Girlz in the Hood

Goddesses, or whores?

A very peculiar ideological battle has broken out on The Spearhead between some of the resident misogynist douchebags and a group of “white nationalists” who have in recent days descended on the site. The Spearheaders’ main beef with these upstanding fellows? Not that they’re hateful racist dicks – sorry, “ethnically conscious.” No, the problem is that they don’t hate white women enough. According to some of the critics on The Spearhead , these guys are apparently “White Knight Nationalists” in thrall to white womanhood.

Spearhead big cheese W. F. Price recently highlighted one anti-White-Knight-Nationalist rant on his site as the “comment of the week.” It’s an interesting, by which I mean appalling, read. “John” makes clear at the outset that he has no real problem with “white nationalism” as such, and indeed complains that

because of “political correctness” it is almost impossible to express pride in the white race without being instantaneously labeled a racist. Nothing like a pejorative to end an intelligent discussion.

No, the problem he has is with white nationalist women and the men who love them too much. These guys, he sneers, are

likely bunion-rubbers, drink the cheapest of beer, fondle their Chinese SKS nightly, and do whatever the “Old Lady” tells them to do while they strut around in front of their friends and the mountain of aluminum empties like little Bantam roosters. Almost as a universal, they hold up the WN females as godesses in spite of the fact that 99% of those “ladies” have had their holes punched and left full of biological waste by more men than there are oil companies that have ever drilled wells in Texas. Frankly, it’s pathetic.

But these supposed “White Goddesses” are not only sluts; John has convinced himself that they are also evil, ugly, hairy feminists too – which would make them honest-to-goodness feminazis, I suppose, though John seems to have less of a problem with the “nazi” half of the equation than he does with the “femi.”

The “female” commentators on WN sites are at least as shaming and self-righteous as those on lefty-feminist sites, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if half of them had some sort of moustache getting a bit out of control on the upper lip and hairy armpits. …

You may as well go over and hang out at feministing. For a good time call 1-800-BITCH. As a rule they are disgusting hypocrites and beyond disappointing. Hell, the best description is repellent. Yes, repellent.

Of course neo-Nazi women bear about as much resemblance to feminists as, well, the Spearhead does to Feministing. John is making the mistake that seems to be almost universal amongst internet anti-feminists, assuming that any time a woman asserts herself in any way, even if she is doing so within the confines of traditionalist, authoritarian and, yes, patriarchal ideology, she’s a feminist. Nope. Feminists don’t ask to be treated as “ladies”; traditionalist women do. Feminist men don’t put women on a pedestal; traditionalist men do. And white supremacists are about as traditional as they come, in all the worst senses of the term.

John seemed particularly incensed that one woman on a white nationalist website had suggested that her white brethren needed to step up their game, romance wise, claiming that “Ghetto Negroes have better wooing, and flirtation skills, than so many White males.” How dare she!

Here we have a supposed W.N. self-imagined “White Goddess” who has experience with being wooed by “Ghetto Negroes” and she expresses admiration for their flirtation skills. Got her thing tingling, I see. Maybe that “tingling” was satiated a few times by one or more of those “Ghetto Blacks”, yet some “Bush” swilling W.N. “White Knight” will draw his sword and proclaim, “I will defend this sluts honor to my death!”

Some Spearheaders greeted John’s post with bravos; others sniffed that he was being too hard on the poor white supremacists, and using “shaming language” like the evil feminists do. Very few seemed to have a problem with the bigotry of the white pride crowd, just their alleged white knightery. As one commenter, calling himself Reality, reported with astonishment:

I’ve tried to get on those White Pride Sites and immediately started discussing how fucked up the modern white female is and was INSTANTLY banned! I was actually shocked. I thought it would be a no brainer that WN types would (OF COURSE) not want white women to be complete parasitical whores roaming the landscape spreading VD like Johnny Appleseed and fucking men over- I mean how you hope for the white race to make a ‘comeback’ if the white family is falling apart?!? One of the very reasons whites are so demoralized and broken politically and culturally is EXACTLY because of the modern American female. It’s just bizarre- these guys really are idiots (at least in this regard).

