The Ladies Auxiliary of the Ladyhaters Club

Women in groups: Always trouble.

One of the strangest places in the burly world of Men’s Rightsers and MGTOWers is The Spearhead’s Shieldmaidens forum. And no, I am not making that name up. It’s a forum, essentially, for women interested in being a sort of Women’s Auxiliary to a bunch of guys who are all about hating women.

Given that such a role – trying to help dudes who don’t much like you or your whole gender -- is a bit of a tricky one, the forum moderator Hestia has written a long introductory post explaining just what new gals should and shouldn’t do to support their menfolk. It’s kind of a masterpiece of doublespeak.  Let’s look at some of its highlights.

Hestia starts out by warning the ladies that these rough men sometimes talk in a rough manner:

As this is a male environment, us girls can expect styles of communication that we might not use ourselves or readily relate to. For the purpose of this post, I will call all of this "locker room talk". … Topics and expressions women may find crude are likely to occur and generalizations about women (or white, western, whatever) used to adequately get a point across. These differences, while bothersome to some women, are not wrong in and of themselves and are not reason to shame men into expressing themselves differently. As women in the locker room, we are the ones who need to look the other [way] and make accommodations; not the men for whom this website is for.

In other words: the guys here may call you sluts and whores and worse, but really, that’s your fault for being here in the first place, so don’t complain.

Welcome aboard!

Hestia continues:

We must also respect this place as one of the few politically incorrect sanctuaries that men have in today's misandrist world. … We should not be bullying men into saying, "yes, indeed not all women are like that!" to appease our own egos. … This is sacred male friendly ground and should be treated as such. … We are but guests on this website and must know our place and respect certain boundaries for the sake of the men here and for the work towards gender peace.

Hard to be more abject than this. So how have the menfolk responded?

It appears that not too many men actually read the Shieldmaidens forum, but among those who do, the reaction has been a little less than enthusiastic. Our friend GlobalMan, one of the more excitable Spearhead regulars, basically tells her (and all women) to fuck off entirely:

I have voiced my opinion many times women should be banned all together from here. They are contributing nothing and they are taking up a lot of time and energy of the stupid young men who do not realise that women are just attention whores who won't actually do anything at the end of the day. ….

You women pretty much fuck up everything you stick your nose into. And you never, ever tire of fucking things up for men under the delusion you have 'something to contribute'. You don't. Get over it. You pop out babies. That is your one and only 'claim to fame' and it used to be enough for a man to love a woman for her whole life and to provide for her and the kids. Now it is not. So you women need to 'act like men' and suck it up.

Indeed. If women had any class at all you would leave of your own accord and let the men sort out what you refused to. The only posts from women here should be 'Men, please tell us what to do'.

A fellow calling himself Diogenes offers his two cents:

That Hestia has to write this thread proves that indeed women who come to this board do exactly that which she complains against. They have such a cozy and male-coddled life that they are shocked when some men rightly express their scorn and foul language towards their attitudes and manipulative behaviour. Women BREED misogyny because all they do is constantly manipulate and get the attention and protection of men by trying to look sexy all the time. Every time a man turns his head towards a pretty lady, she knows she is being looked after and will be rescued by a man if ever her poor little ass does something stupid. They are CHILDREN at heart. One female college student mentioned to me how according to her "every girl" has gone on dates just to get free dinners. How much more proof do we need that women are NO GOOD WHORES?

I guess that’s some of the "locker room talk" Hestia was warning the ladies about.

Granted, it's been awhile since I've seen the inside of a locker room, but I don't remember much of the talk in the locker rooms I've been in revolving around the no-good whorishness of all women. I think that might be because most men are not in fact hateful assholes who think all women are NO GOOD WHORES.That's just a theory though.

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Incredibly Strange Antifeminist Bedfellows: Kay Hymowitz defends her attackers

Damn you, you monsters! This scarf does NOT make me look gay!

This is just embarrassing. A bit over a week ago, the Wall Street Journal published a chunk of antifeminist polemicist Kay Hymowitz' new book Manning Up, which argues that young men today have turned into a generation of immature pre-adults as a result (to simplify only slightly) of excessive exposure to Judd Apatow movies and to young women who won't let them step up and be real men. The article stirred up quite a tempest in the tea-pot that is the Men's Right's/MGTOW world online. Completely missing the antifeminist implications of her argument, manosphere men attacked her for impugning the honor of young men and their video games, and for generally being, to quote a few typical comments, a "bitch," an "entitlement whore," a "cunt," "a fugly tranny skank," and someone who "on her best day ... has a face that reminds me a mule my uncle used to own."

