect fact of the matter is that young women have far more power to stop rape than innocent young men by not putting themselves in situations where rape is more likely to occur. 

There's a lot of bullshit condensed into these short paragraphs. There's victim-blaming, of course: do we regularly attack murder victims for "putting themselves in situations where murder is likely to occur?" There's his weird complaint that actually investigating and prosecuting date rape puts an "impossible burden" on police and the judicial system: should we simply stop enforcing laws against all crimes that are hard to investigate or prosecute? And there's his unwillingness to accept the simple fact that rapists all too often do look exactly like the "nice boy next door." As for his complaint that these events target the wrong people, see here for an argument as to why it makes sense to raise awareness specifically amongst those men who are NOT likely to rape women. 

In the past a few MRAs have asked me why I put the False Rape Society blog in my "boob roll" -- and formerly in my "enemies list." This is why. Spreading blatant misinformation and blaming victims: these are not exactly good ways to actually reduce the number of men falsely accused of rape.

And here's another thought for the MRAs reading this, Harlan included: if you are truly as concerned about testicular or prostate cancer -- or any other male malady -- as you so often and so loudly claim to be, take a few moments away from your constant complaining about feminism and/or women, and actually hold a fund raiser yourselves. In a comment on his latest post, Harlan writes: "My problem is this: how about an event to raise funds for male suicide, etc. once in a while?" You know how events like these happen? PEOPLE ORGANIZE THEM. There is nothing stopping MRAs from organizing such an event on their own. How about it, guys? 

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Educated women: Boner killers?

Guys never ever creepily obsess over women like this.

Dating guru RooshV -- whose name conveniently rhymes with "douchey" -- is convinced that, when it comes to women, smartness is inversely correlated with hotness. As he puts it in a post today, committing at least one logical fallacy in the process:

Femininity is a quality that pleases men. Therefore from the chart we can deduce that educated women decrease a man’s happiness. ... Anything beyond a bachelors at a public university is a near guarantee she’ll possess a large basket of masculine traits that will prevent boners.

The "chart" in question is one that RooshV made up himself, and which contrasts the purported sexiness of less-educated women with the purported unsexiness of more educated women. As he explains:

A good test to see if a girl is over-educated is to add the word “sexy” before her job title. If the resulting phrase ignites arousing images in your head, then she’ll most likely have what it takes to satisfy you.

Amongst RooshV's "boner inducing" job titles for women: Sexy waitress, sexy teacher, sexy librarian, sexy flight attendant. Amongst the "boner softening" job titles: Sexy IT specialist, sexy anesthesiologist, sexy tort attorney, sexy financial analyst.

There are more than a few problems with RooshV's little list, not the least of which is that plenty of dudes do in fact get boners thinking of "sexy" female IT specialists, lawyers, financial analysts and other smart women. (I'm kind of partial to sexy professors, myself.) And if you don't want to take my word for it -- and MRAs never do -- I invite you to investigate the vast amount of porn involving "nerdy girls" or simply girls with glasses (NSFW link). 

Also, if you're going to base your notions of male and female sexuality on which job titles sound like the best sexy Halloween costume, how can you leave out such classics as "sexy nurse" (a job that actually does require specialized education) or "sexy kitty" (which requires whiskers and little cat ears)? And should we conclude from the perpetual popularity of the latter as a Halloween costume that furry women with tails who shit in a box are sexier than the furless standard models?

Also, if you're a guy who fetishizes less-educated women, and refuses to date women as educated or as well-paid as you are, you pretty much lose the right to criticize women for wanting you to pick up the check for dinner.


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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Out to Lunch

Just a note: I'm taking the weekend off; will return to the usual business on Monday.

In the meantime, here are some hairy dudes.

Earthquakes and Ideologues

A scene in Haiti, after its earthquake.

Sometimes The Spearhead, probably the internet's leading angry-man site, seems like a giant interactive game of "pin the blame on the feminists." When uprisings broke out in Tunisia and then Egypt , you may recall, W. F. Price -- head honcho at The Spearhead -- suggested that the unrest in both countries was a male reaction to the excesses of feminism and female power.

Now he's returned with an even stranger article, comparing  the current disaster in Japan with the very different outcome of last year's earthquake in Haiti-- and blaming women in general and feminists in particular for the far more lethal outcome in Haiti.

You might think that the staggering death toll in Haiti -- estimates range from 92,000 to more than 300,000 --  might have something  to do with the fact that it's the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a weak and corrupt government and almost nothing in the way of intrastructure.  And that Japan's relative resiliance in the face of an even more powerful earthquake might have something to do with the fact that it's a wealthy nation -- the world's third most powerful economy, with a GDP per capita about 30 times greater than Haiti's -- with a great deal of experience in handling earthquakes.

But Price has a rather different, and highly peculiar, explanation: Haiti suffered more because it's a  "matriachal" country, unlike properly "patriarchal" Japan. Comparing  "matriarchal Haiti’s and patriarchal Japan’s respective responses to natural disaster," Price writes that

in Haiti the women are still living in open encampments well over a year after the quake, [while] Japanese women are already sheltered, which is necessary, because it is still cold in northern Japan this time of year. ...