Watching this unfolding fight between male supremacists and white supremacists is really something of a treat for those of us not into the whole supremacy thing. I can only hope both sides lose, and as humiliatingly as possible.

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

Something Awful visits The Spearhead Forum

 

This weekend, Something Awful gives its readers a little tour of The Spearhead Forum and some of its more colorful fauna. I've borrowed the screenshot above from them. Hagslave entrainment! Yeasty oblivion!

The Spearhead Forum is if anything a little weirder than The Spearhead itself. It is also the main stomping ground of a fellow named Zebert, who has many, well, innovative ideas about how to solve all the problems of the world (e.g. forbidding education for women, prohibiting gatherings of more than four women at a time, removing the voiceboxes from baby girls at birth).

The Something Awful folks have gathered up quite a few of his most intriguing posts, and many others of equal value. Head over there now and enjoy. 

Do feminists secretly want to be Betty Draper?

Uh, shouldn't he have a desk or something?

It’s no secret that lots of women love Mad Men, and not just because Don Draper is such a handsome devil. Sure, the show focuses mostly on the swaggering Don. But it also depicts the struggles of numerous female characters as they bump up against the obstacles and issues faced by women at the time, most notably those of secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson as she tries to make it in the boys club that was the advertising world of the 50s and 60s. Meanwhile, the show’s happy homemaker, Betty Draper (now Betty Francis), is about as far from happy as you can get, her life a perfect illustration of Betty Friedan’s critique of the emptiness at the heart of the lives of many middle-class stay-at-home moms of the time. 

It’s no wonder that historian Stephanie Coontz  has described Mad Men as “TV’s most feminist show,” and no wonder why the show is so popular with the feminist women in my life.(Not to mention with me.)

Just don’t tell any of this to Uncle Elmer, a regular commenter over on The Spearhead. He’s evidently never seen the show, but feels confident he knows why feminists love it so much: 

Feminists ... have a huge forbidden woodie for the “50s”. They simply cannot get enough 50s imagery and its thinly veiled implication that women should stay at home, know how to run a household, and lavishly support their man so he can go out and bring back the bacon.

I’m betting a lot of lez-couples have a secret “50s room” in their McMansion (or remodeled Brownstone) where they can act out these suppressed urges. The props must be breathtaking.

Uh, yeah. As Amanda Marcotte recently observed,“[w]hen you believe that we live in a female-dominated world where straight men are the most oppressed class, it tends to make you wrong about pretty much everything.”

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

Body heat

Jayne Mansfield leaks sex onto Sophia Loren

Be careful, gals. With warmer weather coming, don’t be tempted to wear skimpier clothes. Because female sexuality works the same as body heat on a cold winter’s day: the more skin you show, the more heat – literal and figurative – leaks out. Eventually, you will run out. And that’s bad news, possibly for you, and definitely for your future husbands. (And really, they’re the only ones who count.) 

That, in any case, is the theory of one traditional-minded Men’s Rightser calling himself Alucin. In a blog post today he mused about the differences between traditional religious women and, you know, all those filthy “western” sluts wandering around exposing sexy bits like their legs and their … hair. (Not their leg hair, their head hair. We’ll get to leg hair in a minute.) Alucin writes: 

Orthodox Jewish [and]  Muslim women [cover] their hair and other parts when in public. The ideal is that they save their sexuality for their husband. Only their husband can see their hair, legs, cleavage, and experience their sexuality. 

All well and good, Alucin says. “Western women,” by contrast, 

fully display their sexuality, and tend not to value virginity or other traditional sexual morals. Then, when married, they turn into dowdy, asexual androids, gaining weight and wearing their man's clothes. And forgetting to shave.

They give none of their sexuality to their husbands. It has already been used up. She says that she owns her sexuality, but in fact it was the zillion guys she's been with who have owned her sexuality. Her sexuality has been farmed and mined.

A western woman's sexuality is for everyone but her husband. 

  

Here’s one of those horrible hair-showing western harlots singing about hot cleavage in the summertime. (Just so you don’t get too confused by the lyrics, I’m pretty sure the song is from the point of view of a guy missing his girlfriend.)

-- 

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it. 