Now Hymowitz has responded to all this vitriol by penning ... a partial defense of her attackers for the Daily Beast. While she notes that there are elements of "backlash" and, yes, misogyny in the rage of the manosphere, she's quick to equate this manosphere tantrum with the feelings of men in general (as Amanda Marcotte has already pointed out), and to suggest that there are legitimate reasons for the hate. Which apparently have to do with, er, male frustration with having to ask women out for dates. Yes, that's her real argument. Let's let her explain:

[T]here’s another reason for these rants, one that is far less understood. Let’s call it gender bait and switch. Never before in history have men been matched up with women who are so much their equal—socially, professionally, and sexually. ... That’s the bait; here comes the switch. Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure.

At this point, Hymowitz launches into a tired old litany of male complaints about the alleged horrors of post-feminist dating: OMG, in this crazy mixed-up world of ours, men don't know whether or not to open doors for their dates! Some women want to pay their way on dates, even when they make as much as or more than the dudes dating them  ... and others don't!

Men say they have no choice. If they want a life, they have to ask women out on dates; they have to initiate conversations at bars and parties, they have to take the lead on sex. Women can take a Chinese menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday nights, and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day.

As Marcotte points out, Hymowitz is essentially echoing one of the dopiest of manosphere complaints about the ladies, "that they're all different people, instead of easily controlled sexbots." Indeed, on many manosphere sites, one gets the impression that women are, or should be, a bunch of interchangeable sperm receptacles, differentiated only by how high they score on a "hotness" scale of 1-10. If you think of women this way, no wonder you're confused when women have, you know, actual personalities and shit.

But here's a hint for the angry dudes of the manosphere: once you realize that women are not all the same person inside, you can turn this fact to your advantage, by deliberately seeking out women who are actually compatible with your own personality. Don't like paying for dates? Then find a woman who likes paying her own way! (Just don't be shocked if she finds your retrograde ideas about women repulsive.) I know that this may come as a shock to some of you guys, but there are men out there who actually find women's distinct personalities ... interesting. Stimulating. Attractive.

Back to Hymowitz. As strange as it is to see her parroting some of the dumbest manosphere complaints about women and dating -- some women want one thing, while other women want something different! some say they want good guys but then they date bad boys! -- even stranger is her notion that manosphere rage has its roots in frustrations about dating. Given that she's not a complete idiot, there are only two possible explanations for this strange conclusion of hers. One, she's so eager to find evidence for her thesis that empowered women are the root of male immaturity that she is willing to overlook the crazy misogyny of angry MRA/MGTOW dudes because they, too, blame women for their dating woes. Or two, that she has not actually given the blogs and forums of the manosphere much more than a cursory glance. I think it's a bit of both.

The list of manosphere sites she mentions in her article bear out the second of these theses -- it's simply cut-and-pasted from her 2008 article Love in the Time of Darwinism, and it's pretty clear she hasn't revisited any of them since then. Or, in one case, ever: EternalBachelor.com isn't a Men's Rights or MGTOW site at all. but a skeleton site for a web magazine "coming soon" whose only content at the moment consists of photos of buff, shirtless guys (and a page where you can order t-shirts, presumably to keep the poor fellas from freezing to death). I can only guess that Hymowitz meant to refer to the Eternal Bachelor blog, which has itself been dormant for more than three years.(Another site she links to, Nomarriage.com, is also "under construction.")

Kay, if you read this, please take a moment to peruse some real MRA/MGTOW and related forums, like, say, The Spearhead, and take a look at some of the comments there. For example, this one, about you -- which, last I checked, had gotten 33 upvotes and only a handful of downvotes from the Spearhead peanut gallery:

I wish I could reach through my computer screen and punch this bitch. .... this stupid bitch is using the pain of innocent men destroyed by the same misandric system that publishes her shit to make more money and she is probably part of the feminazi conspiracy to appropriate and colonize the growing MRM. ...

WTF is up with jewish women? They seem to be the most misandric of all. They demand that baby boys get their dicks chopped off and grown men too, I have hooked up with a few and they all got weirdly gitty knowing I was uncut and then sad when they realized I wouldn’t get chopped up and submit to their version of a sky god. I mean, really, WTF? I haven’t read much into the torah but just scanning the feminists and other feminazi loons it’s is obvious that there are a lot with jewish names. ... Really, I don’t get it and am not trying to sound like a nazi but I must be missing something.

Somehow, I don't think the rage in this comment has much to do with confusion over whether or not guys should open doors for their dates. 