Price goes on to argue that Japan is doing better by its men as well. While in Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, the UN and some relief organizations targeted aid towards women -- who tend to literally get pushed aside in the mad scramble for food supplies otherwise -- Price argues that

Japanese men ... have it far better than their Haitian counterparts as well. There are no foreign troops pointing guns at them and denying them food, they are taken care of and respected if old, and given jobs and a place in society if young. Perhaps most importantly, They are given the opportunity to do what men often do best — they are allowed to take care of their families and communities.

Let's set aside for a moment that it is a tad early to be declaring, er, "mission accomplished" in the Japan crisis, especially with the specter of a nuclear reactor meltdown looming. Price is a man with an agenda, and he moves fairly quickly to his grand conclusion: The two disasters, he argues,

give us an opportunity to ask ourselves what kind of a society we want to live in. Do we want, as the feminists would have it, to be helpless, disease infested, homeless and starving if we face hardship, or do we want to have the ability to come together and pull ourselves up from the rubble? For the sane people of the world, the choice is clear.

Yes, that's right. Feminism is the party of helplessness, disease, homelessness and starvation. Anyone who's just made the argument he made really shouldn't be offering any opinions on the sanity of others.

Before we get into a critique of Price's argument, such as it is, let's pause for a moment to ask how his novel thesis was received by the Spearhead regulars. While a few commenters did take him to task for ignoring economics, others took his absurd argument and ran with it. (This is The Spearhead, after all.) Alucin declared,

Feminism is a crime against humanity. What happened in Haiti regarding food distribution will be repeated again and again as long as feminism prevails. Fighting feminism is something good people do on behalf of humanity. The men and women of Japan will get their lives back together again far more quickly than the matriarchal people of Haiti.

The future is patriarchal. It’s just a matter of which form it will take and when the West will re-masculate.

Epoetker took it a step further, adding a bit of racism to the misogynistic mix:

Haiti is a land of men who look like men but think like women. Japan is a land of men who look like women but think like men.

Rebel, meanwhile, found a grim humor in it all:

The Haitian case is proof positive that feminism is exactly like AIDS.
No matter how many die, feminism will be the last thing to die.
It was planned that way.

Whichever way you look at it, the answer is always the same: feminism is a religion of death.
Feminists are death worshippers.

That leaves very little hope for the future.
Life is so short and we worry too much. And it’s so futile.
One day we will all be Haitians. LOL!!

A note: These aren't a couple of weird comments I've "cherry picked" to give a distorted picture of the discussion. In fact, these comments got anywhere from 20 to nearly 70 upvotes from Spearhead readers, and almost no downvotes. There were many other comments, also heavily upvoted, agreeing with these general premises. If you don't believe me, go take a look yourself.

Numerous other commenters, I should also note, offered frankly racist interpretations of "the tale of two earthquakes," blaming the greater scope of the disaster in Haiti on what one commenter called its "largely negro, largely indolent society." While some objected to the racism, many clearly racist comments got numerous upvotes from the Spearhead crowd.  (The comment I just quoted got 60 upvotes and 20 downvotes.)

Getting back to Price's argument, let's try to unpack the various layers of bullshit here. First of all, Haiti is no matriarchy. Yes, women often head up households there. But they don't run the country, by any measure.

Life in Haiti is no picnic for men, but women have it even worse; as one human rights group noted in a recent report, "Haitian women experience additional barriers to the full enjoyment of their basic rights due to predominant social beliefs that they are inferior to men and a historical pattern of discrimination and violence against them based on their sex. Discrimination against women is a structural feature in Haitian society and culture that has subsisted throughout its history, both in times of peace and unrest."

Rape is a constant threat, and, as a recent article in the Los Angeles Times notes, it "wasn't even considered a serious criminal offense in Haiti until five years ago. ... Before 2005, rape was considered an offense against honor, or "crime of passion," meaning it was a minor infraction in which the perpetrator would go free if he agreed to marry his victim."

The earthquake only made the situation worse for women. Rapes are especially widespread in the camps that sprung up in the wake of last year's earthquake. Instead of "tak[ing] care of their families and communities," as Price would put it, many Haitian men have instead preyed on women and girls, sexually assaultng them and stealing their food and other supplies. This is not, to put it mildly, a country suffering from an excess of feminism or female authority.

No, Haiti is in dire straits mostly because of its extreme poverty. Anyone looking at the history of natural disasters can plainly see that they tend to cause far more chaos and misery and death in poor countries than they do in rich ones: In highly patriarchal, and poverty-stricken Pakistan, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake killed an estimated 75,000, though the quake there was an order of magnitude weaker than Japan's.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to remind readers of these basic points; the absurdity of Price's arguments should be immediately obvious to anyone not blinded by misogyny. Sometimes I wonder if Price even believes all of the shit he shovels. Stupidity would be easier to forgive than that level of cynicism.

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