Guys, you're not helping: The Dear Woman video

 

The video above, which has been making the rounds of the manosphere, is one of the creepiest and most off-putting things I’ve seen since watching Dogtooth a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I take that back: Dogtooth was much less creepy and off-putting. I was so repelled by what I saw in this video that it literally took me several tries to get through the whole thing. And no, it’s not some weird misogynistic rant by the likes of Bernard Chapin. Oh, no no no. The misogynists of the world are as repelled by the video as I am, though for radically different reasons. Titled “Dear Woman,” the video was actually put together by a couple of self-described “conscious men” who think they’re doing a great favor to the women of the world.

To which I can only say: Guys, stop it, you’re not helping.

If you can stomach it, the video is worth watching in its entirety. If not, here’s what you’re missing: The video is the work of a couple of New Age gurus -- Arjuna Ardagh and Gay Hendricks, Ph.D – who, with the help of a little gaggle of guys, have written a little manifesto “apologizing” to the women of the world for all the bad shit done by men to women over the centuries. Or, as they put it:

I feel deep love, great respect and a growing sense of worship for the gifts of the feminine. I also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present. I want to apologize to you and make amends for those actions, in order to bring forth a new era of co-creation with you.

The first step in “making amends,” evidently, was to gather together a group of men – some of whom seem to have been roped into it in the middle of a garden party -- and to somehow convince them to read out loud the entire text of this manifesto. (The full text is here, but it's much creepier when it's read out loud.)

There is something about this manifesto, and the men reading it, that is so “off” that it may well make your skin crawl, and make you wonder how many of the men in the video have dead bodies secreted away in the crawl spaces under their homes. A female friend I showed the video to could only make it through the first couple of minutes before switching it off in horror; one commenter on Metafilter reported that it “made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and not in a good way. Eeew.”

The creepyist, skin-crawliest part of the video has to be the section in which the assembled men talk about women’s bodies:

I honor the beauty and integrity of your body. When we worship each other through our bodies with awareness and devotion, there are no boundaries to the love that we can generate. I feel sorrow that men have used your beauty as a form of commerce in prostitution and pornography. In the grip of lust we have often lacked the skills to ask gracefully for intimacy or to take ‘No’ for an answer. I take a stand against any form of enforced or soulless commercialization of woman’s beauty, and I respect that your body belongs to you. …

I honor your capacity to listen to your body and its needs for food, rest and playtime.

I feel confident that I speak for many when I say "ewww." Somehow I’m reminded of Saturday Night Live’s hot-tub-loving “lovers.”

It’s worth pointing out that the written manifesto refers to men and women “nurture[ing]” one another’s body; apparently no one noticed that the dude reading this passage in the video had turned nurturing into “worship.”

As one commenter on Metafilter put it:

“We worship women" sounds like something Buffalo Bill would have said if he had a PR agent. My guess is that they're sickos who seem really earnest at first but it turns out that they're actually trying to collect used tampons for onanistic purposes or something.

So what is it, aside from all this worshiping, that makes the video so creepy? Part of the problem is that these “conscious men” are, in their own way, as patronizing and sexist as any manosphere dudes “mansplaining” about how all women only want to fuck alpha guys. Women, in their view, are inherently peaceful earth-mother types. “I commit now to … honoring the spirituality of the divine feminine,” the guys tell us. “I honor your deep connection to the earth.” 

The manifesto is overflowing with this kind of shit. No matter how “New Age” these guys think they are, these are some truly ancient, and quite thoroughly retrograde, notions.

But that’s just what makes them wrong and misguided. What is it that causes viewers to pick up that whole serial-killer vibe?

I think the answer to this can be found in a book called The Gif tof Fear by security expert Gavin de Becker. The book attempts to explain why our intuitions about creepy people are so often correct. There’s a good reason you feel uneasy around certain people; that’s your unconscious picking up on real, if hard to pin down, signals of danger.