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Antifeminazis

Well, here's an interesting pic I ran across on teh Internets. MRAs talk about feminazis all the time, but, gosh, here are some anti-feminists who actually are Nazis.

A little Googling reveals that Sniper Records is a White Supremacist record label. I'm not going to link to it. You can find it on your own, if you are so inclined.

One thing we can all agree on ...

... MRAs and feminists alike, is that this t-shirt, recently discovered at Old Navy, is irritating as fuck, and any (straight) woman who would wear such a thing would be someone to avoid at all costs. Seriously.  (In case you can't quite make out what's going on with the graphic, the "o" in "hope" is an engagement ring.)

As one Redditor pointed out in the discussion of the subject in the TwoXChromosomes subreddit, where I found the pic, the only people who could wear the shirt without being complete douchenozzles would be lesbians and gay men, because then it would become a political statement about gay marriage. Actually, come to think of it, I'd have no problem with straight guys wearing it either; that would be kind of hilarious. Or security guards of either sex who happen to be guarding the Hope Diamond. 

I guess basically the only people who shouldn't wear it are straight women who aren't guarding the Hope Diamond. Or babies. A baby wearing this shirt would just be really weird.

Suffragette Set

As depressing as the election results were, at least to those of us in the Daily Show demographic, just think how much worse they would have been if women didn't have the right to vote! You know, like these dudes, and this gal, and this dude wish were still the case.

So celebrate that tiny little silver lining by taking a look at these horrifyingly amusing anti-suffrage cartoons, and just remember, the assholes drawing them lost.

Esther Vilar, crazy catty lady

In 1971, writer Esther Vilar banged out what she later called a "pamphlet written in great anger against the women's movement's worldwide monopoly of opinion." This pamphlet became a small book called The Manipulated Man. Largely forgotten today, the book has nonetheless been hailed as an underground classic by many in the Men's Rights Movement.

It's not hard to see why. It's an entertaining rant, written with style and verve, an interesting reminder of the passions (pro and con) that the women's movement inspired in women in its early-70s heyday. What really endears it to Men's Rightsers, though, is that it's full of catty, often quite vicious, attacks on women and enthusiastic paeans to the glories of men. None of these are supported in any way by actual evidence, of course, but that's rarely a drawback to MRAs. (You can buy the book on Amazon, though I bet that if you look around a bit you might be able to find a pdf of it for free, wink wink.)

Vilar pulls no punches:

Women let men work for them, think for them and take on their responsibilities - in fact, they exploit them. Yet, since men are strong, intelligent and imaginative, while women are weak, unimaginative, and stupid, why isn't it men who exploit women?

Zing!

Why do women not make use of their intellectual potential? For the simple reason that they do not need to. It is not essential for their survival. Theoretically it is possible for a beautiful woman to have less intelligence than a chimpanzee and still be considered an acceptable member of society.

Oh, snap!

By the age of twelve at the latest, most women have decided to become prostitutes. Or, to put it another way they have planned a future for themselves which consists of choosing a man and letting him do all the work.

Oh no she didn't!

As zingy as these zingers are, they don't actually describe any human females I know. (Well, ok, they describe a tiny handful of women I've known.) But as I read the book I realized that they described a non-human someone I know very well:

My cat.

Yep, by simply replacing the word "women" in the book with the words "cats," and making a few other minor adjustments, I discovered that Vilar's angry, anachronistic rant is actually a detailed and unflinchingly accurate description of life with my cat. Consider these altered passages:

It is true that cats get progressively more elegant, more well-groomed ... but their demands on life will always be material, never intellectual.

The sort of independence men have means nothing to cats, because cats don't feel dependent. They are not even embarrassed by the intellectual superiority of men because they have no ambition in that direction.

There is one great advantage which cats have over men: they have a choice - a choice between the life of an alley cat and the life of a dimwitted, parasitic luxury item. There are ... few cats who would not select the latter

A cat will always be pleased if a man turns to look at her ... . Her pleasure may be compared to that of a shareholder who finds that his stocks have risen. It will be a matter of complete indifference to a cat if he is attractive or looks intelligent. A shareholder is hardly likely to notice the color of his dividend checks.

A cat's greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility - yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body ... that darling miniature of an adult. It is a child that a cat imitates ...  its helplessness, its need for protection. A cat must be cared for; it cannot look after itself. And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring?

A cat takes interest only in subjects that have an immediate personal usefulness to her.

True, true, true, true, true, and true.