De Becker also lays out some of the techniques predators use in an attempt to allay the suspicions of those they’re trying to victimize. One of the sneakiest? The unsolicited promise, which often means the very opposite of what is said. When someone tells you, out of the blue, that they “aren’t going to hurt you,” it’s often a very good sign that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. When someone feels the need to tell you, apropos of nothing, that he “honor[s] the beauty and integrity of your body” and “respect[s] that your body belongs to you,” you may well want to run screaming. 

Even more than the unsolicited promises, I think it’s the unsolicited apologies in the Dear Woman video – so similar in intent to unsolicited promises -- are a large part of what is setting off alarm bells in so many viewers. When a young guy in the video takes personal responsibility “for dragging you into … wars, and for the rape, murder, broken hearts and damaged families that resulted from them,” that’s just plain … weird, given that (unless he’s some young despot I’ve never heard of) he’s not actually responsible for any of this.

The “unsolicited promise” is similar to what de Becker calls “loan sharking” – offering unsolicited “help” in order to make victims feel obligated in some way to their unwanted helpers. In the manifesto/video, this “help” is abstract, but the strategy seems to be the same:

From this day, moving forward, I vow to treat your heart as the sacred temple it is, and I commit to honoring the feminine in you and me and in my relationship to all life.

 

Uh, who the fuck asked you to treat anyone’s heart as a “sacred temple?”

The manifesto/video is also filled with examples of “forced teaming,” another strategy favored by predators who want to convince their victims that they are in fact working together to do the very same thing:

I know that by leaving the past behind and joining hands in the present, we can create a synergy of our strengths. Together, there is nothing we cannot do.

(For a fuller explanation of some of de Becker’s ideas, take a look at this post on saying “no” on Captain Awkward’s excellent blog, which I’ve drawn on heavily here.)

But there’s something else about the video that adds to the sense that something is not right here: no matter how earnest all the men in the video are trying to sound, none of them (except perhaps the two ringleaders) seem to really believe the ridiculous things they’re saying. Instead, they seem to be, with varying degrees of insincerity, mouthing a series of essentially meaningless New Age platitudes – in short, simply saying what they think women want to hear.

No one is buying this bullshit, guys. Give it up.

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Two Holes Don't Make a Right, and other somewhat baffling MGTOW slogans

Grace Jones will kick your bumper sticker's ass.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to make yourself look like a complete idiot is to festoon your car with an assortment of bumper stickers – preferably stickers that are belligerent, incoherent, and “funny.” (By “funny,” of course, I mean “funny only to people who share all of your social, cultural and political beliefs, and probably not even then.”)

Alas, the Men Going Their Own Way movement doesn’t have any bumper stickers of its own. Oh, sure, there are a vast variety of just plain sexist bumper stickers out there  (“If I wanted a bitch, I’d buy a dog”),  and you can even buy “I HEART misogyny” stickers on Cafepress. but there’s not much out that deals with the specific stupid concerns of the MGTOW crowd.

The good fellows on MGTOWforums.com want to change all that. Recently a batch of them began brainstorming about possible slogans for MGTOW bumper stickers. Womanhater started the discussion off with a doozy, managing to be both belligerent AND baffling to anyone who hasn’t already taken a sip of the MGTOW Kool-Aid:

Chivalry is Treason!

A promising start. Not all the suggestions that followed quite lived up to this standard. Quite a few were earnest and plodding, not very slogan-y:

When Was the Last Time You Treated a Man Fairly?

Single moms should stay single.

Some men live happy fulfilling lives, the rest get married.

Women and happiness don't go together.

Still, some of the more earnest attempts managed to be attention-grabbing nonetheless:

I don't believe any accusation of rape

Many others simply rehashed basic MGTOW themes:

We Are Men, Not Wallets

Marriage is for morons 

Alimony is Slavery

But a number of the suggestions contained the spark of creative loopiness that keeps me coming back to the MGTOW forums again and again. Take, for example, the surprisingly large number that managed to work vaginas into the equation, generally in a highly off-putting manner:

Give women the finger and not in a good way 

Excuse me, is that fish I smell?

Two holes don't make a right

This last one, while not without its charms, is a little puzzling. If you do the math correctly, women have seven holes, and men have six (or seven, if you include one very small hole). Up to three of these lady-holes (and up to two for men) may come into play in the course of routine sexual activity. (More advanced fetishists may use more holes, as this somewhat NSFW video illustrates; don't worry, it's not a link to a video of someone putting something in a man's seventh hole, because, OW!) I'm not entirely sure which two holes our sloganeer is fingering as the villains here. 