It's too bad Vilar chose to market her book as an attack on women. She could have had a long and happy career as a cat whisperer.

More on Vilar in a bit.

Manly pic: John Wayne, Metrosexual

You may remember a recent post of mine about that Michael-Cera-hating, Alpha-jock-loving Vanderbilt gal who wanted to see men emulate more manly role models, like John Wayne. Well, a friend of mine showed me something today, a picture from an old Spy magazine, that would rock her world, though not in a good way. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this stylish fellow with the nice gams and the weird male camel-toe is John Wayne. It's not a costume. He was on vacation.

The Surreal Housewife

One of the things that still surprises me as I traverse the weird online world of anti-feminism is the number of women I've run across who think that they have altogether too many rights. I've written in the past about women who don't believe they should have the right to vote. Today, Laura Wood, a proudly retrograde woman who thinks the solution to contemporary "cultural ruin" is for employers to start paying women even less than they do now. According to "Why We Must Discriminate," a manifesto of sorts on her blog The Thinking Housewife:

Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural ruin of its women. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. ... First and foremost, we must restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions must be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.

It's a strange manifesto and a strange blog. Unlike many of the reactionaries I regularly quote on this blog, Wood is not an idiot. Her tone is measured and cautious. If you accept her fairly ludicrous premises -- the key ones here being that it would be desirable or even possible to undo decades of economic and cultural history to essentially return to an imaginary, idealized prefeminist world in which men could earn enough to comfortably support a family and women would work primarily for "pin money" -- her manifesto almost makes sense. And yet what she is saying is, not to put too fine a point on it, vile.

She is utterly blithe, for example, about the effect her proposal would have on single and divorced women:

Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.

Who needs a man-sized wage when you can just beg dad for cash when the rent comes due?

Wood not only thinks women deserve to be paid less than men for the same work; she's also wary of women taking on almost any authority at all outside the home. While she's admits it's technically possible for women to be, for example, effective drill sergeants, she finds the idea vaguely abhorrent:

When women start barking orders at grown men, the delicate balance of power between the sexes is disturbed. Women are mothers and wives, lovers and friends to men. These roles are damaged by domineering bossiness. Male psychology is radically different from female psychology. After all, mothers are women. There is no more significant fact than that.

There's more, much more. Troll This Blog has assembled a lengthy list of Wood's more backwards utterances, from which I drew the example above, including some thoughts on race that would not be out of place at a (very polite) Klan meeting: "Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today."

Though I found her blog through links on a Men's Rights blog or two, and her ideology is more or less consistent with some of the more reactionary MRAs out there, Wood is not exactly an MRA herself. Indeed, she has tangled with the Men's Rights Movement on several occasions -- lambasting commenters on The Spearhead for "juvenile" misogyny, and accusing MRA elder Paul Elam of "idiocy and hatred" for his, er, idiotic and hateful statement that if he were on a jury he wouldn't vote to convict a clearly guilty rapist.

Wood's enmity towards certain elements of the MRM has been reciprocated. Our good (not) friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog recently took on a "mangina" commenter at what he calls "The (Not) Thinking Housewife" for suggesting that the MRM had its roots in "radical homosexuality."

This is one of those battles, to paraphrase Calvin Trillin, in which I can only hope that both sides suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.

NOTE: Before any of the anti-feminists who regularly post here accuse me of lacking "substance" because I do not "rebut" Wood's "arguments" in detail, I request only one thing: find me something solid to rebut. Wood, like many of those I write about, offers a lot of opinions -- see the quotes above, and on Troll This Blog, for numerous examples -- but almost nothing to actually support those opinions. Find me an example of an argument she has made that is actually supported with actual empirical evidence, with specific citations and/or links to sources, and I'll have a go at it.

Quote of the Day: Women's Suffrage = Lost Faith in Manhood.

I had no idea that women's suffrage was still so controversial. Apparently it is, at least to the guys at the Spearhead, and to the blog Full of Grace, Seasoned with Salt. Without further ado, the quote:

Woman Totally Ruining Everything

Women's suffrage may have been the first major event that said, "don't trust men". In other words, it was the beginning of the lost faith in manhood. It sent the message that men were inept to handle worldly affairs and when men gave women their vote, it kicked things up a notch by reinforcing the mindset that men were indeed inept little boys who can't figure anything out or get anything done without a woman's guidance. Had the men held their ground and the women held their faith, I believe any unsettling political/economic conditions would have improved.  It is similar to our faith in God.

I should point out that the author of this fine piece of analysis is a woman. Some women are idiots. Into the Enemies List she goes.