Quite a few of the suggestions seemed almost designed to baffle everyone outside the confines of MGTOWforums.com (and even some within it):

Don't blame me for 1920

Hammurabi was correct about women

Listen to Cato the Elder

For those playing along at home, 1920 was of course the year in which matinee idol Douglas Fairbanks married actress Mary Pickford, known as "America's Sweetheart," even though she was Canadian; it was also the year in which construction began on the Holland Tunnel between New York and New Jersey, thus setting the stage for the horror later known as the “bridge and tunnel crowd.” But I’m guessing the event our sloganeer is really concerned about is the passage of the 19^th Amendment, giving American women the vote, though, unless our sloganeer is quite elderly indeed, I’m not quite sure why anyone would be blaming (or crediting) him for the Amendment’s passage.

As for the other two, well, the Code of Hammurabi, the first king of the Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC,  “mark[ed] the beginning of the institutionalization of the patriarchal family as an aspect of state power,” as historian Gerda Lerner notes. Hammy (as I like to call him) also invented the idea of “an eye for an eye.” And Cato the Elder? He said some nasty shit about women.You can look it up yourself. I'm lazy.

Other slogans weren’t so much obscure as just plain odd:

If the FDA screened pussy, you'd need a prescription to get it.

I'd rather have guns than gals.

A cow in the bed...but a freak in the courtroom!

And then there was this little riddle:

Q)Why don't women respect men?
A)Becoz a Mousetrap laughs at the Mouse

Uh, what?

Of all the proposed slogans, only one actually showed any real wit, this punny little contribution from Apeiron:

Better dead than wed.

Indeed, this one was so good I suspected it had to have been used somewhere before. And indeed it has been. A quick Google search showed that the UK anarchist group Class War used the phrase back in the 1980s on a poster protesting the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson. Of course, that temporarily happy couple ended up separating after only six years, and divorced a few years after that.

Maybe slogans can change the world.

Scary thought.

Despite that risk, I would like to encourage the MGTOWers to make up some stickers of their own. Maybe some t-shirts, coffee mugs, and baseball caps as well.  Heck, put these slogans on everything you own. Seriously, anything that makes it easier to identify you, preferably at a distance, is more than welcome.

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it. 

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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.


--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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? 

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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.

--

If you appreciated this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. Thanks!

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

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:



--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Days of Whine and Roses

The face (and torso) of evil.

Certain kinds of stories are like catnip to the Men Going Their Own Way crowd: Stories about rich airheaded women. Stories about golddiggers and giant divorce settlements. Stories about idiotic or incompetent women. So it's no surprise that the tale of Patricia Kluge and her not-so-successful foray into the world of winemaking has sent the fellows on MGTOWforums.com into full-on misogyny mode.

Kluge, you see, is the former wife of a media mogul, and her divorce settlement in 1990 netted her hefty alimony payments, which are variously claimed to have been either $1.6 million a week, or "less than $1 million a year."  The article linked to by the MGTOWers says she was rumored to have collected a settlement of a cool billion bucks and that the reported $1.6 million a week was just the interest on this vast sum. Who knows? It was a shitload of money. Plus a giant fucking mansion. Whatever the amount, Kluge has apparently blown through it all, spending huge amounts on ostentatious luxury crap and burning through tens of millions on her less-than-successful winery. Last month the bank repossessed her mansion.

So: this terrible woman was also a terrible businesswoman. Well, yeah. But to the fellows at MGTOWforums.com, her singular tale is a sign that women in general shouldn't be trusted with money -- or with anything else, for that matter. Chainlightning started off what turned into a veritable misogyny cascade by announcing:

Women should never have access to money. Look at what happened to the US since the 1960s.

Systems1082 saw Chainlightning's "women shouldn't have money" and raised him with "women shouldn't have the right to vote."

It actually goes back to 1920 when women were given the right to vote. They have learned they can vote themselves other people's money.

Stonelifter took it even further, suggesting that some women don't ever deserve the right to live:

i don't understand why men don't engage in more murder for hire

He followed this innocent little query up with a reference to the evil feminist Karl Marx and his followers at "some college in Berlin."

it goes back to about 1870 so so when marx decided tearing down Western civilization was best achieved on many small fronts and women would be one of them. Cultural marxism was tied up into one neat package in some college in Berlin during the 1920's but the idea to have women voting to fuck everything up came to marx at the tail end of his life

XTC pretty much trumped everyone by taking it back to the source: that bitch Eve.

It goes back to the garden of Eden when Eve screwed us all over.

So there you have it. Eve ate an apple, Patricia Kluge blew through money she didn't really deserve to have. Therefore, women are evil.

Um, have you MGTOWers ever heard of Nicolas Cage?

(Note: Before you tell me that Nic Cage earned his money fair and square, I ask that you sit down and watch The Wicker Man, Ghost Rider, National Treasure, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Face/Off, and Con Air. Then get back to me. I will allow that he did a pretty good job in Kick-Ass.)

(Note 2: By "some college in Berlin in the 1920s," Stonelifter was of course referring to an assortment of Marxist theorists associated with a research institute that started in Frankfurt, not Berlin, in the 1920s, but which achieved its greatest influence after it moved to New York in the 1930s because of, you know, Hitler.)

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Shovel ready

The Ideal Woman, apparently.

Freud asked: "What do women want?"  Mel Gibson answered the question in that movie in which he could read their lady minds. I never saw it, but I'm guessing based on Gibson's behavior since making the film that women want lots of drunken anti-Semitic tirades and verbal abuse.

Anyway, over at A Voice For Men, MRA elder Paul Elam doesn't really give a shit about what women want. But he knows what they deserve, and what they don't deserve. Which turns out to be shovels and love, respectively. As he explains in a recent comment:

We don’t need to teach young girls to marry for love; we need to put shovels in their hands and put them to work in ditches, digging their way to self sufficiency. We need to leave them to their own survival devices so that they can learn some humility ...

But what we most need to teach young girls is that until there are social pressures established that place firm boundaries and limits on their hypergamous instincts, that they cannot be trusted with love, as women in this culture have been proving for 50 years ... .

Keep shoveling, Paul.

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Godwin's Law, upside-down and backwards

Meet Stu. Stu hates feminsts. But he hates manginas even more. You might even say that Stu hates manginas the way Hitler hated Jews. No, I'm not comparing Stu to Hitler. He happily compares himself to Hitler in this comment on A Voice For Men.

Phew, I’m glad you [Paul Elam] said feminist hating is an honorable and viable political act because I certainly hate them. ... The real object of my hatred are those that enable these people. The ones that are actively engaged in creating the environment of misandry that we live in now.

For those people, career feminists and manginas, my hatred would be on par to Adolf Hitlers hatred of a super rich gay jew who was raping his arse. Out of these, I hate career manginas the most. There would be no mercy for these arseholes if I could be dictator for a day, they would soon be living what is left of their lives in extreme misery.

Emphasis added. This comment, Hitler and all, got more than three times as many upvotes as downvotes from the assembled mob site's readers. Of course, Stu's comment is in response to a post titled "The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever," which means that these upvoters are people who enjoyed a post titled  "The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever" so much that they stuck around afterwards to compliment the author, so, you know.

This, by contrast, is the sort of comment that gets downvoted on A Voice For Men, and which inspires the post's author, Paul Elam, to tell the commenter "fuck that, and fuck you. Let me say that again. Fuck you."

EDITED TO ADD: When I posted this piece last night, that second comment had virtually no upvotes; you had to click a link to even see it. I hope at least a few of the upvotes it now has were from the regulars on that site.

Another heartening sign: the critical response Elam's "Rape ... whatever" screed got on the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit. His response to the criticism is rather telling. I'm generally not a fan of the Men's Rights subreddit, as you might imagine, but there are some decent people who comment there and it is much less hateful than almost all of the other MRA/MGTOW/etc sites I regularly read.

--

If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the "Share This" or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.

*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.